I've spent some time during the past two days developing a C#/.NET application. And the experience has been, mostly, a good one.
The program is perhaps more of a utility that an application. It reads some text data and presents it in a GUI. The data itself represents the changes between two spreadsheets. The 'diffs', if you will.
The one frustrating aspect was the C# language. After working in Perl and Ruby (and even C++), I found C# to be a bit of a straightjacket, due to its strong typing. At multiple points in the code, I had to insert extra lines (or what I consider extra lines) to convert data from one type to another. The only reason I can see is the type checking in the compiler. Yet Perl and Ruby can perform the same operations without the extra code.
Languages are about expression, and I find myself more comfortable with Perl and Ruby. But that's beside the point.
We're using C#/.NET for the GUI portion, and here the language and framework perform well. I was able to create the GUI using standard controls (this is a Windows application, so no Silverlight or ASP magic was needed) and present the data. I spent more time on organizing the data in the program and less time fiddling with the user interface. And that's what I expect of a good framework and IDE.
So I give Microsoft credit. Visual Studio, C#, and .NET made it possible to deliver the goods.
No comments:
Post a Comment