Recently I have abandoned my plans of switching to MacOSX as my primary Operating System after using the the OS for four months straight without touching Windows. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the ride – a lot! But I also had plenty of reasons for going back to Windows (7). First of all I don’t like Apple’s attitude. I think they are turning into some kind of evil empire against which even Microsoft during its darkest days pales in comparison. I also regard Apple’s sloppy handling of serious security vulnerabilities as highly unprofessional. Then there were details that many users wouldn’t even notice. For example I’m obsessed with ClearType and could never become really comfortable with Apple’s Font Anti Aliasing which is still a lot better than Ubuntu’s though.
Anyway I decided to ditch the OS but I’m keeping the hardware – my keyboard to be precise. After typing on this fantastic keyboard for a couple of months there is no way going back to that cheap plastic crap that you usually deal with on the PC. What’s really odd is that there are peripherals vendors who are charging more for their plastic toys that do not even feature a built-in USB Hub than Apple for their anodized aluminum enclosure that offers a rock solid typing experience and even includes a USB Hub. In conjunction with an utility called SharpKeys which I use for swapping Cmd with Alt, this fine piece of craftsmanship can used pretty comfortable under windows.
This is one of the very rare occasions where Microsoft actually did something cool. A couple days ago I needed to test one of my web apps with Internet Explorer 8 and just for giggles with IE6 – although we’ve dropped support for that dinosaur a while ago. Remembering my previous experience with IE8 and my inability to go back to 7 all too well – yes don’t laugh at me, I should have known better I know – I was preparing to fire up VMWare and create two XP Images, one for each browser version. But imagine my surprise when I discovered that Microsoft actually offers pre-configured ready to launch Windows XP VirtualPC Images for every possible IE version for free.
Be advised that these images expire in a couple of months but Microsoft seems to make new images available shortly before the old ones expire.
Here’s the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7c2b5317-a40f-4e86-8835-d37170c5923e&displaylang=en
Sometimes I can’t help but getting nostalgic when I think about the old days when Microsoft Visual Studio was the benchmark for Integrated Development Environments. Back then when I used Visual C++ 2.0 the first time, I immediately fell in love with it. The IDE ran under Windows NT (I refused to use Windows 3.1 and 95 for anything productive), had an excellent editor and kick-ass debugger, was fast, and just did what it was supposed to do without getting in my way. The following releases improved on that foundation and introduced features such as IntelliSense, incremental Compilation and minimal Rebuild. Everything was good in Developer Land.
Unfortunately, all of that ended with the release of Visual Studio .Net 2002. This was the first release which introduced support for the .Net Framework in the IDE. Don’t get me wrong. I still regard the .Net Framework as one of Microsoft’s better products, but this post is about Visual Studio and the impact the framework plus other contributing factors had on the quality of IDE. Visual Studio .Net 2002 took approximately two hours to install on my relatively powerful workstation. After that, when I was allowed to launch the IDE, the greatly increased startup time was immediately noticeable. But hey that’s the price you got to pay for all those shiny new features right?
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