Sheep redux

Posted on Monday, November 8, 2004 in Uncategorized

I feel I need to clarify a few points about my previous post “We are sheep, take our money…”.

I have no issues with Scott Hanselman or what he posts to his blog I have no issues with MaxiVista or their product I mistakenly compared MaxiVista to Synergy – they are completely different products which should have been obvious to me I don’t want to stop people talking about things they find cool I do want people to stop wasting money on commercial software when there are perfectly good Free and Open Source alternatives out there I do want people to contribute (time and effort, not just money) to Free and Open Source alternatives

In a nutshell, my examples within that post were wrong, but my reasons were right. I didn’t write the entry because of Scott’s posts about MaxiVista – they simply reminded me of an annoyance I’d been meaning to voice for some time.

I know why there is such a market for IDE add-ins and developer tools, but that doesn’t mean I need to agree with it. I also lament the fact that more and more developers are growing up in a world of wizards and add-ins, where development is more a matter of bolting pieces together rather than solving a problem.

In my Why .NET? entry I said:

As far as desktop application development is concerned, itÃ¢??s not currently going to win many .NET developers over Ã¢?? in fact I can imagine more Mono developers jumping to .NET once theyÃ¢??ve got to grips with the concepts.

Which in hindsight isn’t completely fair – VS.NET is an excellent IDE which MonoDevelop cannot hope to compete with (yet), but Mono itself is almost as complete as the .NET SDK and Framework. The problem is that very few .NET developers learnt via the SDK[1]. If more had gone that route, then they would take to Mono like a duck to water – but as long as they are being taught to use a wizard over a tool (e.g. The VS.NET “Add Web Reference” wizard vs. the WSDL SDK tool) then they will always have trouble adapting.

Whilst the main thrust of these entries is directed towards developers, the same sentiments could be applied to all computer users…

¹ Which is actually the route I took – writing ASP.NET pages in Notepad!.

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