Re: GNAT for MS Visual Studio

[Markus E L <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

"Steve" wrote:

> "Markus E L" <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de> 
> wrote in message news:xwir5zj8j2.fsf@hod.lan.m-e-leypold.de...
> [snip]
>>
>> I see that MS marketing already works. In your mind GUI developent is
>> impossible w/o Visual studio.
>
> You're reading me wrong here.
>
> C# or VB on Visual Studo, Delphi and  SharpDevelop are all comparable in 
> terms of effort to create a GUI.  Unless Microsoft has purchased Borland or 
> Imprise ... I'm not sure what they're calling it these days) Delphi is not a 
> Microsoft product.
>
> The Microsoft Foundataion Classes used with Visual C++ in visual studio are 
> horrible.  It has been since it was first released.  Borland's OWL was 10x 
> better than MFC.  It's ridiculous to develop user interfaces using MFC when 
> so many better tools are available.

> BTW: In my opinion:  Ada is the best general purpose programming language to 
> date.

In my opinion the "general purpose" doesn't apply any more, but let's
not argue about that: This has been beaten to death w/o any real
results in threads some months ago.

> Earlier in this thread it was mentioned that AdaCore has produced a dot-net 
> version of GNAT.
>
> If you haven't learned about dot-net, and you program user interfaces for 
> Windows, I would recommend doing so.  It is similar to Java and Java's 
> virtual machine in nature, but better, and covers all of Windows.  If you're 
> programming using .NET you have a wealth of class libraries available... 
> regardless of the programming language.  It should be as easy to write GUI 
> user interfaces with GNAT on .NET as it is to write them in C#, VB, or Boo.
>
> What I was trying to point out (if anyone was listening) is that there are 
> tools available (for tool builders, which I'm not... its just not my forte') 
> that should make it relatively easy for tool builders to include support for 
> interactively building .NET forms in the Visual Studio 2005 development 
> environment.

Obviously not easy enough to make building those tools into a viable
market. That might be due to the size of the market or the difficulty
/ ineconomy of maintaining such support over the years.

Still my point applies: You cannot imagin building GUIs w/o
"interactively building" etc. My suspicion why there is no market for
GUI builders is:

  - Coding is only a small part of a development project.

  - Building GUIs is hard with and without GUI builder, the hard part
    is not selecting the widgets and plugging them together, but (a)
    non widget related structuring of event processing and (b)
    plugging this to the rest of your application. GUI builder don't
    help there.

  - It's only too often the beginners that camour for GUI builder. But
    they (a) overestimate their productivity boost from having such a
    builder and (b) aren't willing to pay big bucks for it. In teams
    of larger projects it's certainly not the beginners that decide
    which tools are bought.

That would explain, why people urgently wanting a GUI builder of VS
integration are only a small fraction of the specific language /
developer community. And it would explain why there are such tools for
e.g. C# and Java, which have a larger community such that even the
small minority constitutes a viable market, whereas the Ada community
is small so that a GUI builder would not be viable.

I'm not sure that is right, I'm just speculating.


> It is impractical (as Randy mentioned) for Ada tool developers to create 
> their own development environments with the same capabilites as Microsoft. 

> But what is practical, is to make use of the tools that Microsoft has made 
> available to customize their development environment.  

? And you don't think the creeping featuritis and inevitable but fast
change of the MS tools wouldn't hit them then? I think they would,
actually I cannot imagine any worse environment for maintaining any
corpus of code than these "tools Microsoft has made" wheras plain old
make and a compiler ...

> The same is probably 
> true of Eclipse, but I am much less familiar with Eclipse.
>
> In general, I'm not a big Microsoft fan.  When I first learned about 
> developing windows applications my response was "you're kidding!".  When VB 
> and Delphi came out, it made things a lot better.  In my opinion .NET has 
> finally brought windows development far closer to what it should have been 
> in the first place.

Well -- The problem with windows is, that they are more often than not
the wrong interaction model: For the user as well as from the
application perspective (processing events instead of reading
input). This of course cannot be changed any more today since bad
practice has formed user expectation over the years. Bad practice: No
user manual, but overladen input forms, and no "direct interaction
metaphor".


> I was reluctant to learn C#.  It was my understanding that it was basically 
> just a Microsoft rip-off of Java (in my opinion they have a history of 
> copying other peoples innovations and making them their own).
>
> I try to keep on top of new technologies as they come out so reluctantly I 
> read the ECMA standard for C#.  I was suprised to find that there are 
> several things that I like a lot better than Java.
>
> Ada is my preferred programming language.  If A# or GNAT for .NET give Ada a 
> better shot at a larger market, maybe I'll be able to use it more.


Regards -- Markus