[Technical] Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

[Con Zymaris]

In case you haven't seen this:

 (FYI, Chuck Petzold is who we all learnt Windows Programming 101 off, in 
 the 1980s.)

 http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html

Most of the really innovative interactive design stuff found its first 
expressions in the Windows-based versions of Visual Basic, and here’s 
where I started becoming nervous about where Windows programming was 
headed. Not only could you move a button onto your form, and interactively 
position and size it just the way you wanted, but if you clicked on the 
button, Visual Basic would generate an event handler for you and let you 
type in the code. 

This bothered me because Visual Basic was treating a program not as a 
complete coherent document, but as little snippets of code attached to 
visual objects. That’s not what a program is. That’s not what the 
compiler sees. How did one then get a sense of the complete program? It 
baffled me. 

Eventually, the interactive design stuff found its way into development 
with C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes, and there, I truly believe, 
code generation was used to hide a lot of really hairy MFC support that 
nobody wanted to talk about. 

For an author who writes programming books, all this stuff presents a 
quandary. How do you write a programming tutorial? Do you focus on using 
Visual Studio to develop applications? Frankly, I found it very hard to 
write sentences like “Now drag the button object from the tool box to 
your dialog box” and still feel like I was teaching programming. I never 
wrote about C++ and MFC, partially because MFC seemed like a light wrapper 
on the Windows API and barely object oriented at all. I continued to 
revise later editions of Programming Windows under the assumption that its 
readers were programmers like me who preferred to write their own code 
from scratch.

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___________________________________________________________________________
Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au> Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne, Australia 
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