In March, I moved from a web development project in Java to one in ASP.NET. It was a good opportunity to get some more experience and more responsibility, and I had been on the old project two years.
So here I am, programming in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. And let me tell you, it’s a piece of crap. It continues in the long Microsoft tradition of assuming that users are stupid. Go search for solutions to problems in .NET. Almost every single tutorial relies heavily on the Visual Studio GUI.
A good analogy here, for those of you who aren’t coders: Remember back in school when you were learning math? You probably learned how to do long division on paper, and you probably hated it. If you’re like me, you no doubt complained about it. Later, you got to use a calculator, and then things were more or less okay.
Imagine, however, that you had never been taught long division. More than that, you were never even told that long division even existed. Instead, you were handed a calculator and told that division means hitting one number, then the division button, then another number. Not that doing that would tell you the answer, but that doing that was what division was. It wasn’t a shortcut, a convenience. It was division.
Sure, you’d have the answer. You’d be able to divide any number by any other number. But you wouldn’t understand division.
This is what Visual Studio does. It assumes that, if you end up with a working web page, then the fact that you have no idea how you got there is not important.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Visual Studio doesn’t have a lot of nice features that save you time. I use the code completion features all the time. But seriously, Microsoft. Stop treating me like an idiot.