Dan Herbert's

Microsoft recently announced that the javascript library jQuery is going to be included in future Visual Studio 2008 releases as well as a patch/hotfix coming soon. In addition to this, Microsoft plans to offer full support of the API, including intellisense, and inclusing into its “shared source” AJAX Control Toolkit libraries.

For those who have never heard of jQuery, it is a Javascript library/API that has become very popular since it first came out. It focuses on the “less is more” principal, meaning that the API is very minimal, but it also allows developers to do more with less lines of code.

jQuery is run by John Resig, a man who really knows his stuff when it comes to Javascript. He’s responsible for the FUEL API in Firefox 3 and he’s very outspoken about the power of Javascript. Because of the knowledge of John, as well as the other developers writing the library, the API can do things other Javascript API’s can’t do, or don’t do as easily (in my opinion)

• Work totally fine side-by-side with other Javascript libraries, including different versions of jQuery, on the same page
• Allow for powerful plugins to be written to expand the functionality of the API
• Lightning fast performance
• Extremely effective DOM traversal
• Offer an simple, consistent, understandable core API
• Work consistently across every browser.

Microsoft just released the results of its Windows Mojave experiment.

Windows Mojave is a marketing experiment Microsoft created to convince people that a lot of unwarranted negative press has been spread about Vista, giving it an undeserving bad name. The premise of the experiment is this:

Microsoft took average people and introduced them to what they claimed was a new operating system. Microsoft told these people that Vista was “Mojave,” which was a codename for a new Windows operating system. The created new packaging for Vista, they changed the Vista name to “Mojave” in the operating system, and showed people what it could do.

The result of the experiment was overwhelmingly positive. Average computer users (or so it seems like) seem to really like the new system.

I try to remain as objective as possible about Vista. I’ve read the good things and the bad things about it and I’ve tried it myself for a little while. Several people I know also use Vista and I’ve had to help them with their computers on occasion.

As an avid computer user, my experiences with Vista have been somewhat negative.

I can honestly say, as negative as people like to be about Vista, it is not so bad. It has a lot of good points to it. When I used it, I really enjoyed a lot of the features and changes made to the OS. You could say it is a decent OS. As I said, however, I have had an overall negative experience with Vista.

At a first look, to the average person Vista can seem “shiny” and have lots of cool new aspects that make it seem like a great OS. What I doubt Microsoft’s Mojave experiment would test is the long term satisfaction with the operating system.

The negative experiences I’ve had with Vista all come from long term use of the OS.

There are major memory and performance issues with Vista. I tried running it on a machine with 1GB of RAM (more than enough for an XP machine) and it could barely handle itself after a while. This is not just something I say because I saw the Task Manager chart show the system using large amounts of RAM. It comes from actual experience. I’ve tried running programs I normally run under Windows XP without a problem, and have been disappointed that Vista can’t handle itself when more than 2-3 programs are running. Admittedly, Vista should be slower on my old hardware, just like XP ran slow on my older computers that were upgraded from Windows 98. However, I put a lot of work into turning off features of Vista so that it was running at the minimum it took to run the system. I turned off Windows themes completely. I shut down all of the services I knew I wouldn’t need.  I made sure that nothing was running at startup other than what I absolutely needed (just the software for my trackball). With all of the “stuff” I turned off, I would have expected Vista to run reasonably well, however I was disappointed that I just couldn’t get it to go faster.

Aside from memory and performance, which can be forgiven since I lack modern hardware to test the system against, I have major issues with the Vista interface. The Windows Vista interface is absolutely the biggest flaw in the operating system. Out of every Windows OS I’ve used (and I’ve used every OS from Windows 3.1 onward) the interface of Vista has to be the worst.

From what I heard about Vista development, Microsoft hired a world class HCI specialist to give Windows a facelift in Vista. What came of it was in some ways better than what had existed in previous versions of Windows. In many ways though, Vista fails completely when it comes to HCI. Microsoft broke at least 2 fundamental rules of HCI with Vista:

1. When designing an upgrade for existing software, do not change what users are comfortable with. Seeing how Microsoft has 90% of the desktop market and Windows has such a huge influence in society, it is really disgraceful to see them completely change what everyone has gotten used to over the course of the last 10-15 years. This is something that Mojave doesn’t seem to show (for good reason). Users may think it looks cool and shiny, but once they begin using it for day to day tasks, in my experience people generally become frustrated trying to navigate around the Vista interface.
2. Keep your UI consistent across your entire system. This is a tough one to do. Windows is a beast of a project and it has a lot of different tools, applications, and dialogs included with it. To change everything over to the Vista “look and feel” is a major undertaking that has got to be hard to do. I can understand having a hard time getting around to every single thing Microsoft has developed, making sure it aligns with a new style guidline. What I can’t understand is how Microsoft failed to keep the Vista UI consistent. The average person would never think about an issue like this when a “new” OS (such as Mojave) is being demonstrated to them. That is the point. A user shouldn’t have to think “is this UI consistent?” It should just feel easy to use. If a UI is different in some part of a system, that means the user has to learn a new interface and remember it. Microsoft seems to have had a really hard time deciding what a menu should be like in Vista. Every program you open has a different menu, different names for commands, and just looks different depending on what you’re using. This is where Vista fails the most.

If it weren’t for the UI issues with Vista, I’d be able to proudly say it’s a good OS that I’d recommend to my mother. However, when you’d be required to learn a new interface just to use your computer for basic things, it becomes something I can’t recommend to people who just aren’t computer enthusiasts.

I’m glad Microsoft tried the Mojave experiment. Hopefully it will show people that Vista isn’t as bad as everyone says it is (it has its merits.) It still doesn’t address the issues with Vista, however it might help fix Vista’s bad name

I’m mainly a .NET developer. As a .NET software developer I’ve been using Visual Studio as my primary Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for a little more than 3 years now. I’ve used Visual Studio 2003 through 2008 for writing, building, and occasionally designing software.

Since my first (and for a long time, only) real experience using an IDE was with Visual Studio, I grew to really love it and feel that it was the best thing out there. I really felt that Microsoft did an amazing job designing the software to be as useful as possible, providing me with lots of really great tools to make doing my job easier.

As I started learning other programming languages and technologies, I started learning how to use other programmer’s tools, such as Vim, Notepad++, Eclipse, and Netbeans, among others. All of these tools are absolutely free, and what is even more amazing for me, they’re actually better than Visual Studio.

A collection of free tools is actually better than an $800-$2500 (depending on the package) piece of software.

The key difference to keep in mind, is that a lot of these tools are scattered. What I mean is, they take a little more setup to get them working nicely, compared with Visual Studio which includes by default, a lot of things the free tools provide as additional plugins.

The fact that these free tools require some setup is really nothing compared with the benefits they offer and the productivity boost they give me. Although Visual Studio can include a lot of things by default, they generally are not as good as the equivalent free alternative.

A good example are the refactoring tools Netbeans provides for Java. In Netbeans, I can create 10 private variables, and then tell my IDE to create getters and setters for all 10 variables. It provides a nice GUI interface to allow me to customize how the auto-generated code should look and make sure everything is the way I want it. Visual Studio has a similar feature, however it only lets me do 1 variable at a time, and if I use it, I have to break the organization of my code because the new property has been placed directly below the private field.

This is just one example of something I have to do almost every day that could be easier if my IDE were “better.” Visual Studio has had a similar feature for a few versions now but it’s so tough to work around that I rarely use it.

Eclipse is one IDE that I really think might be the best on the market today, and it is totally free. I’ve used it for Java and PHP development and I find it to be a joy to use. It gives me great tools to make my work easier, and I don’t have to pay a dime for it.

Although I’m too young to have been able to see this unfold, apparently a few years back Eclipse was (as it is now) the best IDE out there. It made Visual Studio look kinda crummy, so Microsoft put a lot of work into making it a better IDE and eventually prevailed. Now that Microsoft is declared “victorious,” like they did with the browser wars, it seems like they have given up trying to make their IDE the best on the market.

I still feel that Visual Studio 2008 is a decent IDE. I use it every day for work and I find it acceptable, it just frustrates me when I see all of the cool features other IDE’s have that I might never be able to use despite how popular they are.

If you’ve used Visual Studio and another IDE before, how do you feel about the differences between the “enterprise” IDE and the free alternatives? Do you think either one is truly better? Worse? The same? Leave a comment.