Tag Archives: development

software development, tech

StackOverflow survey 2020

The StackOverflow developer survey 2020 is out – surveys come out constantly but this one is worth more than most because of the huge reach of StackOverflow among developers. This one has 65,000 responses.  Every survey also has reasons why it is unrepresentative; there is no such thing as a definitive survey because you can never precisely compare like with like, humans are unreliable, and every sample has its biases. Every wondered what a survey of “developers who never respond to surveys” would look like, if you could cajole them into answering questions? I have.

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Imperfect then, but still interesting. What is notable in this one? The questions that interest me are those in the technology section. I am also more interested in trends than in absolute rankings, because it is the trends that might tell us something about the future. So let’s have a look.

In “Most popular programming languages” the interesting stuff is well down the rankings, since the top places are little changed. Dart has gone from 1.9% last year to 4.0% this year; still small, but that is more than 100% growth, thanks no doubt to Flutter. Rust has also grown, from 3.2% to 5.1%. Swift has fallen slightly, from 6.6% to 5.9%. This no longer seems likely to become a top programming language, important though it is for macOS and iOS. Objective-C is down a bit too (4.8% to 4.1%) and I wonder if this suggests greater interest in cross-platform toolkits and/or web technologies for Apple platforms. Such as Flutter, of course.

What about web frameworks? React.js is up a bit, from 31.3% to 35.9%, and to my mind it does look all-conquering at the moment. jQuery is above it, but that is nonsense really, as jQuery is not an alternative to React.js, being more a low-level plumbing thing. The figures for both Angular and ASP.NET are confusing as hell, since last year there was no separate entry for ASP.NET Core, but this year there is; and this year Angular is split between Angular and Angular.js. So we cannot conclude anything about these technologies. There are signs of growth in JAMstack frameworks. Vue.js is up from 15.2% to 17.3% and Gatsby makes an appearance this year at 4.0%

In “Other frameworks” we see .NET down a little but .NET Core up a little, so probably no change there. Flutter up from 3.4% to 7.2% as noted above. Xamarin down a bit, from 6.5% to 5.8%. Xamarin has not been as popular as I had expected it to become when Microsoft acquired it; the reason seems obvious, which is that Microsoft has given developers mixed messages about whether to use it, with the Windows and Office teams seemingly preferring React Native.

In databases, PostreSQL had another good year, rising from 34.3% to 38.5%. More than MySQL, it seems a natural destination for those migrating from Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle. Though note too that SQL Server is up, from 32.8% to 34.8%. Microsoft pushes developers strongly towards SQL Server in its developer tools and frameworks, and the strategy seems to work (plus it is a pretty good database manager).

In platforms, both Linux and Windows have increased use among developers. Not so surprising when you consider that Microsoft now ships the Linux kernel with Windows 10. MacOS is going in the right direction too, from 22.2% to 24.0%.

StackOverflow stuffs cloud platforms into this part of the survey too, as well as things like WordPress (talk about not comparing like with like!). Still, note that AWS is up from 26.6% to 26.7% (well, hardly moved); Azure is up from 11.9% to 14.5%; and Google Cloud (GCP) from 12.4% to 14.1%. Oh yes, and Kubernetes is here too, up from 8.5% to 11.5%. All of this chimes with my perception that GCP is doing pretty well from a developer perspective, now only just behind Azure in this particular community.

Then there is the entertaining most loved, dreaded and wanted. Rust is still move loved by miles (86.1%, up from 83.5% last year). Not much else I want to say about this section, other than to note that Python tops the “most wanted” list by a bigger margin (30.0% up from 25.7%); and poor old VBA continues to be “most dreaded”, again by a bigger margin (80.4% up from 75.2%).

In web frameworks, the good news for .NET developers is that ASP.NET Core now tops the list of “Most loved”, whereas ASP.NET is well down the list (36.9%). Again you cannot really compare with last year. Angular.js (the old version) tops the list of “Most dreaded”.

Similarly, .NET Core tops the list of most loved “other frameworks, libraries and tools” at 71.5%, though it only manages  8.3% in “Most wanted.” Translation: .NET Core developers love it, but it is still not doing that well in terms of appeal to those not currently using it. Chef should be asking itself why it is top of “Most dreaded” for two years running, in fact more dreaded than last year (72.4% up from 66.7%). Puppet is not far behind. Ansible seems both better liked and less dreaded by developers.

The “Most dreaded platforms” list is also notable, with WordPress at the top (PHP spaghetti anyone?) and IBM “Cloud or Watson” second, both positions unchanged from last year.  Android as overtaken Windows as the most dreaded operating system. All the top cloud platforms are more dreaded than last year, and so is Kubernetes.

Make of all that what you will. The survey seems to me valuable as evidence of things we already know, but there are no huge surprises – and why should there be?

software development, tech, visual studio

Stack Overflow survey shows leap in popularity for Visual Studio Code

Stack Overflow has released the results of its annual developer survey. I took a quick look, comparing the figures to those for 2018.

The survey is based on results from 88,883 developers from 179 countries. 400 responses were excluded because they took less than 3 minutes to complete!

A few things caught my eye.

Visual Studio Code is the most popular development tool, with over 50% of developers saying they use it. This is up from 34.9% last year. Visual Studio (which I guess includes Visual Studio for Mac) is second but has gone down from 34.3% to 31.5%.

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Visual Studio Code is an amazing success; it is only four years old. What is the benefit to Microsoft though? There must be some benefit via the branding and gentle steers towards Microsoft services such as Azure; but this is mainly about Microsoft delivering a great free and open source developer tool and getting kudos in return.

Few other technologies have moved by such a dramatic amount. JavaScript remains top in languages but slightly down, 69.8% to 67.8%. Python is gently up, 38.8% to 41.7%. C# slightly down, 34.4% to 31%. Swift is down a bit, 8.1% to 6.6%, which is a little surprising to me.

TypeScript is up from 17.4% to 21.2%. Another impressive open source project from Microsoft and the great Anders Hejlsberg (Object Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript).

In frameworks, last year StackOverflow had a single category for .NET Core (27.2%) while ignoring .NET Framework. This year it has 23.7% for .NET Core and 37.4% for .NET – no trends are therefore visible but next year perhaps.

There is an overly broad platform category including everything from Raspberry Pi to WordPress to AWS. I do not have much confidence in these figures, but notice that AWS is up from 24.1% to 29.5%, Google Cloud Platform up from 8% to 12.8%, and Azure up from 11% to  11.9%. Not good figures for Azure, now third behind AWS and Google. But Microsoft can take comfort from Windows, supposedly up from 35.4% to 50.7%.

Both Android (29% to 27%) and iOS (15.5% to 13%) are down slightly. I do not think this is meaningful movement but it does suggest that mobile app development is not longer a big growth area; perhaps there is more attention being paid to server apps.

android, microsoft, mobile, Notes from the field, tech, windows

Configuring the Android emulator for Hyper-V

Great news that the Android emulator now supports Hyper-V, but how do you enable it?

Pretty simple. First, you have to be running at least Windows 10 1803 (April 2018 update). Then, go into Control Panel – Programs – Turn Windows Features on and off and enabled both Hyper-V and the Windows Hypervisor Platform:

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Note: this is not the same as just enabling Hyper-V. The Windows Hypervisor Platform, or WHPX, is an API for Hyper-V. Read about it here.

Reboot if necessary and run the emulator.

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TroubleshootIng? Try running the emulator from the command line.

emulator -list-avds

will list your AVDs.

emulator @avdname -qemu -enable-whpx

will run the AVD called avdname using WHPX (Windows Hypervisor Platform). If it fails, you may get a helpful error message.

Note: If you get a Qt library not found error, use the full path to the emulator executable. This should be the one in the emulator folder, not the one in the tools folder. The full command is:

[path-to-android-sdk]\emulator\emulator @[avdname] -qemu -enable-whpx

You can also use the emulator from Visual Studio, though you need Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 Preview 1 or higher with the Xamarin tools installed. That said, I had some success with starting the Hyper-V emulator separately (use the command above), then using it with a Xamarin project in Visual Studio 15.7.5.

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.net, development

Should you go to Microsoft Build?

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In the beginning there was the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) – the first was in 1992. They were fantastic events, with deep dives into the innards of Windows and how to develop applications on Microsoft’s platform. Much of the technology presented was in early preview and often did not work quite right; some things that were presented never made it to production, famous examples including “Hailstorm” also known as .NET My Services, and the WinFS file system originally slated for Windows Vista.

These events seemed to be a critical part of Microsoft’s development cycle. Internally teams would ready their latest stuff for a PDC session, which was then adapted and re-presented at other events around the world.

Then PDC kind-of morphed into Microsoft Build, the first of which took place in September 2011. Unlike PDC, Build was specifically focused on Windows, and was originally associated with Windows 8 and its new app platform, WinRT. Part of the vision behind Windows 8 was that it would have a strong app ecosystem and Build was about enthusing and informing developers about the possibilities.

As it turned out, the Windows 8 app ecosystem was a bit of a disaster for various reasons. Microsoft had another go with UWP (Universal Windows Platform) in Windows 10. Build in April 2015 was an amazing event, where the company appeared to be going all-out to make UWP on both desktop and mobile a success. Not only was the platform itself being enhanced, but we also got Project Centennial (deliver desktop applications via the Store), Project Astoria (compile Android apps to UWP) and Project Islandwood (compile iOS code for UWP).

Just a few months later the company made a huge about-turn. CEO Satya Nadella’s Aligning Engineering to Strategy memo signalled the beginning of the end for Windows Phone, and the departure of Stephen Elop and the dismantling of the Nokia devices acquisition. That was the end of the universal part of UWP.

Project Astoria was scrapped. The Windows Bridge for iOS (Project Islandwood) still just about exists, but its core rationale (get iOS apps to Windows Phone) is now irrelevant.

Nadella steered the company instead towards “the intelligent cloud” and to date that strategy has been successful, with impressive growth for Office 365 and Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft has announced Build 2018, in early May, I find it intriguing, given the history of Build, that Windows is not currently mentioned on the event’s home page. In the page description metadata it says:

Microsoft Build 2018, Seattle, WA May 7-9, 2018. Microsoft’s ultimate developer conference focused on cloud, artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and more.

In the main text of the page, about the only specific topics mentioned are these:

Take in keynotes by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other visionaries behind the Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge

That sounds like a focus on Azure and AI/ML/IoT/Big Data cloud services, and on mobile and IoT devices. It is a long way removed from the original concept of Build as all about Windows and its application platform.

Windows remains important to Microsoft, and to all of us who use it day to day. Still, if you think about cutting-edge software development today, Windows desktop applications are probably not the first thing to come to mind, nor UWP for that matter.

This being the case, it does make sense for the company to focus on its cloud services at Build, and on diverse mobile platforms through what is now an amazing range of cross-platform tools in Visual Studio.

Of course there will in fact also be Windows stuff at Build, including Windows and HoloLens Mixed Reality, Cortana skills and UWP improvements.

Still, if you can only get to one big Microsoft event in the year, Ignite in September is now a bigger deal and closer to the heart of the new (or current) Microsoft.

Let me add that these Microsoft events, whether Build or PDC, have on occasion seen some stunning announcements. Examples include the unveiling of C# and the .NET Framework, the 2003 Longhorn reveal (yes it all turned to dust), Windows 7 in 2008, and Windows 8 in 2011.

I would like to think that the company still has the capacity to surprise and amaze us; but it must be admitted that the current Build pitch is rather unexciting. Google I/O, incidentally, is on at the same time.

.net, development, tech

Microsoft introduces new feedback system for technical documentation, will delete existing comments

Microsoft is introducing a new feedback system for https://docs.microsoft.com, used for its technical documentation.

The new system, which you can already see for certain topics such as the Visual Studio IDE, is based on GitHub issues. When you leave a comment, you can specify whether it concerns documentation or product functionality.

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So far so good, but the downside is that all existing comments will be deleted:

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The statement “Old comments will not be carried over. If content within a comment thread is important to you, please save a copy.” is unhelpful. Nobody knows what comments will be useful to them in future.

Few things sap enthusiasm for community participation more than having all the past contributions into which you have put effort suddenly zapped. Nor is this the first time, as user guibirow notes:

As much I like the new system idea, I hate the fact that this is happening over and over.
It used to be a Disqus comment system, then moved to LiveFyre, then moved now to this new system, what will be the next?
The worst part of this all is that MS does not care about past content lost on these discussions, so many times I found issues described in the docs that are gone now.
Please, pay attention to your previous mistakes, don’t let the information be lost again, at lest import them as closed issue in the new system.

Sometimes progress has a cost and that is understood. However it is not impossible to migrate content from one system to another. It just takes effort.

Update: Microsoft’s Rob Eisenberg has responded with an explanation and mitigation plan regarding existing comments. He says that a straight migration of the comments is impossible:

    • There is a lot of garbage, spam and even dangerous content within existing LiveFyre comments which would violate GitHub terms of usage and our open source code of conduct, as well as cause security problems.
    • There isn’t a good way to map LiveFyre users to GitHub users and using a bot account to anonymously add comments is questionable with respect to OSS practices and GitHub terms of use.
    • For legal and privacy reasons, we cannot move user-associated data from one system to another without consent from users (GDPR).
    • LiveFyre conversations are threaded, while GitHub issues are not.
    • Placing the old comments into the GitHub Issues system would derail the entire GitHub Issues workflow for both customers and employees and muddle the data.
    • It isn’t clear whether there is a way to invoke GitHub APIs for a migration of this scale such that it wouldn’t violate GitHub API terms of use.

He also has an archiving proposal:

We would take the comments from an article on docs.microsoft.com and then convert them into a Markdown file. During this process, we would strip all user info (remember GDPR). The Markdown file would then be committed to a GitHub repo. Finally, at the bottom of the feedback section, next to the link that says "View on GitHub" we would add a second link that said something like "View Comment Archive". This link would connect you directly to the Markdown comment file for that page.

This sounds positive. At the same time, it is a mess that illustrates some of the disadvantages of a “best of breed” approach to solving technical problems. If Microsoft could use its own technology to host a documentation and commenting system, and a source code management and issue tracking system for that matter, this issue would not occur, and users would not need multiple accounts, causing the legal issues mentioned above.

Microsoft in fact used to use its own platform for all the above but decided to shift to using third-party solutions because they worked better. That seemed to be a good thing, improving user experience and productivity, but becomes a problem when what seems to be the best third-party option changes.

.net, development, software development, tech, Web

What the Blazor! After Silverlight, .NET in the browser reappears by another route

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Silverlight, Microsoft’s browser plug-in which included a cut-down .NET runtime, once seemed full of promise for developers looking for an end-to-end .NET solution, cross-platform on Windows and Mac, and with support for “out of browser” applications for a native-like experience.

Silverlight was killed by various factors, including the industry’s rejection of old-style browser plug-ins, and warring factions at Microsoft which resulted in Silverlight on Windows Phone, but not on Windows 8. The Windows 8 model won, with what became the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) in Windows 10, but this is quite a different thing with no cross-platform support. Or there is Xamarin which is cross-platform .NET, and one day perhaps Microsoft will figure out what to do about having both UWP and Xamarin.

Yesterday though Microsoft announced (though it was already known to those paying attention) Blazor, an experimental project for hosting the .NET Runtime in the browser via WebAssembly. The name derives from “Browser + Razor”, Razor being the syntax used by ASP.NET to combine HTML and C# in a web application. C# in Razor executes on the server, whereas in Blazor it executes on the client.

Blazor is enabled by work the Xamarin team has done to compile the Mono runtime to WebAssembly. Although this sounds like a relatively large download, the team is hoping that a combination of smart linking (to strip out unnecessary code in both applications and the runtime) with caching and HTTP compression will make this acceptable.

This post by Steve Sanderson is a good technical overview. Some key points:

– you can run applications either as interpreted .NET IL (intermediate language) or pre-compiled

– Blazor is an SPA (Single Page Application) framework with solutions for routing, state management, dependency injection, unit testing and more

– UI components use HTML and CSS

– There will be a browser API which you can call from C# code

– you will be able to interop with JavaScript libraries

– Microsoft will provide ASP.NET libraries that integrate with Blazor, but you can use Blazor with any server-side technology

What version of .NET will be supported? This is where it gets messy. Sanderson says Blazor will support .NET Standard 2.0 or higher, but not completely in the some functions will throw a PlatformNotSupported exception. The reason is that not all functions make sense in the context of a Blazor application.

Blazor sounds promising, if developers can get past the though the demo application on Azure currently gives me a 403 error. So there is this video from NDC Oslo instead.

The other question is whether Blazor has a future or will join Silverlight and other failed attempts to create a new application platform that works. Microsoft demands much patience from its .NET community.

microsoft, mobile, visual studio

Xamarin Challenge shows bumps in Microsoft’s path to cross-platform mobile

Microsoft ran a Xamarin Challenge over on Paul Thurrott’s site. The idea was to demo how to build a cross-platform mobile app with Microsoft’s cross-platform mobile toolkit.

The challenge was in three steps. You build a weather app, complete with crash analytics on the Visual Studio Mobile Center.

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Someone did a lot of work on this, and the app looks pretty and works nicely once you get it running.

Despite this, I am not sure that the challenge was altogether successful. It is a step-by-step which in theory involves no developer expertise as you simply copy and paste code into your project. I am not sure that is the best way to learn, but that is by the by. I doubt that learning how to code for Xamarin was the primary goal of the challenge. I’d guess it was more about showing how easily you can build a cross-platform app (Android, iOS and Windows UWP) using Xamarin, C# and Visual Studio 2017.

Well, in fact a little bit of developer expertise was required to complete the challenge, because the step by step instructions did not quite work (in my experience). I did not make a note of all the times I had to do something not in the given steps, but there were many occasions, the main issues being around using the Visual Studio Android emulator, NuGet package management, and a few small tweaks to the code itself. The code as given made no allowance for the cloud services it called being offline, or the connection to the internet not being available, but would simply crash in this case.

The challenge could be an excellent resource for Microsoft and Xamarin if the company drills down into the problems developers experienced trying to complete the challenge, recorded in this forum thread. Here are a few examples:

Myself and 5 other developers in our office attempted the challenge and none of us have been able to get past the first challenge. We are not Microsoft Visual Studio experts so we had hoped following the provided instructions would be sufficient.

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The upload was failing on a discrepancy between 2 different versions of the Json package, which somehow had crept into the project. Installing over 40 updates in Nuget resolved this.

Many thanks for running this challenge –this was very useful and worthwhile. I just wish modern development did not feel like trying to dance on a mile high stack of chairs with a leg missing on the bottommost one!

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I got a late start on the challenge and was able to complete part 1 pretty quickly but was only able to run the UWP locally. I cannot seem to get either the Windows mobile emulator or Android emulators to run successfully. I can’t deploy to the Window Mobile emulator, it returns an error indicating the emulator failed to start. As for the Android emulator, it launches, but the emulator does not have a connection to the network, so the application encounters an exception.

Note that those posting to the forum were more likely to be the ones with problems; there could in theory be many others who breezed through without any issues. But as one participant writes, “I’d be interested in what percentage of participants actually got to the end of the challenge with no problems.”

I like Xamarin; it does an amazing job in enabling cross-platform development with C# and it would be my tool of choice for cross-platform mobile development. It is not always straightforward though, and the kinds of issues experienced by the challenge participants illustrate what can go wrong.

If you just use the native toolkits, such as Android Studio and Xcode, you will have a smoother experience, but of course miss out on the productivity benefit of cross-platform code. That is the trade-off you make.

development, microsoft

Microsoft sets Visual Studio LightSwitch to off

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Microsoft has officially announced the end of development of LightSwitch, a rapid application builder for desktop and mobile applications.

LightSwitch was introduced in July 2011 as a tool to build multi-tier applications using a data-first approach. You can design you database using an excellent visual designer, design screens for viewing and editing the data using a non-visual designer, and generate applications with the server-side code hosted either on your own server or on Microsoft Azure. The client application in the original LightSwitch was based on Silverlight, but this was later extended with an option for HTML. You can get a feel for the general approach from my early hands-on here.

As I noted at the time, LightSwitch abstracts a number of difficult tasks. This is a good thing, though as with any application generated you had to take time to learn its quirks. That said, it is more usable than most model-driven development tools, in my experience.

LightSwitch had some bad luck. It was conceived at a time when Silverlight looked like the future of Microsoft’s client development platform, but by the time it launched Silverlight was heading for obsolescence. It also fell victim to ideologies within Microsoft (which persist today) that chase the dream of code-free application development that anyone can do. The documentation for LightSwitch on launch was dreadful, a series of how-tos that neglected to explain how the tool worked. You had to get the software development kit, aimed at those building LightSwitch components, to have any hope of understanding the tool.

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The abandonment of LightSwitch is not a surprise. Microsoft had stopped talking about it and adoption was poor. There will be no tooling for it in the next Visual Studio, though you can keep using it for a while if you want.

I think it is a shame since it is a promising tool and I cannot help thinking that with more intelligent positioning and a few tweaks to the product and its documentation it could have been a success. Those who did get to grips with it found it very good.

What is unfortunate is that Microsoft has lost the faith of many developers thanks to the many shifts in its development strategy. I know component vendors have also been caught out by the Silverlight and then LightSwitch debacle. Here is one of the comments on the announcement:

Microsoft keeps doing this over and over, we invest months even years to master a technology, just to find out it’s being phased out prematurely. Perfectly good, one-of-a-kind niche tools too. So much investment on both sides (both MS and customers) down the drain. What’s worse, it is done is a non-transparent, dishonest manner, letting things dry up over a couple years so that when the announcement comes, no-one really cares any more, no more noise – just look at this blog.

This makes it hard for the company to convince developers that its new strategies de jour have a longer life ahead of them. I am thinking of the UWP (Universal Windows Platform), which has already changed substantially since its first conception, and of PowerApps, the supposed replacement for LightSwitch, and yet another attempt to promote code-free development.

Developers do not want code-free development. They like tools that do stuff for them, if they are intuitive and transparent, but they also like an easy route to adding and modifying code in order to have the application work the way they want.

microsoft, visual studio, windows

Microsoft completes Visual Studio 2015

Microsoft has completed Visual Studio 2015, the latest version of its all-encompassing development tool. You can download it here. Today is also the release day for TypeScript 1.5 (a language which compiles to JavaScript)

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Windows 10 is released in just 9 days, so all eyes will be on this and its new/old app platform – the Universal Windows Platform, based on the Windows Runtime, as found in Windows 8, but considerably revised so that developers can in theory write one app and run it on any Windows 10 device, from PC to tablet to phone to Xbox to HoloLens, and sell or distribute it from a unified Windows Store.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently confirmed that the Windows Store is a key part of the Windows 10 strategy:

Why then make all these changes to the Start Menu with Windows 10? It’s not because I just want to bring back the old. It’s because that’s the best way to improve the liquidity [of] our store. Windows 8 was great except that nobody discovered the store. In Windows 10, the store is right there and done in a tasteful way.

The Store is more visible in Windows 10 than in 8 because in Windows 10 there are no longer two separate environments (Metro and desktop), but only one (desktop). Windows Runtime apps run in desktop windows. This makes the experience a little worse for tablet users, but the advantage is that now desktop users are more likely to interact with the Store, and more likely to use the apps they install, since they run in a familiar environment.

Another key change is “Project Centennial”, which I wrote up for the Register here. This lets developers package desktop apps for delivery from the Store, using app virtualisation (based on an Enterprise product called App-V). If Microsoft gets this right, Project Centennial will be the preferred way to deliver most desktop apps, since it is both easier and safer for the user.

If the Store does take off (and if it does not, Windows 10 will in part have failed), then Visual Studio will be the key tool for created or repackaging apps for Windows.

Windows 10 is important, but so too is Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. Visual Studio has a key role here, too. Microsoft has an entire stack, including Windows as both operating system and development environment, Visual Studio for coding and testing, and Azure for hosting cloud applications. Since the early days of Azure, the development experience has improved, so that with a modest understanding of the ASP.NET MVC framework you can go from an idea to a working demo, hosted on Azure, that you can show customers, in a short space of time.

There is also a new Cloud Explorer in Visual Studio which lets you view Azure resources from the IDE.

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Mobile is Microsoft’s weak point, but the the company has made efforts to support Android and iOS both through mobile service back-ends hosted on Azure, and by supporting various approaches to building cross-platform apps. Visual Studio 2015 includes Xamarin project types, though out of the box these just tell you to go and install Xamarin, which lets you build Android and iOS apps with C#, subject to a separate Xamarin subscription.

Another option is to use Microsoft’s new iOS tools to code in Visual Studio while targeting Apple’s mobile platform, though this does require a Mac running a remote agent.

There is also Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova, where you code in JavaScript and wrap the results as native apps for both Windows and mobile platforms.

Visual Studio comes with an Android emulator, based on Hyper-V, for debugging either Xamarin or Cordova apps. Xamarin also offers its own emulator and I am not sure how these compare.

In addition to the above, Visual Studio 2015 introduces C# 6.0, Visual Basic 12, the Roslyn compiler platform which enables new IDE features, and .NET Core which is an open source, cross-platform fork of the .NET Framework. Thanks to .NET Core, the latest version of ASP.NET runs on Mac and Linux as well as Windows.

Despite Microsoft’s new cross-platform focus, Visual Studio itself runs only on Windows. In a world of Mac-wielding developers that is a problem, so the company has come up with Visual Studio code, an editor with some IDE features that runs on Window, Mac and Linux. Other options for non-Windows developers are to run Windows in an emulator such as Parallels, or on a virtual machine hosted in the code (Azure has suitable pre-baked images with Visual Studio), or to use third-party tools.

Visual Studio is a critical product then, but is it really done? Although you can download the final product today, many parts are not available (Project Centennial) or still in beta (ASP.NET 5 is beta 5). This is a milestone though, and credit to the team for bringing it out in advance of Windows 10 (I recall some Windows releases where Visual Studio was still in preview on release day).

.net, development, microsoft, software development

Supporting developers: how could Microsoft improve?

3 Comments

Microsoft invests substantial resources in supporting developers; yet the last two topics I have explored in earnest – the Azure blob storage service, and ASP.NET MVC with Azure Active Directory integration – have been frustrating and difficult. Admittedly I am only an occasional developer, but I suspect my experience is common. What is going wrong, and how could Microsoft improve?

Among the problems I have encountered:

  • Abundant documentation of simple first steps with a vacuum for anything more advanced
  • Samples that do not run without tweaking
  • Samples designed for old versions of Visual Studio
  • Samples which use obsolete or deprecated libraries
  • Samples which are poor solutions for the problem they are supposed to address
  • Documentation or samples which use preview, beta or even alpha libraries. Microsoft sometimes seems to make more effort documenting what is in preview than what is fully released.
  • Posts on a topic which are out of date, but for which it is hard to find something current
  • Circular links – click here for more information – you get another article which links back to the first one, perhaps with an intermediate step
  • Poor quality responses to questions on official Microsoft forums

On the positive side, the reference documentation is not too bad. StackOverflow is a great resource and seems to attract higher quality responses (even sometimes from Microsoft staff) than the company’s own forums.

Here then are some of the improvements I would like to see:

1. A sharper distinction between what is in preview and what is production-ready. For any given problem, it would be great to find a clear statement of how you should address it for production now, with fully released and supported libraries, and another statement showing how you will be able to address it with the latest and greatest (but perhaps less stable) technology which is in preview.

2. For key teams in Microsoft to maintain sites which offer clearly delineated production and preview sections and which are kept rigorously up to date.

3. More short samples and fewer “this demonstrates everything” samples. Large samples are more difficult to install and study and have more complex dependencies.

4. Posts and their accompanying code inevitably go out of date and I do not favour removing them, which causes more difficulties than it solves (broken links). However it seems to me reasonable for teams to maintain a number of key samples for their product area and keep them up to date.

What am I missing – or am I complaining too much about what is normal in software development? As ever, I welcome your views.