- Move your software forward as often as possible, even if a few customers have to suffer lack of backward compatibility
- Move your software forward as little as possible, even if a few customers have to suffer lack of innovation
I've noticed from my own personal experiences that Apple tends to take the former attitude, whereas Microsoft tends to take the latter attitude. In the end, someone (probably you) is going to get screwed over at some point, it's just a matter of how you want it to happen. As a consumer, I generally like Apple products, so on my personal technology front, I choose the former. As a software developer, I'm forced by business constraints to accept the latter. The specific circumstances that bring me to mention this :
Today I was working with version 4.0 of the .NET framework, the very latest (and supposedly greatest) from Microsoft, along with the very latest version of their Visual Studio (2010) software. I'm also using these with WPF (the Windows Presentation Foundation) to create an application for my employer. For various reasons, I had to go back and refactor some old code, part of which required opening log files for viewing within the application. In order to open a file in WPF, you must use the OpenFileDialog class that comes with the Windows Forms library, which has been around since Windows 2000 (if not earlier, I'm admittedly not as familiar with the lifecycle of this technology as I could be). If you're a developer on the Windows platform, or even just an observant user, you'll have noticed that on the OpenFileDialog there's a Places bar on the left hand side of the dialog that provides common places for storing files, some of which are very general and will require some drilling down into subfolders to find what you actually want. I wanted to be able to add a place to this bar so that users of the application (company employees who work as technicians out on job sites) could have a direct link to the typical directory used to store log files on their machine.
It turns out that adding a folder to the places bar is obscenely difficult, and must be done through registry hacks. My question is this (directed squarely at the developers at Microsoft responsible for writing the GUI controls, specifically these dialogs) : what the hell was going through your head that would make you think that the way you've implemented these dialogs is a good thing ? It's obscenely hard on developers to customize the generalized tools that you've given them, and this in turn makes it hard on users of that software to use the software made by developers bound by these stupid and seemingly arbitrary constraints. I find myself growing increasingly frustrated by stupid decisions of the Microsoft developers that seem obviously poor when you look at them from the perspective of a framework user. These poor decisions are costing me a lot in terms of time I have to spent developing around these decisions and researching alternatives. It's now no wonder to me how other companies can make absurd sums of money off of controls designed as work arounds for the short-sightedness of Microsoft's developers, and frankly, it's quite depressing.
