Just for kicks I decided to try out
Borland C#Builder 1.0 - boy was that a mistake! I see why these guys are
giving up on their dev tools. Funny, I used to like turbo pascal and turbo C++
in college. Today's whole experience was a mess from the start, so I decided to
send them an email expressing my frustration. First, I had to go through a long
series of questions online before I could install an
evaluation version. It wouldn't have been so bad, but almost everything was
a required field and submitting each one of those slow CGI pages made me want to
break something. Finally, I was able to get to a download page. HINT TO SOFTWARE
COMPANIES: Make it easy to download a trial version of your product!
After downloading this heap, the installation process ended up being multiple
installations, not like installing Visual Studio where you just "click next"
(I'm actually uninstalling Janeva and ComponentOne Studio right now). It also
wanted the JRE to be installed for God-knows-what. Then came the fun part -
getting the program to run. It turns out they send you an email to activate the
product, so I wrestled with that for a few minutes and then got it up and
running. I decided to create a simple Web application. Finding a toolbar with
ASPX controls was counter-intuitive, and then this happened...
That would have been a deal breaker, but then I started typing in code in the
IDE. Their intellisense was trying to help me and kept overwriting what I was
trying to write! I
complain loudly about how slow Visual Studio intellisense is, but I'd rather
deal with that than the IDE automatically placing junk in the middle of what I'm
trying to type. Needless to say, I'm not impressed at all. Hopefully
SharpDevelop comes up with better ASP.NET tools. Certainly their WinForms
kicks ass all over Borland's C#Builder. Yuck - I have nothing further to add.
