As I’ve mentioned, I’m getting more and more familiar with ASP.NET as I drag this application kicking and screaming (usually it’s me that’s doing the kicking and screaming, actually) toward completion. Still don’t like visual studio much, or being forced to work on Windows at all, and I keep trying to articulate why not?
One recurring theme, it seems to me, is the operating system putting its needs paramount to the user’s needs, and in some cases treating the user as if they were an annoyance as opposed to a raison d’etre. This isn’t just something you can “friendly up” – it’s more of an underlying way of thinking about the machine that leads to better coding, design, etc. And it’s unfortunately a legacy thing, too, where the more years you treat your users like crap, the more likely the users are to expect that’s the way they ought to be treated.
Here’s the example that brings this to mind: when editing web pages, Visual Studio can display as either HTML code view, or as “design view”, a pseudo-WYSIWYG where you can type text, select “bold”, etc. But when you switch from code view to design view, it’ll often lose the spacing I’ve added to make the html more readable. The actual code editor does the same thing – it wants to automatically align my code, but won’t let me easily override its sense of order. In both cases, the software is putting its needs (to align the code, to autoformat text to keep it pretty) ahead of mine (to rearrange text as I want, even if it isn’t as neat). For example – I like to put “test” code out to the right, rather than lined up with the hierarchy. VS won’t let me do it.
Another example, from HTML itself. Comments are really kludgey as compared to “real” programming languages. There are two main reasons to use comments: to make human-readable information about the technical details of a program (“Must verify credit card format before asking for dollar amount”), and to “comment out” code that you don’t want to run. The first is possible with the