Mark hits the Mark!

I was planning on giving you a technical rant about Visual Studio, however after an anonymouse comment left on my blog I went surfing and I found a couple of postings by respected Microsoft developers I wanted to share with you. Besides that, I thought this would be nice conclusion to my rants why Visual Studio is wrong from a business perspective.

In Markus Eggerus's blog he discusses the benefits of VS however he couldn't help but a take a well deserved gab (more like an upper cut) at Visual Studio. The following excerpt is from his blog:

".... A premium solution such as the Milos® Solution Platform will automate much of the data access for you, based on information in your data store, and will follow best practices to provide a more flexible system. Whether you choose a third party solution for the data access and business layers, or you intend to roll your own, you should plan on including these layers. The .NET environment is not nearly as flexible as VFP in many areas, and you’ll run into trouble later if you don’t include these layers. ...."

If Microsoft had nailed data access with anyone of their 5 different "failed" data access paradigms why are data technologies like Milos even being mentioned? I tell you why because data access is nothing short of an abortion in Visual Studio and Microsoft is too arrogant to admit they are completely clueless when it comes to data and blinded by their own self righteousness to implement a paradigm that actually works, Visual FoxPro. Given Microsoft owns the VFP source code their logic defies reason.

With regards to cost of ownership below is an except posted by a Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio MVP on his blog:

...Les Pinter has a nice strategy for selling VFP apps.He first shows to his audience, most likely managers and budget-responsible people, the whole myriad of classes and possibilities of VB.Net of C# or whatever they can come up with.He is driving them crazy with all the things you can do in .NET to a point where they ask him for a price to develop that must-have application XYZ.He gives them the price and the time to deploy the app and tells them there is an alternative.... and then says, "nahhh, you probably won't be interested, it will cost you only 25% of the price I just mentioned but it won't be interesting of you". Well, those budget-responsible people ARE interested then, and then he shows them his "special framework, developed in C++, AKA VFP".He drives their minds to a boiling point with another show-off from VFP and compares that with the things he just showed to his audience. And shows that it is indeed, remarkably quicker, and, what's more, cheaper!!

Yes you read it correctly as quoted by a Microsoft Professional Developer, VFP is remarkably quicker and a VFP custom solution is 75% cheaper then a Visual Studio/.BLOAT solution !

In closing here is an link to an older infomation week article ripping Vista apart. The interesting thing is Vista consumes a large portion of the .BLOAT framework. I find it ironic that Microsoft can't even make .BLOAT function as well as XP.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203975

Once again I'm right on the mark as usual.

Until next time.

Mark