* Posts by SNaidamast

16 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2015

Hey Microsoft – what ever happened to 'Developers, developers, developers'?

SNaidamast

I am in a somewhat similar situation as yourself.

I retired in 2014 after 43+ years in the profession. For me, I just couldn't take the utter incompetence of technical management any longer.

Nonetheless, I am still working on my own development projects full-time... Or just about...

I would like to consider moving to LInux and have gone ahead and installed the latest version of Ubuntu, which has come a long way since I first began tinkering with it.

I am slowly learning Python simply because I want an environment that I can develop with on Linux that is native to that ecosystem.

However, I still use Visual Studio quite heavily as I do a lot of work with WPF. As a result, I m still waiting on JetBrains to complete their WPF environment for the .NET IDE, "Rider". After years of waiting for this, JetBrains has barely been able to provide a decent toolbox so one knows which controls are available to use.

I imagine this delay in such an important development aspect of "Rider" is a result of some issues they are having with Microsoft, whose most requested Visual Studio feature is a version for Linux.

However, I imagine that Microsoft knows that if they create such a version, their ball-game for Windows will have a finite lifespan since many of us would then abandon Windows altogether.

I imagine that JetBrains will get its act together someday, considering that other vendors have already completed similar environments for Windows developers. So the question is, why can't JetBrains do this implementation faster?

Windows: Insecure by design

SNaidamast

I have already installed Ubuntu Linux in a VM on my laptop, which is what I use for development. And I like OS. The latest version is fairly easy to get around.

I would move everything to Linux in a heartbeat if I could get an IDE to support my current development work, which is currently being done in VB.NET\C#.

I keep tracking JetBrains' Rider IDE for .NET but after such a long time with constant updates they still don't have a usable WPF designer in place, which is what my development work is based upon.

I don't need such a designer as I do most of my screen design with the raw XAML but their software doesn't even have a toolbox so I know which components I can use for a specific version of the .NET Core Framework.

As a result, I have to wait...

I am tinkering with Python, which I enjoy, but a complete conversion of my work would be a huge job that right now I don't have time for.

I can more easily convert my work to C# but I find VS Code pretty useless for my requirements...

Steve Naidamast

Sr. Software Engineer

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

SNaidamast

Re: What took so long?

Since all this garbage came out back in the early 2000s with claims of faster development times and whatnot, I have been writing and arguing against such new processes for years.

There is absolutely no such development concept that can work effectively without the so-called "waterfall" model, which for all intents and purposes, merely demonstrates a logical way to go about developing a project. There are many variations on the "waterfall" model but none have to date been able to eliminate it... until Agile came along...

And now we are seeing the results.

If you want a project to be completed on time and within budget then you follow the standard software engineering practices for project development and implementation.

If you don't, like the majority of technical managers who still believe they are geniuses, then use Agile...

Steve Naidamast

Sr. Software Engineer

White House and lawmakers increase pressure on UnitedHealth to ease providers' pain

SNaidamast

One reaps what they sow...

There are a lot of people who deserve the blame here as people simply would never consider the downsides of moving everything under the sun to web applications, all of which use a completely insecure protocol.

Even the scientists who created the Internet warned businesses about this years ago.

But everyone just wanted to make money and find faster ways to create new applications.

Now we have what we have...

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

SNaidamast

Re: Why I write very simplistic software...

XP and "paired programing" was introduced around 2001.

It was developed by members of the Chrysler C3 Payroll Project, which was going to replace the existing payroll system in that company.

These new concepts were introduced in the 4th year out of a 5 year development process.

For whatever reason, these concepts took off like wildfire.

Then in the 5th year of the payroll project, the entire thing imploded as a result of the stupidity of such ideas.

However, by then, the die had been cast and the rest is history....

SNaidamast
Happy

Why I write very simplistic software...

This is great piece regarding all the BS that we as professionals are constantly indoctrinated with on daily basis.

Given that I am not an internals specialist, I cannot write operating systems, device drivers or the like. I am a software engineer who designs user-based applications.

And many years ago, when developing applications on the UNIVAC and IBM mainframes, we are were always taught to write our software for the least experienced person in our team. This way everyone could understand what we were all doing and could work more easily with each other's work.

Since 2010 especially, like the author here elaborates on, simplicity was more or less thrown out the window for complex design patterns, convoluted software solutions using languages such as JavaScript in ways that it was never designed for, and a consistent churning of the software development process that starting in and around 2001 through out common sense for stupidity and egregious idiocy.

Has no one figured out yet that everything we implement is done so around some for of "Waterfall" paradigm? However, XP Programming and Agile has convinced literally tens of thousands of developers that somehow one can create an application and then when its done, design it. Basically, that is what Agile in all its incarnations promotes while XP Programming or Pair Programming attempted to turn an individual pursuit into a multi-player game.

Today, anyone who reads the code of one of my applications can quickly get a feel for how it is designed and then just as easily follow all the code once the basic patterns are understood. And I still write in my preferred language of Visual Basic .NET, though I can just as easily write C#. However, in a current assignment I am finding writing C# code a complete chore in Visual Studio 2022. Unlike its VB.NET counterpart and due to the constant enhancements to C# itself and Visual Studio, I can't enter a line of code without having the editor interfere with what I am attempting to write. I don't require all the popup suggestions and hints as I already know how I am going to finish my line of code.

There is nothing fancy here with my won application development and I eschew all the philosophical crap that has popped up in the last 2 decades to simply write applications that simply work and which are relatively easy to maintain.

In my corporate career, no supervisor every worried about one of my applications crashing at night or during the day.

But today, as the article clearly demonstrates, things have gotten out of control both in the internals arena as well as general application development. And it is not going to get better; especially since our young people and university graduates are getting dumber by the day...

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

SNaidamast

Re: Eclipse Versus Borland Delphi

You basically described the entire problem with the Open Source paradigm; people need to make money even if they are writing software.

Sun didn't go out of business because they gave Java away freely. They went out of business because they spent very little on their own R&D. Sun had great machinery and a great OS, but once they reached a successful plateau they basically stopped inventing and creating refinements to their systems. Instead, Scott McNealy would get into pissing matches with Bill Gates, and despite what one thinks of Gates (he is nothing but a dangerous windbag now), at the time McNealy was quite a nasty person. Like Kahn of Borland, he destroyed his own company.

Nonetheless, The Open Source paradigm destroyed a thriving software cottage industry of third party developers who sold their wares for very affordable prices. Now these same developers and many others have to provide their software freely while also offering their source code as well.

How is anyone supposed to really make a living doing this? You can't and many professionals are finding that out.

Corporations especially are quite happy to take freely available software and use it for their own reasons and asking for compensation after the fact is a little late in the game.

And no amount of licensing refinements will stop this from happening since enforcement, if it is possible, is both costly and timely for most individuals and smaller businesses.

Open Source has been a terrible bane on our profession and it has only made things worse for many who simply want to have software businesses.

Though there is some very fine Open Source products out there such as the freely available database engines, most Open Source projects are not very good or even if they are tend to be abandoned after a point when the developer or developers find that there is no future in maintaining the software.

Microsoft .NET MAUI devs vent over bugs backlog, response times

SNaidamast

Re: .NET WinUi3

You can get a complete set of freely controls for WinForms from Syncfusion.

Just apply for a developer license there.

I have been using them for years...

Steve Naidamast

Sr. Software Engineer

SNaidamast

Microsoft shot itslef in the foot with the droppong of ASP.NET WebForms

ASP.NET WebForms was the zenith of Microsoft's development quality along with its ease of web development.

Once Microsoft started with ASP.NET MVC, its been a downhill slide since then. This is why I still stick with the original .NET Frameworks. They just work and provide what I need them to provide.

Constantly churning the development environments as Microsoft has been doing since 2010 is causing mayhem and frustration in the MS Development Communities. And this is also contributing to developer burnout. Dear god, who in their right mind would base a new web development environment on JavaScript, which has now been changed to C#.

It is a little ridiculous that JetBrains can come out with a cross-platform IDE for .NET (Rider), which runs on Windows, MacOs, and Linux but Microsoft can't seem to do the same with Visual Studio.

Instead of coming up with all these idiotic framework upgrades and language features, Microsoft should just go back to the drawing boards and develop 3 versions of Visual Studio with three separate teams for the three popular operating systems available. But instead, they discontinue the MONO-based version of Visual Studio for MacOS.

The fact that they did not move WebForms and WCF over to the new frameworks is just a sign of complete laziness, incompetence, and a complete lack of direction.

Like many, after being involved with the field since 1974 and rising to that of a senior software engineer, I am also considering looking at options that would make my skills and expertise more flexible in the environments that we now have. JetBrains Rider is certainly one major consideration. However, I am also teaching myself PHP and have already successfully tinkered with Python.

WiseJ.NET has also produced a ,NET WebForms-like development environment using Blazor as its underlying foundation. If they can do it, why can't Microsoft?

By the way, WiseJ.NET has a freely available community edition of this software...

Steve Naidamast

Sr. Software Engineer

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

SNaidamast

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

I have been saying this for years that putting critical data and\or infrastructure in the "Cloud" is a fool's errand that only enriches the vendors.

Considering the increasing number of breaches to such stupid architecture, one would think that businesses would shy away from using such technology.

Unfortunately, the majority of business executives and managers are not very bright...

.NET 5 and Windows 10 20H2 drop out of support

SNaidamast

Constant churning of technology releases is getting ridiculous!

I am a senior software engineer developing ongoing extensions to a new product I have just released.

I work in Visual Studio 2019 and have worked with .NET since it was first commercially released in 2001.

Since the advent of Microsoft's move to ASP.NET MVC in 2010, the company has been churning out technology releases and upgrades\updates at such a reckless speed that no one can no longer keep up with such technologies. And there is a lot of dissatisfaction in the Technical Community regarding this. And we call all see this with large increase in software defects making it into the public domain for use by end-users.

I recently tried to upgrade to the recently released Visual Studio 2022 (which has support for .NET 6.0) and it completely messed up my Visual Studio 2019 installation (which has been a reported issue) so that I had uninstall both and reinstall Visual Studio 2019 so I could get my commercial product back into the development environment.

I did this upgrade so I could recompile a number of data access layers I had written to the .NET 6.0 Core Platform. However, there is little wrong with the .NET 5.0 platform that I could see as it supported the type of web development I was learning (Blazor in a WebForms-like manner).

But I can't currently use .NET 6.0 because Visual Studio 2022 is currently too unstable for me to work with right now. However, we have .NET 7.0 Core right around the corner.

Its not only the machinery that is being made obsolete its also that developers and engineers simply cannot keep up any longer with these platform upgrades with features that are for the most part meaningless in the scope of real-world development or end-user usage.

I have been considering simply dropping the Microsoft development environments by purchasing RemObjects latest product, Mercury Visual Basic, which supports everything in the older and newer frameworks. Tracking RemObjects Software for a while, they don't seem to constantly churn out releases on such an ungodly schedule.

Has anyone ever asked Microsoft why the need for so many upgrades outside of making money?

So how's .NET 6 coming along? Oh wow, Microsoft's multi-platform framework now includes... Windows

SNaidamast

Re: Nope.

Well, when it comes to web development, increasingly developers are seeing just an enveloping quagmire of tools, frameworks, and paradigms that all compete for their attention.

I have done the ASP.NET MVC thing and decided that I would either remain with the WebForms environment or wait until Microsoft redevelops Blazor back to something similar to WebForms, which it looks like it is already doing.

Microsoft is going in so many directions now for the development community, no one any longer knows what they can rely on to develop with. And this is not the way to create a stable development

community...

Complexity has broken computer security, says academic who helped spot Meltdown and Spectre flaws

SNaidamast

The article brings up some rather salient points regarding the security of systems. The problem however, is you cannot make such systems secure by adding ever more complex technologies to the endeavor. The answer to this issue is to return to more secure processes, which are far more difficult to breach than current systems are.

For example, the rush to do banking online via mobile devices has become a watershed for cyber-criminals wanting to breach people's accounts. Many use such options over public WiFi networks where people with sniffers can literally scoop up data over the public airwaves and then simply use brute force techniques to crack the security at their leisure. Instead of simply waiting to use such online services from a more secure connection at home, people simply ignore such safeguards to do their banking at their convenience. But whose convenience?

Another aspect of this overall situation is the priority of companies that all applications must go on the Internet\Intranet. Instead of prioritizing low-risk applications as those that can go ion the Internet, while high-risk applications are developed using binary protocols within client-server infrastructures on localized LAN networks, companies simply ignore such thinking for convenience.

In the end, the problem is not the technologies but how they are used combined with the lazy proclivities of people who simply want convenience over minor impediments to their daily lives. If people were to make some minor changes in their lifestyles, you would probably see a lowered number of breaches taking place. However, in a world gone mad over the latest technological refinements made available, this will most likely never happen leaving security researchers to continue chasing after a silver-bullet to the world's woes...

Talk of tech innovation is bullsh*t. Shut up and get the work done – says Linus Torvalds

SNaidamast

Re: @Mark 85

Facebook was just a copy of MySpace and has a terrible interface. Can't see anything innovative here either but it is a billion dollar company. Go figure...

Why Microsoft's .NET Core is the future of its development platform

SNaidamast

Re: Entity Framework is an abomination and shouldn't even exist

Very well said... I have been saying the exact same things for years and why I continue to offer open-source DALs for developers at my business site (http://www.blackfalconsoftware.com).

Erik Meijer: AGILE must be destroyed, once and for all

SNaidamast

Is Sanity Coming to The IT Profession ???

Since Agile first became popular in the l990s and later I have been highly critical of the paradigm and its supporters. And it finally appears that some in the profession are beginning to get the message.

"Agile" was a re-development of the "XP" paradigm, which turned out to be a complete failure as everyone would have known had they been tracking the history of this early paradigm. "Agile" was merely a new face to a very stupid idea; that you can design software by bypassing its most vital processes with a new paradigm.

There is no such thing as developing software without using some level of the "Waterfall" approach, which simply details the basic common-sense steps to the creation of any type of product; design, implement, test, validate the defects, correct, re-test... and so on.

Anyone who believes they can re-arrange common-sense does not belong in any creative field such as IT.

Now there are many ways that one can approach these steps and in standard software engineering practices there are approximately 13 such variations, two of which already somewhat mirrored what Agile was attempting to accomplish but failed to do. These variations can be found in the standard "bible" of software development by Steve McConnell, "Rapid Application Development", which is still a standard in the industry though it was first published in 1996.

Now before anyone decides to rebuke my contentions please understand that the development of Agile was not a reflection of software engineers attempting to produce better results but to do so under increasing, severe pressures. The development of Agile was more a reaction to the increasing and utter incompetence of US corporate management to understand the realities of software development with the idea that you cannot create anything worthwhile under foolish time constraints, limited budgets, and poorly staffed development teams. To such management everything is about the money, which in the end they never save but only lose more as a result of poor results. For some reason this proven logic cannot seem to enter the highly narrowly focused brains of such people.

This reaction in the software development industry should have been thwarted by more engineers insisting that the original precept in our field in which management will simply have to wait until developers can produce a product correctly. And this is how it was done in the mainframe era where we had our own issues to deal with and when technical management was little better than we have today. Nonetheless, project planning and implementation was somewhat better understood and to a degree somewhat better implemented than currently.

What happened was that with the incursion of the micro-computer into daily business processes along with the newer development tools some people got the ludicrous idea into their heads that software could now be developed faster. These people never considered the fact that better development tools does not translate into faster Humans in terms of development processes.

Nonetheless, this idiocy took hold and the rest is history.

Needless to say, the overall project failure rate in the United States has not moved very much from the 70% average, though some limited studies have attempted to show some improvements but not against the overall, historical average when such broad project failure statistics are taken into account.

I do disagree though, with the contention that Agile should just be dropped so that developers can simply do more code. If Agile is to be dropped then what should developers then do in terms of proper design processes? Simply coding is like just saying we should all just become "guerrilla programmers" as it was known in the mainframe era when instances of projects were not properly designed and managed.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in telling management to either wait and do it right or find another staff member. By not doing so we professionals have been bullied and coerced over the years into producing garbage, which is having terrible ripple effects in US society; the "Affordable Care Act" web-site introduction is a classic example of this. The current, massive issues with the new F-35 fighter is yet another.

In the end we are all going to pay a heavy price for allowing so much bad software to enter our daily lives and we are already doing so as software use is exponentially growing while its development is being done on increasingly flimsier foundations since so much of it is done at the behest of the "bottom line" in business.