App Config

Here is the first of the promised rants. Microsoft really want you to believe their stuff is easy to use. I suppose this line is directed at Corporate Managers who believe that if they buy lots of Microsoft products, their programmers will produce twice as many features in half the time. And snake oil cures cancer.

And it's true: their stuff is easy to use. But it is not easy to learn to use. That's because it is complex and convoluted and poorly documented. After all, why should Microsoft spend money that Bill Gates could be giving to charity documenting their products? Let Microsoft Press and Wrox Press and Apress and Addison Wesley and O'Reilly make some money, too.

Take, for example, app configuration. This is a fairly complex subject that a programmer would have to spend many hours understanding before he could write code to use it. So Microsoft gave us the settings designer in VS2005. With the settings designer, a programmer can add an application setting to a project without writing a line of code or understanding how the forms designer interacts with the settings. But let him try to do anything that is not an example straight out of the documentation, and bad, scary things can happen. And without understanding all that stuff he didn't study, he is going to spend a bunch of time fixing the mess it put him in. In fact, he could spend more time recovering than he would have spent learning how it worked in the first place.

If you want a worked-out example, visit my web site, wblum.org, and take a look.