Well I have been playing with Visual Studio 2005 since about 6PM and it is now about 2AM. That doesn’t include installation, I built a fresh 2003 SP1 Server yesterday and also loaded all of the VS stuff. That took several hours as well, I built VS from DVD.
Overall the feel reminded me of the previous feel of Visual Studio 2003 which I wasn’t too fond of. I would say the environment in Borland Builder 6 released in 2002 is still better overall for intuitive ease of use.
So then I started looking at building apps, that is the important part, I can put up with anything if the tool makes building apps fairly easy. I start hunting around and sure enough, there is a c++ service wizard!!! Oh wait, it is CLR based, strike 1.
Continuing to look, a nice RAD Web Form Development environment… Whoops CLR based, strike 2.
Try to build a console app, nice and small as expected, it gets to leverage all of the stuff in the OS directly, don’t have to statically link in any extra libraries.
How about a GUI app, I don’t do much with GUI apps but I am getting some pressure to add some GUI to the tools and if I really intend to sell any of this stuff, it probably needs to be there to hit the masses who can’t figure out what to do when they see a flashing cursor and a black window. Again, I don’t intend to do CLR based tools anytime soon so what can it do outside of the framework, they have the idea of RAD dev down for the framework, hopefully they realize they have customers who want to build native apps easily too…. Nope. Strike 3.
Guh, this means I am looking at actually paying real money for the new Borland Builder 2006. What does that say when I am willing to pay Borland for a dev tool that is similar (don’t read as the same) as one I get for free from Microsoft? Looking closer into it, it appears that it will be shipping in the next few weeks.
What do I like about Borland Builder? It does the RAD dev like MS does for the CLR apps, it did this YEARS and YEARS ago. Borland took Microsoft’s own Visual Basic outlook for developing GUI apps and used it against them by producing a C++ tool that did it as well. I know why so many coders hate writing c++ Windows apps if they have only ever used Visual Studio, it is a big pain in the ass and almost not worth the effort especially if you have ever seen Visual Basic. Don’t believe me, download the trial version of Borland Builder 6 (the trial of BB C++ 2006 isn’t available yet) and load it and try it. You build your form dropping whatever graphical components on it you want and then doubleclick the component to bring up the property page with all properties and events for that component. Then doubleclick on the event and you are taken to a function to enter the code to handle that event. Or you enter the values you want for the properties. You want to build a service, there is a simple service wizard, in 45 seconds or less you can have a service written that will beep every 30 seconds. I realize that isn’t much functionality but how long does it take to build a service with MS VC++ in unmanaged code. Again, this was a basic function YEARS ago. Do the MS VC++ team not look at their competitor at all?
The other big thing is everything I do in Borland Builder compiles to native code. I don’t have to worry about whether or not people have loaded the framework. From everything I have seen, heard, and read it is far slimmer than what you get out of .NET (or as some friends say .FAT). The limitations I keep seeing people hit in the newsgroups keep pushing me to stay away from it. I didn’t learn Java on purpose, I don’t see anything that would change my mind to use MS Java.
I admit, .NET is great for folks who tend to shoot themselves in the foot with memory management and security issues. I have done it in the past, I will do it in the future, but it isn’t so much my concern that I feel I need big fat bumpers on my code because it doesn’t happen so much that it needs to be a major concern. I wrote overflow safe string functions 15 years ago. I wrote safe pointer classes probably 10 years ago. Possibly it is because I was actually trained as a programmer, I didn’t just start farting around with Visual Basic one day and decide, hey I want to be a programmer and then hung out a shingle saying I was one.
So off to find the best price I can find Borland Builder 2006 Pro. If you work for Borland or have special ties into Borland and can get me a really good price on on Pro or even Enterprise (say Academic pricing or a comp), please email me. I am great advertising for Borland compilers because I have been using Borland since Turbo C back in the 80’s, Turbo C++ in the 90’s and later Borland Builder 1, 3, 5, and 6. I even bought Borland X which was a bit of a mistake. Anyway, being an MS MVP and having tons of free tools available to the masses and seen in books and university programs and articles all over the world it looks good for Borland to have me using their compiler. So come on, hook up a long time customer and supporter. 🙂
joe
