Re: Transcript of MS Remedies

[Steve Cohen <stevecoh@mcs.com>]

Christopher Blizzard wrote:

> What extensions to the language are you talking about?  Visual C++ 5.0
> when compared with other MS development tools is pretty "standards"
> based.

I agree here.  I use VC++ every day.  It isn't all that bad

> You have full access to almost all of the ANSI C++ ( proposed ?
> ) features including the STL, RTTI templates, etc.

Yup.

> They certianly ship
> a ton of MS-specific libraries but that's a bit different than changing
> the language syntax like they've done with Java.

And yet there ARE a few things...Check out the #import preprocessor directive
enabling a type library to be read in like a header file.  And those ugly
_com_bstrs or whatever the hell they're called?  Standard?  Not hardly.  Granted,
you don't have to use this stuff, but still, this stuff should be in a library,
not in the language itself.

Check out the sick use of VBA to achieve automation of their development
environment instead of a perfectly viable and infinitely more flexible old
technology of makefiles, viable until Microsoft broke it, that is.  I have seen
makefiles directly generated from VC 5.0 .dsp projects that nmake won't build.
You can scream till you're blue in the face, they won't fix stuff like this.

Yes, the visual tools are nice, but they don't do everything, and frankly, the
first thing that got me ticked off at Microsoft was the way they chopped things
like makefiles off at the knees and force you to use their IDE.  Why, after six or
seven years of VISUAL C++ do they refuse to release a command-line dependency
scanner?  There's no easy way to manipulate the supposedly integrated Visual
Source Safe from within an MSVC project, but it's something you might want to do
frequently on a big project.\A common engineering truism is the 80-20 rule.  You
get more bang for the buck making sure that the thing that is used 80% of the time
works and letting the other 20% slide.  Oftentimes this is justified.  Frankly,
however, I think the standard for development tools needs to be higher, and with
Microsoft, it never is.