The Pain of Silverlight

I'm starting to write the Stocks application with Silverlight. I installed Visual Studio Orcas. That took forever. I installed the Silverlight extension to VS and the Silverlight 1.1 runtime. That was a lot to install! But that's the hard part, right? Microsoft development tools are great, right?

Uhh, no. Creating a Silverlight project was easy enough. I was surprised to see that VS did not provide any kind of visual designer for Silverlight. It was basically just an XML text editor for creating XAML. I was able to quickly throw together Hello World. I hit the Run/Debug button, and hit my first problem. VS had a problem passing the URL for my Hello World page to Firefox (the default browser on my system.) So I changed my default browser to IE, and tried again. Hey that worked.

I played around with the IntelliSense in the Silverlight/XAML editor. I only saw graphical options. No form elements. I needed a way for a user to input a Stock symbol for my Stock app! So what to do?

There is a visual designer for Silverlight, Expression Blend. So I downloaded that (yet another download) and cranked it up. I created Silverlight project in it. I looked for a text input box in the palette, but didn't see anything I consulted the Help. It indicated that there should be something in the palette for this:


Further exploring Help reinforced this:



The icon I see there sure looks like the Icon in the first screen, near the blue circled 4. But when I use Expression, I only get the TextBlock option. That's also the only option I got when I used IntelliSense in Visual Studio. I'm getting the impression that Silverlight does not currently support any kind of text input!

It appears that I am not alone in this frustration. Luckily that led me to some text controls that somebody else made...

XCode

I've been doing some development on the Mac lately. The tool that I've been most interested in is Dashcode, but I've also been using the seminal Mac development app, XCode. I thought it would be interesting to compare it to a couple of other multi-purpose IDEs: Visual Studio and Eclipse.

In some ways it's kind of ironic, but probably the thing that jumps out the most in such a comparison is that VS and Eclipse both have a lot more eye candy. They are more visually appealing programs, at least in my opinion. XCode is a little more stripped down, and not just in the eye candy department.

A popular feature in IDEs is code completion, popularized by VS's IntelliSense. I don't know if VS was the first IDE to have this, I just know it made it popular. I actually think Eclipse does this better than VS these days. XCode has this feature, too, but it is turned off by default. There is something appealing about that to me. Code completion can make developers lazy, and some would argue that it decreases your programming skill. It's hard to argue that it doesn't make you more productive, though. XCode should make better use of it and turn it on by default.

XCode is very good for running and debugging. I was impressed that it gave me an error code in a program that didn't clean itself up properly. Of course that error message was very cryptic, and was just a warning. Only after I fixed the problem did I realize that the weird warning was because I had left some garbage on the heap in the program.

All of this made me think, I wonder if there is an Eclipse plugin that's designed to enable Mac development? The answer is no, and for a good reason. Eclipse is a little clunky on the Mac because SWT is implemented in Carbon, not Cocoa. Most of those super-slick Mac apps out there use Cocoa. SWT binds the native UI elements on whatever system it is running on, so it could use Cocoa or Carbon on the Mac. The SWT developers chose Carbon. They had some very good reasons for doing so, but the end result is Eclipse is a little clunky. It's hard to convince somebody who wants to build a slick looking Cocoa app to use Eclipse.

Anyways, XCode holds up pretty good, though it definitely seems like a notch below VS and Eclipse. Let's face it, appealing to developers has never been Apple's strong suit. Dashcode is kind of promising, though widget development is definitely a niche at this point.

Python

I decided to go ahead and do Python versions of the programming assignments. I updated the ATM and Text Manipulation assignments to include Python versions. This is my first programming with Python. It seems pretty clean so far. Obviously it is similar to Ruby. It seems a little more procedural (lots of standard functions like ord(), len(), str()) whereas Ruby tries very hard to be object oriented. I think it is possible to be more OO with Python and more procedural with Ruby, but I'm not good enough at either to do so!

Python includes it's own IDE, IDLE. It seems pretty nice. I'm not sure how well it would work on a large project with many Python scripts/classes. I've been using Eclipse for Java and Ruby, and using Visual Studio for C# and C++. For easy things like these assignments, Eclipse is definitely the biggest pain to use...