Visual Studio 2008

Hi Rob,

I worked on the VS 2008 project all last summer for a local company.
It was very painful. IMHO, when you know Smalltalk and its environment,
you absolutely don't want to go back. It seems that you have the choice,
while I didn't.

Ok, building the UI with VS is easy. But when you need to edit the code
by hand, it's a nightmare. But, correct me if I'm wrong, building the UI
with Aida or Seaside is very easy too, it only takes a few minutes, and
you have the advantage of readability, easy maintenance and portability.
Not to mention all smalltalk tools like the debugger, it changed my
life :)

I wrote somewhere on the net a quotation:

question: "Why do people use C++ or Java instead of Smalltalk?"
answer: "Why do they smoke?"

Cheers!

Nico

Le jeudi 17 avril 2008 à 16:24 -0400, Rob Rothwell a écrit :

> We have another application developer at our hospital who has been
> looking at Visual Studio 2008.
>
> Don't send the hate mail...!
>
> We were listing pro's and con's of Smalltalk with Aida (or yes, even
> Seaside!) vs Visual Studio, and I came to the conclusion that it
> depends on the problem you are trying to solve.  The "instant" drag
> and drop data sources and page layouts in Visual Studio were certainly
> impressive, but the underlying code is most definitely NOT impressive.
>
> Anyway, my advice was if you have a complex problem domain, Smalltalk
> is hands down the winner.  If all you need to do is create Crystal
> Reports and paged tables, tracking boards, that sort of thing, and you
> don't even need to "code," why NOT use Visual Studio.  But the minute
> you need to go a little deeper, the code generated by Visual Studio
> is, pardon my language, going to kick you in the ass (in my opinion).
>
> In other words, once your drag and drop days are over, you are not
> having fun anymore!
>
> Any other thoughts, so I can help him make an intelligent decision?
> Maybe both are right, depending on the job?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rob

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Hi Rob,

As you already mention it is a long-term mantability and extendability of Smalltalk systems what should count, not short-term flashy, cool painting of your apps with Visual Studio, which soon start to became spaghetti code and you need to start rewriting them again. That's what M$ like a lot of course ...

On the contrary Smalltalk (and Aida) apps are almost eternal, they can stand years and years of continuous change, yet stay maintainable. Let me just point to 10 years anniversary of longest living Aida app: a Gas Billing System for out National Gas Company, billing all the gas in Slovenia: http://www.aidaweb.si/news/anniversaries-records.html

Best regards
Janko

Thanks Janko.

It's hard to fight the lure of drag-and-drop with a Smalltalk learning curve!

That's why I still feel like a framework that could generate maintainable code, at least to get people started, would be useful.  The would see the relationship between placing the button and the generated code easily because there would be so little code to generate!

The code generated by other tools seems very hard to follow, or is not given to you at all (VB, for example).

I've mentioned your success before, but will pass this along in your own voice!

Thanks,

Rob

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Janko Mivšek <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Rob,

As you already mention it is a long-term mantability and extendability of Smalltalk systems what should count, not short-term flashy, cool painting of your apps with Visual Studio, which soon start to became spaghetti code and you need to start rewriting them again. That's what M$ like a lot of course ...

On the contrary Smalltalk (and Aida) apps are almost eternal, they can stand years and years of continuous change, yet stay maintainable. Let me just point to 10 years anniversary of longest living Aida app: a Gas Billing System for out National Gas Company, billing all the gas in Slovenia: http://www.aidaweb.si/news/anniversaries-records.html

Best regards
Janko

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Rob,
just to bring here my experience, I'm a long time smalltalker (back from 1985), andI actually work (lukily) still in smalltalk, but also on Java and c#.

On java I mostly helped customers developing frameworks, so my java practical knowledge (hands on on tools like eclipse) is quite limited ( I know the language and I mostly use my OO experience coming from Smalltalkk usage for designing the frameworks someone else translate in code), but I'm using VisualStudio from the beginning, and I support a persistency frameworks there (clone to a smalltalk one) from several years, being it used by several huge customer.
I also develop web applications for these customer (big insurance company here in Italy) and my approach here is quite different from your. I use VS only for developing code (with resharper for refactoring), never designed a single aspx page.
As in my smalltalk applications, all of my gui (web pages...) are generated, the code create the HTML, and usually I have only an initial aspx page and a one or more .ashx page for receiving all of the ajax call and dispatching to the right method, this will give back html. Also the AJAX frameworks is my own. (using prototype/scriptacolous)

this is something I allways did in Smalltalk from years. no GUI builder tool, just code generation, this is much easier now, with CSS so powerfull and quite supported on browser. ( I do the same also for cleint/server app, gui are generated, almost never designed)

I have also cutomer that, after long time using gui tools, are now following my ideas, generating instead of designing GUI, this still in the Microsoft VisualStudio world.

So, it's not a problem of language, but a problem of how someone think about generating applications.
I'm pretty sure my way of working gave me lot of benefits, but your idea and exprerince can say the same for you too, it a question of taste. The only thing I would suggest is: try this way and then decide (also on c#, if you like)

The only real difference is that on visualStudio you have the choice, here in Smalltalk you don't. But,smalltalk has so many advantages... (you will discover it if you will insist on using it for a while, first time are hard, I understand, it's a new world...)

Ciao and good luck