29 Jan 09 Visual Studio is a Pretender!
Can I just rant at you for a minute, gentle reader?
The editor in Visual Studio is from the stone ages. Really – it’s retarded (I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense – it really is retarded).
Sure, it does syntax highlighting, but really….so do the little code-paste tools like pastebin, and those little tools highlight for dozens of languages, so color me unimpressed.
Intellisense? Yup – very nifty, very advanced – oh, wait! Lisp environments have been doing “intellisense” for years decades.
What else….let’s see….feature or failure?
| Visual Studio characteristic | Feature/Failure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| consistency of indentation | FAIL | ever tried to use another editor to open files authored in Visual Studio? |
| efficient keyboard shortcuts | FAIL | the most often used shortcuts (navigation in text, for example) require me to move my hand off the home row |
| automatic indentation | FAIL | Are you kidding? Only if you happen to be typing in a magical combination of keystrokes that Microsoft decided was the one true way to type will auto-indentation be convenient. |
These are just some very basic, fundamental things, and this list could go on – indeed, I might come back and add to it as I become more proficient with Visual Studio. As an experienced Emacs user, it’s quite painful. I tried to use the Emacs keyboard mode, but it was even more maddening than the other modes – they get the keystrokes wrong, and even when they get them right, they don’t work correctly! C-k is supposed to kill a line, but you have to type ‘k’ twice for the kill to happen, and if you try to yank it back in using C-y, you get the killed line twice! M-q doesn’t work, you don’t get registers, typing on top of a highlighted region doesn’t replace, it appends, and ‘C-x b’ doesn’t switch tabs in the editor.
For all the wonders of a modern IDE, can we just please, please have an editor that’s advanced past 1985?
Tags: programming, visual studio
13 Jan 09 Crack in the ‘Golden Spike’
I love the description Marty Manly uses over at ‘Jam Side Down’:
So you have Google with all the software needed to replace Outlook in every respect except syncing contact and calendars to an iPhone or a Blackberry and you have Apple with a great device and an opportunity to wean thousands of small and mid size companies off of Exchange offering an inadequate alternative to Exchange. Neither company has built a solution for real users. It’s as if the railroads had decided to end their tracks about a 100 yards from each other rather than meeting at Promontory Point and driving the golden spike. Dumb.
He’s soooooo right. Why can’t Apple support all the Google APIs that correspond to the functionality in Exchange server? It’s all there and free to build against, and for a small business, Google Apps + iPhone (with Google support) would be absolutely killer. I switched from a Blackberry (Pearl) to the iPhone 3G, and I’ll never look back, but having calendar, contacts, and mail all synced to my phone is just huge.
However…
I just got bombed in the way Marty says isn’t possible: Nuevasync stopped working correctly for me. It fails to synchronize my contacts, reporting that my google account has corrupt data. They advised me to export all my contacts, delete them, and re-import them. I followed the instructions and didn’t read the fine print: Google contact export doesn’t retain grouping metadata, so if you do what I did and just export ‘All Contacts’, you lose group metadata. Losing track of your groups is bad enough, but also: all your ‘Suggested Contacts’ also become ungrouped, so I had 500+ contacts, more than half of which were junk.
Anyway, after I re-imported my 500+ contact list (with no groups), Nuevasync still doesn’t work. I emailed their support address, and I got a form reply (which is typical, no problem there), but after several days, I didn’t get any further response from a staff member, so I emailed back again, and I still have yet to hear from them. In the meantime, I have zero contact data on my phone because all my contacts were previously synchronized (which was fabulous!).
I really just don’t know what to do at this point. I don’t want to switch to GooSync because a) it isn’t free, and b) there’s no way to try before you buy, and it looks like you have to download a special iPhone app for syncing. Does that integrate well with the Apple Contacts and Calendar apps? It doesn’t look like it from what I can tell, but….I can’t really tell unless I fork over $15 for the iPhone app and £20 for the SyncML service.
I really just want Nuevasync to help me, because their service worked like a charm up until this point.
Update: Through a comment on their blog, David indicated that there will be some kind of support in the status pages to help pinpoint exactly what data isn’t parsing correctly in the sync.
