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Thinking In .NET
Code, industry analysis, and miscellaneous cross-links
from Larry O'Brien, the former editor of Computer Language and
Software Development magazines.
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Friday, February 21, 2003 |
SD Times has posted my brief review of C# Refactory and IDEA. Even briefer review: C# Refactory is good, but IDEA is the best language-specific IDE ever. I'm willing to state that it's even better than Smalltalk/V ever was!
1:14:41 PM 
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Borland Sidewinder to be "just" a C# IDE? Screenshots. Here are some screenshots of Borland's Sidewinder tool for C#, which I thought was going to integrate TogetherSoft Control Center. No sign of that in these screenshots. Enough! I'll actually...gasp... call them before posting further speculation. Stay tuned!
1:05:28 PM
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Open Source code better than commercial quality.
According to a study by Reasoning software (here's a link, but it's down at the moment), Linux' 2.4.19 implementation of the TCP/IP stack ran around .1 defect per 1,000 lines of code (which we'll assume means executable semi-colons), compared to 5 commercial OS's (at least 2 of which were UNIX flavors), which averaged .6 to .7 defects per KLOC. Reasoning may only be looking at memory defects, which may explain why these rates are dramatically lower than the industry standard of 10-20 defects per KLOC (Software Assessments, Best Practices, and Benchmarks). The study is strong evidence for the OS argument that to many eyes, all defects are shallow.
12:58:00 PM
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FridayFive:
1. What is your most prized material possession?
My wedding ring. (Awww...)
2. What item, that you currently own, have you had the longest?
Hmmm... I have the first release of the "Star Wars" soundtrack, (c) 1977. Since I only listened to it about three times (in 1977), it's in near-mint condition. I wonder what I'd get on eBay for that...
3. Are you a packrat?
For books, yes. For anything else, no. Tina more than makes up for this, though, and most of our house is covered in bric-a-brac.
4. Do you prefer a spic-and-span clean house? Or is some clutter necessary to avoid the appearance of a museum?
Books, books, books. If you don't have stacks of books laying about, how can you stumble across provocative juxtapositions (Chuck Palahniuk versus Jacques Barzun)?
5. Do the rooms in your house have a theme? Or is it a mixture of knick-knacks here and there?
It's a mixture of travel souvenirs, original art pieces (mostly oils and ceramics), books, and computers.
11:45:36 AM
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Microsoft and the corporate market.
There are three 'platforms' for building corporate applications today: J2EE, Microsoft.NET and the 'Open Source' platform. In the later I also include Java software that is not J2EE like Struts, WebWork, Hibernate, Castor....a big oil company and an airline company. Both have J2EE as their standard platform....Slow moving is not a problem for most corporations. They usually move slowly, and they feel comfortable with 'designed by committee' technologies, so J2EE has a good value proposition for them....
via [Andres Aguiar's Weblog]
Andres does a good job articulating one aspect of a fundamental tension in corporate software development -- the processes by which software development is done today are known to be inefficient and expensive, but they're known and therefore somewhat controllable. Many corporations would prefer to budget $100 believing it's +- $10 rather than $80 that's +- $25. In no small part this is because for 40 years, they've been told that new processes "cut development costs in half" or even "by a factor of 10." I estimate the overall productivity advantage of .NET versus J2EE above 10% and less than 20%, which is tremendous, but a MS reviewer criticized comments to that effect in Thinking in C# as "overly cynical and detracts from the author being viewed as the authority on the subject."
These are the numbers that Microsoft uses in their own VS.NET 2003 ROI calculator: Unified IDE +10% productivity. Drag-and-drop server components: +10% productivity. OOP: +10% productivity. Debugger improvements: -20% debugging time. Improved test scripting: +8% test productivity. Web forms designer: +25% Web UI productivity. Dynamic help: 24 hours per developer per year. Even if you accept these numbers, (-25% debugging time? Hah! Advanced debugger features have minimal impact on the overall time spent correcting defects!), how in the world can you argue the tools give you >20% productivity over J2EE using, say, IDEA and jUnit? It's just not true.
11:26:19 AM
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The contents of these pages represent the opinions of one person.
All contents © 2003 Larry O'Brien. All Rights Reserved.
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