Its true, git is complex like Linux is - it suits the needs to Torvalds, but I think its popularity exceeds its ability, and many people use it without using it properly - for example a previous company I worked for used git for their SCM and I asked where the backups were I was told they didn't need backups because it was distributed and everyone had a copy of the repo... of course, that relies on everyone having a copy of each repo, or at least 1 other person having an up-to-date copy of each repo which wasn't the case. This kind of thinking wouldn't happen if there was more of a concept of distributed-but-from-a-central-repo. It needs the concept of a golden root from where everything else is sourced (and I know you can have this, but its more convention due to the distributed nature)

Still, it ushered in a new style of version control that wasn't catered for before.

Now we're seeing easier, more accessible systems, such as fossil by that attempts to bridge the gap between DVCS freedoms and centralised repositories and includes other useful features such as bugtracker in the SCM and still geared towards branches that are more collaborative than gits 'private playground' branches. (ie git is designed for people to work on their own and hopefully merge changes back, many other SCMs are designed for branches that are for common code worked on by several people and thus requiring less merging). Git works well because of how the Linux project is structured - a very large hierarchy, but starts to fall down in a small team where people don't have that arms-length working environment, or where they work on multiple branches at the same time (eg at work, I have my big feature and I have bug fixes that come and go regularly - git doesn't help in that environment unless I have multiple repos checked out)

I'm not convinced its he best designed, nor is the chap in the first link I posted where he complains that in 9 years of using WPF it hasn't gone anywhere and is pretty complex and bloated to use.

Now a well designed UI is Qt - where they enhanced the existing model with their QML language, so you could create a new control in QML and drop it onto an existing form. All the power of QML whilst maintaining the existing investment in UIs. Qt got it right, shame Microsoft didn't have those devs working for them! (perhaps MS should buy Qt out and use it for new developments, probably too late now they've released Windows 10, but it would have been cool, wouldn't it!)

Imagine if Microsoft had done that instead of reinventing the GUI wheel - you'd create a control in WPF and could drop it onto a Winforms dialog. That would have been good.

As it is, WPF is just now very well designed, and not vey well implemented. As the other link showed, the chart controls only work for small datasets, if you want something that works well - you use the old winforms one! I'd hazard a guess that they are also hardware accelerated purely by being constructed by gdi calls too.

So what's the benefit in WPF? It mignt be easier to construct new controls than winforms but is more difficult to use as an application developer, it performa much worse, and requires a lot more investment in training. If the end result isn;t acceptable to users too.. then its no wonder people are sticking with Winforms.

Or HTML GUIs, which is what I meant by ASP.NET.

WPF is very over-rated. that has poor hardware rendering that doesn't work as well as old winforms

Maybe Microsoft isn't open sourcing WPF because they know how bad it is. Only the .NET fanbois are still going on about how wonderful it is, even though the majority of UIs I've seen on Windows are using ASP.NET or Winforms.

I've seen a couple of WPF GUIs, invariably they're horrible - like what you'd write back in the 80s. I once saw a GUI that had orange and blue colouring with red highlight bars - yup, highlight the selected orange text with a red bar, reducing the distinction between the colourblind and those with perfect vision.

Its pretty slow too, a colleague had to drop it for his audio GUI as it simply did not respond quickly enough whereas the old C++ GUI worked perfectly well.

But its the latest cool thing so all the cool kids want to use it. I guess it's keeping them from node.js this week, so maybe its a good thing, but I can see why the Windows team says to write GUIs in html5 rather than WPF - if you need a plain LoB GUI, HTML works, if you need performance then you'll be doing it in C++ with something more akin to a game engine. WPF fails on both counts, and is too complex to boot.

Neither are quite perfect though - C++ has plenty of ancient cruft that;s there for C compatibility, but then, C# has plenty of cruft from its old 1.1 days (all those nasty, nasty functions taking char[] parameters for example.

But they're still better than the newcomers simply because the new ones are just as imperfect but without the benefit of a wide user base or tooling. Maybe one day Rust will become mainstream and we'll all start using it, and good luck for that day.

But, there's no reason not to use C++ now for Linux development. Moving people to C# on Linux is just wrong, not because C# is rubbish, but because it's not mainstream on Linux. The reasons not to use Rust or C or Go are the same ones to use when applied to C# on Linux. On Windows its a different matter of course, but Linux - stick with C++ and enjoy the benefits of the same codebases everyone else uses.

no, it'd take you 10 minutes in Visual Studio - not quite the same time as it takes using anything else, and VS doesn't exactly run on Linux or Mac which is the point of Mono and even then you get a very non-native GUI.

nevertheless you have to run it to give feedback - so run it, in a VM. Then you can legitimately say what you think of it, not what you'd like some imaginary OS to be.

...after eating a thousand burgers.

one of the dlls is mshtml.dll and I know several applications that use it - anything that has an embedded browser for example, MS Money is one that uses a browser control as its entire display surface.

The other is ShDocVw,dll which is a browser control - Explorer uses this.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

lol.The guy I sit opposite has to support a solution built around Biztalk. He continually says "it must have seemed a good idea at the time".

Unfortunately, he has to maintain it, the original weenies who wrote it have moved on to devastate other projects with some other cutting-edge, 'cool' new technology.

Yes, but somebody had to do the proving

somebody else can do it - somebody who isn't trying to make a product that will last. Startup type people who will bang something out and then, if it proves successful, rewrite it in boring technologies anyway.

I think the simplest way is just to use boring technologies anyway, if you consider anything that has been around for a few years becomes either old and boring, or dead and unused.

like storing passwords in plaintext. That's just fucking stupid

not as stupid as you think. Sure, encrypting your passwords is another layer of security but really, if an attacker gets your password database, then they can (and will) crack them quite easily today. Given that all you're doing is slowing the attacker down, it can be better to store them in plaintext.

Because - if you know your passwords are precious and need to be looked after, you will take many more steps to ensure the attacker doesn't get them in the first place. Too many websites think that if the passwords are encrypted then they're all secure. They don't think the (small) effort to properly put the DB behind a middle tier layer and not allow any web application to directly access the tables is worth doing, and so they get hacked and the passwords get cracked.

I blame the web development frameworks, if your idea if security is running it all inside the webserver that's public internet-connected, then you're going to get hacked.

I think this shows the education of modern programmers.

Take a string, append 1 byte. Repeat a million times. Say "why is it so slow?".

Its probably because every time you write to most strings classes, you're making a copy and re-allocating the whole lot, and then deallocating the original.

If you knew C, you'd know what was happening here. This is why we need to teach C to programming students and not Java. Once they know C they can learn Java or whatever takes their fancy on their own time.

(although even Java and .NET programmers should understand what a stringbuilder is and why you'd use it)

Brokeback mountain was not a better movie by any standard despite being love interests.

FWIW, my current project fails since we only have one woman on the team.

right, Julie you can ignore this, but HR has said we have targets to meet so the rest of you have to nominate someone who's gong to have to wear a dress. Wayne, or should I say Waynetta, its probably going to be you.