Musings
2008-09-17 13:49:42.576981+00 by
Dan Lyke
3 comments
Two musings from yesterday's work:
- I don't mind debugging in solder, but I need to remember to not have coffee when
I expect hardware problems.
- One of the reasons I loathe developing in Microsoft's .NET framework is that it's
like coding for an embedded system without schematics and a 'scope. Sure, you've
got documentation for what the designer of that portion thinks is going to happen,
but it's a black box, all you can do is send stuff into it, get output from it, and
guess at what's going on inside. And far too often that's not what the designer is
telling you should be happening.
[ related topics:
Microsoft Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Embedded Devices
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2008-09-17 15:06:03.327159+00 by:
JT
I'm actually doing some dev work in .NET using Borland Developer 07... it's turning out to be an easy process because of the IDE, however there are some interesting caveats to seeing something blow up with no explanation as to why. Thankfully there's a little window in BDS itself that shows me what's blowing up when I'm learning this because MS wasn't showing me anything before.
#Comment Re: made: 2008-09-17 15:18:07.286034+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Yeah, one I tracked down recently had a scrolling canvas resetting its origins in certain cases. Turns out there was a bad interaction with focus, sometimes, so the solution was to make that control have the focus when it got updated, then, if necessary, switch focus back to the control that originally had it.
.NET's Windows.Forms is awesome for slapping up an app and getting a bunch of controls working, but when you get down to the nitty gritty of actually getting a polished app that responds to all of the variations in OS and user interaction correctly, it sucks. GTK (and, actually, all of the UI toolkits I've played with that come from the Un*x philosophies) is a little harder on the front-end, but just gets so much of that crap right on the back end, so the first half of the app is harder, but the last half is waaaaay nicer.
I'm gonna have to look at Borland again, though, if I'm gonna stay in this .NET world any.
#Comment Re: made: 2008-09-18 13:15:28.489478+00 by:
JT
It's intimidating at first... if you decide to get into it, I have 800+ MB of videos training on Turbo Delphi which uses a very similar IDE and is really giving me some insights as to how things function. It's supposed to be a video a day for 30 days, but I'm going through a few a day on top of my regular work while waiting for this current job to end.