Programming, windows style
I’m now in the thick of a bunch of win32 programming at my Honeywell part-time job. I don’t mind it that much, but I continue to be amazed that Microsoft’s IDE is still the one used most often. The autocompletion is nice, but that’s about the only good thing about it. I am continually annoyed that the IDE doesn’t know which definition of a function I want to use, and only seems to pop up it’s hints when it decides. Add this to the fact that most win32 libraries aren’t apparently setup in a way so you can put their source in the repository, and I have a lot of admin work which I’m not particularly thrilled to do. 10% programming, 90% random crap. I’m beginning to understand why the average lines of code per day is so low. I can’t really complain that much though, I knew the tools we’d be using when I accepted the job.
Programming, rails style
I have been working with Ruby on Rails lately, mostly to make some new web applications which aren’t released yet. Things which are possibly in the works:
- MoneyDelta - credit card and savings balance tracker - figures out how much money you are making (or losing) each day based on how the interest is actually calculated. In the end it will probably have a little graph and possibly small things you can do in order to avoid interest and how much you would save in the long run.
- DeadSimpleCMS - CMS built mostly for Diana’s use. It lets you specify layouts (not done yet) and content which goes into the layouts. In a very very early stage of development, but it is actually live on a site right now. As the name would imply, the point is to be very simple.
- Gathr - scholarly conference management software. Accepts papers, assigns reviewers based on degrees of connection to avoid conflicts of interest, generally tries to make the whole conference thing easier.
I also have a couple of smaller applications which won’t really go anywhere, and an internal application upgrade from php. I really enjoy building web applications in the Rails framework, and I have honed my skills at Ruby enough that I actually use it for small scripts when I get frustrated with bash. I tend to do my Ruby Coding in TextMate and with Locomotive on the iBook, although I may do some on the Debian machine soon.
Comments 2
You’re being rude to Microsoft’s IDE but is there any Linux IDE that is as powerful as Visual Studio? Don’t you think Anjuta or Codeblocks are still far from this? And please don’t tell me about Kdevelop, as I don’t a KDE IDE but a C++ one. And don’t tell me about vim+make either, I said *IDE*…
Posted 18 Jun 2006 at 5:41 pm ¶I didn’t make any argument that there was a better IDE in Linux, last time I checked, but I remember a few nice IDEs which I used.
For some, vim+make is a better solution, and has most of what you end up using visual studio for. vim7 even has code completion routines which work pretty good and also don’t get in the way. About the only thing missing from vim which would preclude it being an IDE is the debugging tools which are provided.
Eclipse works for non-Java languages, and does a pretty good job at it too. It also lets you decide which automatic code you want generated, which is a plus when you put together a GUI of any kind.
The thing which bugs me the most about Visual Studio’s IDE is that it will give you information, but not tell you where it came from. A couple days ago the compiler was complaining about a undefined constant, but when I hovered over the constant in VS it clearly had the answer - I couldn’t get any more information though.
It just seems like while Visual Studio is trying to bill itself as the one-stop solution to all the world’s programming problems, vim doesn’t try to oversell itself as something it is not. Personally I would like to be able to use a different editor than VS’s inline one, but I don’t have that choice - in *nix I can at least choose my editor and compiler separately.
Posted 18 Jun 2006 at 7:15 pm ¶Post a Comment