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Mike Marynowski wrote: The part of the system that staff use to take payments from people on the floor via iPods is a mobile web app, because that's where it made sense to use one. Can we do the rest with a node.js + website system? Yes, but it would be bloody mess and it would be significantly more complicated. And the performance of the animations would be crap.
Oh, you're preaching to the choir on that one. As much as I like node, I don't drink the kool-aid thinking it does everything including make toast. But I am glad it exists.
Mike Marynowski wrote: My point is...HTML/JS apps are not a proper substitute for native development yet, and likely won't be for a while. I like the web, but it is unsuitable for the stuff I do. Hence the painful part.
Well sure, but my point was in the context of the web.
Jeremy Falcon
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Well of course in the context of the web a website will be better, haha. I don't disagree, and we have many websites and web apps as part of our projects where it makes sense.
If you need to go native though, XAML is really in a league of its own for building interfaces as of right now.
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If I remember correctly I think VS2013 really brought some really nice speed improvements. I have yet to experience a bad slowdown in XAML editing in VS2015.
I do remember VS2012 getting a bit sluggish at times but then again I probably wouldn't have used XAML for a large medical application in 2012. Back then the only thing I used it for was full custom interfaces like touch screen kiosk apps and things of that sort. I would probably have just stuck to WinForms for a medical app.
Today that's definitely not the case though. XAML and the tooling has gotten so good and MVVM is amazing and indispensable at this point.
We actually don't do MVVM here, we have a whole framework we use internally to do what we call MVS, or Model View State, which is kind of a cross between MVC and MVVM. We're considering open sourcing and documenting it with tutorials and such but we are working on getting another surprise ready to release first  But between XAML+MVS and the other project we will release first, we pump out apps 5 times faster than with anything else at the moment. I <3 XAML.
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Gotcha. Whatever the case, I have no need for it anymore since Silverlight is dead and I do web dev, but that's good to know.
Jeremy Falcon
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MVS? Surprise, surprise  We actually developed a kind of what you called MVS system for our HTML/CSS/Javascript (hybrid) applications ...
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Yeah I could see that, HTML/JS would definitely be a good candidate for doing something similar! It would fit perfectly with the templating and binding frameworks available and the structure of web projects.
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Mike Marynowski wrote: XAML is also expressive enough that I rarely use the editor directly anyway
What, you mean you can modify the top (editor) screen, I thought it was there for display only. Oh wait I have been known to click on an object and delete it, thai is the extent of editing done in the top screen.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Yes, definitely agreed. Sometimes I use the slider to change margins or the color wheel because it is nice to finely tweak the value over a smooth range. I also like the scaffolding for creating a copy of a template or style, but then I hand delete 90% of the bloat and just keep what I need.
Animations in Blend for Visual Studio is just about the only thing the editor is used extensively when we have an animation heavy component to the app. It's actually pretty fantastic in terms of how easy it is to make great animations but the markup it produces is god awful, so we tuck away animated stuff into its own controls and only edit it with Blend.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: I couldn't stand editing XAML. The editor was slooooooooooooooow. Did I mention slow?
OMG! Someone actually use the editor?! 
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Yes. 
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: I couldn't stand editing XAML.
I've recently been writing one app natively on all platforms.
I wrote it as a winform. Then i converted it to Android. That was very easy.
Next, I decided to write it as a UWP Universal Windows Platform app. Pain. Agony. XAML.
Now, I'm writing it as an iPhone app.
Anyways, the other painful thing about the UWP XAML thing is that you literally "type your user interface" and all the editing takes up tons of space vertically on the screen. it's such a pain.
And slow.
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Converting an app from Winforms would be a lot of work because MVVM/XAML is a completely different paradigm. It's only really suitable for a new development written ground up the way you have to write MVVM/XAML apps. It also has a huge learning curve, much like HTML/CSS - I hated it at first too, and it takes a long time before you get comfortable enough with it to write code that you can look at and say "ah, what a work of beauty"...but when you get there, it becomes indispensable and you never want to go back to procedural UI layout.
I have a fairly old box by today's standards and I have yet to experience slowness on VS2015. What are you using?? I also have resharper going and that takes up a whole lot of system resources on its own and still no problems.
I never understood developers that would hold out upgrading memory or to an SSD to be able to use more powerful tools. Whats $300 or $400 extra to save you hours and hours of building an app?
XAML tools used to be a bit slow but since VS2013 service pack something, I haven't had any such issues.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: Did I mention slow?
No, but you forgot to mention 'dumb and buggy'. It makes a lot of assumptions about what you would use XAML for and quickly stops working when something is not as it expects.
It easily took the first place as my 'favorite' Mickeysoft bugware. Previously it was the ASP.Net webform editor, which at least never became completely useless.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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I don't know what you mean by "it makes a lot of assumptions" - can you explain?
The editor used to be horribly buggy. That hasn't been the case for a very long time now though, perhaps it would be worth re-evaluating
A lot of what I said is also dependent on the kind of development you do. The apps we build now have DPI-independent full custom designs. Whatever a designer can design in Illustrator we need to be able to translate easily into an interface, and XAML makes it sooooo easy.
If you are building more standard apps then the learning curve might not be worth making the transition, but I will say that once you get over the learning curve you never want to use anything else again.
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Been through the same thing, though it was a Mac, exploring iOS and then a Linux project for me.
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Bugger mobile, I shy away from entering the web stack let alone the non MS mobile arena.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I switched from MFC/C++ and C# to iOS and never want to go back. This crappy resource editing and bloated XAML is pain in the ass. The class library from Apple are simple and they work. No fizzling around some messie bugs and annoying errors.
It is hard to start, but when know enough you write mean and clean code. And it works on all systems, no big and bloaty setups with errors. 
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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To each their own I guess. I don't think XAML is bloated if written properly, and I'm extremely anal about XAML being written cleanly. We write XAML by hand, not using the editor. Anytime XAML seems bloated we refactor or find a way to reduce the clutter and keep it clean. This is just one example:
[Code Index] | Getting Rid of Ugly TransformGroup Blocks in WPF[^]
Resources are great - they are like CSS styles for controls. If you use the editor then yeah it's a bad experience and you will get TONS of bloat. The editor should be there for only 3 things - scaffolding a template or a style for you that you then hand modify and place where you actually need, having a live view of the changes you are making in the XAML by hand, or playing with property values like margins or color live so you can tweak them just right by sliding your mouse on a slider or color wheel instead of typing, deleting, typing, deleting, etc.
Do you use IB or code to build your iOS interfaces? I'm assuming code, as most iOS devs quickly drop IB (us included) because of how bad it is.
You lose something special when you build interfaces in code instead of a declarative language with a live updating view. For mobile apps it can be argued that the interfaces are simple enough that it doesn't make much of a difference but I tend to disagree. I would also *strongly* disagree that hand written XAML is bloated compared to the code required to build up an interface.
I wrote interfaces with code 10 years ago and in my opinion it's a huge step backwards. HTML/CSS and XAML are a much better way of representing an interface.
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We just did an evaluation of XCode 8 by updating one of our apps in the last few days and besides a few hiccups that we had to manually fix, it has been soooo much better so far...so a lot of what I said doesn't apply anymore. That was kind of odd timing with my post lol.
Interface builder has become way more usable now, I think I can say I even like it.
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I am a kernel dev, 18 years on windows, 3 on linux, and you are right in one respect:
My list of tools:
1) Windbg on Windows. Extraordinary debugger. More power than you know what to do with. ON linux, kgdb + debugger that came with compiiler. Dont know if Eclipse works as a debugger, and dont know if the problem setting kernel breakpoints was because it was an ARM11 system I was debugging or not. Building unoptimised code in linux has do be done source file at a time with pragmas. No over all 'debug build' of driver.
2) Code editing. VS versus GEdit. Actually I find the two similar. I dont use autocomplete anyway so no big difference here.
3) Code browsing. VS Browse vs CodeQuery. Being able to jump to definitions AND implementations in the linux kernel is of course nice, so its a point to linux here.
So its an even score, but the power of Windbg is extraordinary. I know many linux kernel devs who printk debug. If they ever tried Windbg they would never be happy with such a crude process again.
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Oh yeah, Windbg is great, saved me a few times from tearing my hair out  I've never done kernel dev though so I can't comment on your last point.
Low level development is an entirely different beast than what I've been doing for the last 10 years. I loved doing that kind of work back in the day, but besides some embedded C++ stuff for MQX RTOS, it just isn't the kind of work my clientele is looking for.
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Mike Marynowski wrote: Windbg is great, saved me a few times from tearing my hair out
Yeah, its great for user mode too, an awesome debugger, its the only Microsoft I like and respect.
I like the lov level stuff, I guess being an ex mech-aero engineer I like the fact its more like real engineering, nuts and bolts stuff.
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Went from SQL Server to Oracle. Screams of agony ensued.
Went from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice and later LibreOffice. That didn't go so well.
Went from Visual Studio to Notepad. Actually that worked a lot faster 
Visual Studio is a great tool, but sometimes it does too much and my computer is a few years old.
I'm starting up VS now so I can get to work in five minutes 
The minimum install used to be 6GB, 'nuff said 
If Microsoft does something right it's development tools
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Visual Studio is a bit bloated, but that's part of its beauty in a way. Everything is just there and easy to find. The only other tools I need to do 99% of my dev work are Resharper and XAML Styler.
I'll gladly spend a few hundred bucks on system upgrades to run a more productive environment where everything is just there and easily accessible when I need it, but I can definitely see why that's a turn off for a lot of people.
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Bloated, definitely.
When you have dual quad processors and SSDs and tons of RAM you sort of expect things to go fast.
VS seems to stand for Very Slow.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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