Charles Petzold on coding

Charles Petzold recently delivered a talk at the NYC .Net Developer’s Group and he’s made it available online here “Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?”.

It’s an interesting read, especially if you actually remember writing early Windows GUI applications and building your dialogs in your resource files by hand. I agree with his view that many of the features of Visual Studio are there simply to help us write code faster and that this doesn’t, necessarily, result in us writing code better or in code that is clear of fluff and easy to maintain. I commented recently (on a post that I can’t find, on a blog that I can’t remember) about how application design can be twisted to make it easier for “wizards” to generate the code for you and how this isn’t always a good thing… The OLE DB and MFC Wizards were particularly bad in this respect. Still, from what Charles says it seems that XAML and Avalon may start to move things back in the “right” direction…

Via Chris Sells.