Sheep redux

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

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:

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!.

We are sheep, take our money…

One of the things that frustrates me with the Microsoft/.NET communities is the willingness to pay (and charge) for things. I’m not talking Visual Studio .NET here, but rather simple little tools that may (or may not) make your life easier – Text editors¹, Winzip-alikes² or utilities that replicate built-in functionality that people are too lazy to learn/use/

Another thing that annoys me is the herd mentality of said communities. There are some very good .NET/Development blogs out there, but there are some which are thinly veiled (sometimes not even veiled!) advertisements. Now, this is understandable when you’re pimping a product you wrote, but not when you are, but you didn’t.

Take the last link – he’s basically selling MaxiVista’s product for them³.

…I hear you say. Wrong – you’re missing my point. It’s not his post I object to, it’s the comments to an earlier post about using said product. This is a very tame example, but you see it time and again – a blogging ‘personality’ promotes his favorite product(s) and people flock behind them to buy said product(s). All too often this is done without checking out the competition (which is well worth checking out by the way – even just for the “wow that’s cool” factor).

I’ve done it myself with CodeRush – I heard it mentioned on .NET Rocks and thought:

Time like these I wish I could be bothered to draw stick figures like Rory does

I tried it. I quite liked it actually. I let the demo expire and stopped using it. And you know what? It didn’t make any difference – I still code the same, I just have less flashy effects going on! Yes CodeRush does other things, but so do other (free) VS.NET add-ins.

Now, I understand the basics of marketing and why things work this way, but it still frustrates me especially when there are so many as-good-as (and often better) Free and/or Open Source alternatives out there. They just don’t get pimped (in the right places) as much…

¹ Why would anyone not use Vim ?

²Info-ZIP and FreeZip should fulfill your needs, but I do admit to using WinZip on my work machine because we have license agreement. I still use Info-ZIP though…

Ironic?

…possibly in the Alanis Morrissette sense…

After a few teething troubles, I’ve now migrated from a variety of aggregrators (including the Mono app Blam which is almost there…) to Bloglines.

Bloglines is an excellent service, and once I got used to it’s quirks I love having my feeds available anywhere, and I’ve been playing with their web services as well (more to come on that).

Now on to the bit which made me laugh today…

Logging into Bloglines this morning presented me with a “recommended feeds” page which included…this site! I know Bloglines couldn’t know this site was mine, but I still found it funny that it thought my site should go with the rest of my reading (mainly techy/geeky blogs). Must be doing something right!

I am so unfit…

One of our cars has decided to start playing up – brakes pads by the sounds of it – so it went into the mechanics this morning.

In a fit of healthy-mindedness, I decided to drive the car there, and bike back. Now it’s been at least two years since I rode a bike in anger, but it’s only about 5 miles – should be easy right? Right?

Well to be honest, it wasn’t that bad¹ (and I even went a long way round for a nicer/quieter ride) which pushed it up to 6 or 7 miles, but I was absolutely knackered when I got back!

Time to start getting fit again methinks…

¹ Except for the fact that both tyres were flat, and when I started pumping up the front one it sounded like there was a masive puncture (which I still can’t find – valve must have been stuck) so it was a quick inner tube replace. Oh and the brakes squealed like a stuck pig for the first mile or so!