Microsoft Lightswitch: giving people who know nothing about writing software...

[Darren Dirt]

...the tools to write software!

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/03/visual-studio-lightswitch-grows-to-support-cloud-plugins.ars?comments=1#comments-bar

(one comment ^ said what I put in this thead title) (and another mentioned/compared it to http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/ -- which apparently has a goal of letting non-webgurus develop websites even more easily.)


(But does "more easily build" mean "can more easily do damage that will be even that much more difficult to fix by the professional when they finally, inevitably, get called in?)

(I'm done with the brackets.) (my apologies.)

[Mr. Analog]

Whoa not sure how I missed this!

But yeah, MS tries to upsell to people who aren't developers for a very good reason: dumb people buy things. Especially if those things sound easy.

It's why IBM sells licenses for some of their truly heinous crap. Dummies at the top of organizations will buy that @%&# (the same way people buy Sony products i guess?)

I've been on the receiving end of a lot of tools that should be easy but often break and/or do not function as advertised. These get forgotten quickly. Developer created/supported projects are much more memorable because not only do they WORK but they do it in ways that can sometimes surprise and delight.

Sadly to get a good tool like this requires either a lot of hands on testing or deep, godlike insight, something you just aren't going to get from Microsoft (well, on average).

[Thorin]

I 100% concur with your comment on IBM.  Man, there were years spent trying to use the IBM licenses, eh?

I also concur with your point about tools that break or don't function as advertised, but I'll add in that many of the tools coming from Microsoft try to do everything and because of that are overloaded with features that most people don't use.  Be it developer tools or Microsoft Word.

As for finding tools that delight, the trick is to have someone looking for new tools and when they find a good one, forget about who made it ("Is it Microsoft?  No?  Then we won't use it").

[Mr. Analog]

That's the key right there. The tool has to fit the job not the other way around, often tools become overcomplicated and less specialized. Case in point TFS, it's not exactly a code repository, it's not exactly for project planning/tracking, it's not exactly an automated build server, it's not exactly a test suite AND YET it is supposed to be all these things.

The idea behind TFS (going way back now) was a good one, take all these big tools and link them together, but instead of building the workbench to make specialized tools work with each other what we got was one big clumsy tool that only kinda-sorta does a little of each.

It's like having a Swiss Army Knife with a chopstick on each end, sure you have the same number utensils for dinner, but brotha, you ain't gonna be eating no rice tonight. (sorry, I'm hungry)