27 Dec 2006
I Spoke Too Soon

I went off on quite a rant the other day, moaning about M$ Visual Studio and it's nearly unusable user interface. I compared it to the tools I was most used to, which were from Borland, namely Delphi and C++ Builder, and found MSVC sorely lacking.

Which is where the title of this post comes in: I should have made it clear that my references were to C++Builder and Delphi before the atrocity known as "Borland Developer Studio" was foisted on the unsuspecting programmer. You see, I downloaded a trial copy at work (it's 537MB download, not for an ISDN line at home). And what an eye opener it was.

Oh, they still have the VCL, a completely superior framework for Win32. And they've added .Net capability and even a C# environment. But they've tossed their old IDE to the trash heap of history, and rather than coming up with something new and better, they've slavishly imitated Visual Studio, right down to the idiotic project setting style, the bifurcation of each program into 'Debug' and 'Release' branches, and the utter and complete lack of usable help.

Un-fucking believable. Forms are now shown on tabs in the editor rather than free floating - and they've undocked the tool pallet and made it contextual, doubling as a template and wizard container. The screen's so busy and cluttered it took me thirty minutes just to figure out how to open a new project!

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, but why they chose to flatter the dunghill known as Visual Studio is completely beyond me.

I was prompted to download the Borland tool out of frustration - I have gotten nowhere at work trying to do a simple SOAP client in Visual C++ without using the .Net framework (which is deemed too big a download for our customers). Knowing C++ Builder 6 as well as I do, I figured I could whip one out in an hour or two. Which I did. Tonight. At home. Using C++ Builder 6. Because the ultra expensive and expansive Borland Developer Studio was completely unusable - I couldn't even get F1 context help to pop a readable class definition!

So it's Visual C++ and M$ tools for me: if I gotta use an environment that sucks that badly, I might as well use the one that's most popular with employers, and productivity be damned. Which should make some of the folks at Borland think: I've been using (and spec'ing and buying) Borland compilers since the 1980's. And unless I can figure out a way to make the IDE function in a "classic" mode, and get help actually working, it looks like Delphi 4 and C++ Builder 6 will be my last purchase from that venerable institution.

00:37 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link