Moving back to .NET

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 22:12:47 UTC, Idan Arye wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 20:41:38 UTC, rumbu wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 19:52:11 UTC, Paolo 
>> Invernizzi wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 18:36:01 UTC, rumbu wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Personally, I don't know any Windows developer masochistic 
>>>> enough to use the command line when an IDE is available for 
>>>> the task described above.
>>>
>>> Nice to meet you, rumbu!
>>> Now you know one!
>>>
>>> ;-P
>>>
>>> ---
>>> Paolo
>>
>> Nice to meet you too, Paolo. Browsing through your posts, I 
>> saw that you are using "mainly Mono-D" :) Don't tell me that 
>> you are coloring the keywords in your code using a marker.
>
> "Not using an IDE" does not mean "programming with cat" - most 
> text editors have syntax highlighting...
>
> Anyways, I've also used to be one of these Windows developers 
> masochistic enough to use the command line. I've used it back 
> when I was programming in C#, which means I had to write 
> .csproj files by hand(deep down they resemble Ant, but Visual 
> Studio seems to be writing all sorts of crap in there) and 
> build the projects from the command line using MSBuild, but it 
> was worth it because it means I could build seamlessly from 
> Vim, and I could write deployment scripts that run on the 
> server.
>
> That being said - when I said "used to be" it's not because I'm 
> no longer a "masochist", but because I'm no longer a Windows 
> developer(so yes, I'm no longer a masochist...) - so you can 
> say I was already in the Linux developer mindset and it's no 
> surprise I preferred the command line. Even back then, I was 
> disturbed by the fact that so many programmers feel 
> uncomfortable with the idea of typing textual commands to make 
> computers do things...

I, for one, was very excited when I found out that you could 
actually run VS builds from the command line rather than having 
to open up VS. And at my last job, I redid our build stuff so 
that we used cmake to generate the build stuff for both Linux and 
Windows so that we didn't have two build systems to maintain, and 
with that, the _only_ reason that I ever had to open up VS was to 
debug on Windows. It was great.

Unfortunately, at my current job, we're entirely Windows, so 
everything's a huge mess in VS rather than using cmake, and most 
of the devs are totally Windows devs, so they'd probably freak 
out at the idea that the .vcproj files are generated, and you 
don't edit any settings inside of VS. So, there's no way that I'm 
going to get the beauty of cmake again here. I'm forced to open 
up VS more - and we're using the muck that is TFS, which pretty 
much requires opening up VS to manage source control (though the 
TFS power tools help). So, unfortunately, I end up having VS open 
almost all the time now, even if I almost never use it for 
editing. Windows _really_ isn't for me, but when it's what's used 
at your job, you don't have much choice...

I do kind of wonder though what MS would do if the majority of 
Windows programmers really got a taste of how great the command 
line is and started complaining to MS en masse about how MS needs 
to have a proper command line - preferably even port over 
something like bash or zsh with all of the fantastic tools that 
come with that. I don't see any reason why they couldn't do that, 
but they're completely focused on GUIs and doing their own thing.

- Jonathan M Davis