Java or C#? - Page 3

On July 04 2011 13:49 InvalidID wrote:


You obviously work in very different areas of software development then me. The IDE form editor features are significant time savers, for simple gui apps, but you may trade some level of control(though you don't have to give it that control, you can use VS as basically VI with contextual help, and debug integration, if you so choose). You basically can use a graphical editor to design a "form" which is basically a window, or a web page depending on if you are using windows forms or ASP+. You can then graphically assign assorted events to functions, and voila, you have the shell of a UI. It takes about 5 minutes to get a basic windows app setup, far less then manually coding all the controls in, and its visual, so you don't have to twiddle around recompiling a million times to get a simple UI to look the way you want it to. Again, and most importantly, you don't have to use the forms editor if you don't think it gives you the flexibility you want for your app, you can use it just like you use VI/command line with whatever additional features you desire.

When you get into more complex apps, then maybe the forms editor loses its advantage, as you traded some level of control away to have a skeleton UI laid out for you. I have yet to see it pose significant problems, as you can over-ride pretty much anything the IDE does manually.

Contextual help is probably the killer app of VS though. Basically, it provides a popup menu of the MSDN library documentation. For example, if I could not remember the correct function to split a string, typing string. would pop up all the functions under the string class for you to select from(though you can just ignore it and type if you know what you want, its basically like the autocomplete feature of google). It automatically generates the same for any other library you have included. It is implemented very elegantly, and once you get used to it, it is a headache to use anything else, and constantly have to look things up online.

The debug features are also very well implemented, and it seems to save a lot of time. At any given break-point or error, or even run-time point, when you are running your app in debug mode, you can see the values of all variables in the memory of your app. You can do the same with the command line but it is far less elegantly implemented.

VS is probably the main reason that Microsoft is so dominant in the enterprise: it is just an enormous time saver for writing the kind of apps we need to write in the enterprise. These apps don't need super fancy UI functionality, they need stability, simple text boxes/buttons, graphical displays simple UI logic, and low development costs. I am a big supporter of open source, but I have yet to see an open source offering with comparable functionality(though Eclipse is getting better).

My most recent private web project uses a thin php frontend with a lot of javascript and all the heavy work is done in a C# server (did you know that .NET actually provides a complete embedded webserver? i was suprised when i found that out :p) to which the php frontend connects via TCP/IP. It allows me to use the strengths of each language to it's fullest while i'm still avoiding most of the weaknesses... but it's still a complex solution not suited for beginners who can't differentiate between scripting languages and programming languages