DECENT PROGRAMMING

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May 2006

I cannot help but wonder why ANYONE, especially a developer, would stay loyal to Microsoft!

I've written about Inline::Java recently. This week, I had the DIS-pleasure of recompiling it on a Windows platform. The last time I compiled it, I got lucky and the whole process only took me about a day. The actual compiling of the module's parts that need to use C only takes about 20 seconds - it is getting everything that you need to compile on Windows that takes the other several hours. When I finally figured out what I needed, and gave up trying to use freely available compilers, I was able to snag a copy of Visual C++ 6.x...

This week, I wasn't so lucky. I ended up not being able to use the copy that I had before, so I went looking around and found the development tools needed on Microsoft's site. Between the SDK's and tools needed (just to compile a small DLL), I ended up downloading and installing over 500Mb of files!!! The final DLL's that I made, all three of them, are 31kb TOTAL!

And, when I say that I wasn't lucky, it was not because I had to download so much crap onto my system to make this work. No, with the "new improved" Visual C compilers, Microsoft decided to change how DLL's are handled.

Needless to say, I had to spend (waste) several hours searching for answers and reading posts until I came across the way to make things work. There are many solutions out on the web, but since I was creating no executable and was not using an installer package, they would not work. I finally found a solution at http://www.grimes.demon.co.uk/workshops/fusWSThirteen.htm - the author did a great job explaining the issues, and pointing out the just plain shoddy way that things were implemented by Microsoft.

Argh! All I needed was a couple VERY small DLL's so that Perl could talk to Java.

This whole experience has left me with a renewed vigor for my feelings about Microsoft. It also leaves me wondering how any developer could stay loyal?

I am going to stick with developing on a platform that does not tell me what I want, and how I should do it.

I think I'll go take a shower, this whole experience has left me feeling dirty.

Posted by Brent Michalski at 03:43 PM  Permalink |

I stumbled upon a great resource today. I work in the corporate world and the place I work is very sold on the whole extreme programming (XP) model.

I've been through the training and can really see how it is beneficial and really want to start using it. However, our shop is almost entirely Java and the training also was very Java-centric.

I am one of the few Perl programmers who work there, and XP resources that deal with Perl are not that easy to find.

But, this morning I came across this site http://www.extremeperl.org/bk/home

It contains a book called Extreme Perl. The author, Robert Nagler, was kind enough to provide the book online for free! And, instead of it being a book that is written and then forgotten about, it is getting updated as needed.

I think this is a great resource to help people see what XP can do, and to possibly help them to transition over to XP development.

Now, if I could only get some people who are smart in Java and Perl to create some more Perl plug-ins and Perl refactoring plug-ins for the Eclipse IDE, I'd be much happer!

Posted by Brent Michalski at 01:18 PM  Permalink |