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IDL and ATL/COM will never die! |
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The follow-up of "A PETITION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERFACE DEFINITION LANGUAGE AND THE MIDL.EXE COMPILER"... |
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| So, this petition referred above is a Fools' Day
joke, isn't? Anyway I'm
signing it 'cause this joke looks very well made... On the other hand the way VB6 World is forced to throw-away most of the code base this VB6/VBA World developed for years (Support Classic VB... ) - makes me wonder if this petition joke might come true sometimes in not that far future?... I have just started my attempts to convince my customers to not waste time and money to VB.NET transition because IDL based C++ ATL/COM port of VB6/VBA code looks comparable in efforts to VB6/VBA->VB.NET port and because C++ and "ATL/COM will never die!"(*)... This my "COM will never die" naive(?) thinking and so my current "back to COM" initiative looked to be safe and will save my customers' investments from today's and forever until MS Windows will be alive... How wrong was I! Some folks compare this crazy technology race with the cars' industry innovations - come on folks! The cars "bodies" and engines get naturally corrupted and the price of the cars get amortized and in just several years they become dangerous to drive because of probable damage to the people around and the environment million times outweighs the several thousands of saved bucks one may keep by not purchasing the new car - so comparing cars' industry innovations with what happens on MS Windows platform isn't correct: helping businesses and end-users to save application software purchasing and development investments could and should be the roadmap for serious IT-companies. Doing it the other way like it so often happens on MS Windows platform with the new technologies appearing and growing like mushrooms, quickly getting spoiled and quickly dying substituted by the new "better" ones - this practice is a waste of resources this World could spend on more important things.... I think that MS Windows innovation race is becoming a "mad scientist" game: yes, all the new technologies mainly look and are great because they are a quintessence of more than forty years of IT industry development and because they are designed and developed by brightest people of this industry but under the slogan on lowering TCO and giving the business applications developers the RAD tools to quickly satisfy businesses needs of their customers, under these right slogans and good intentions is hidden "the road to hell" of big losses of the constant rewriting of this "RAD-way created" business applications... So my proposal is to call these RAD tools, we have had to use for the development on MS Windows platform for the last 15+ years, my proposal is to call them from now on HILAD (Huge Implied Losses Application Development) and to rename promised "paradise-land" of lowered TCO as GFCO (Guaranteed Fortune Costs of Ownership)... I wish I was wrong with my worrying about coming soon "IDL death" in MS "Dingo's teeth" and I wish this petition was just a good Fool's Day joke... This is a First of May coming here in Russia and since Soviet times it was a "Day of Solidarity of All the Working People of the World". This was a day when a lot of "deeply satisfied" people were demonstrating on the streets "happily" directed by CPSU (Communistic Party of the Soviet Union) leaders and crying aloud many slogans (this was mainly fun BTW and we liked this demonstrating when were schoolboys or students especially if it was hot outside). So remembering and following this old Soviet tradition I'd add some slogans here in the end of this my petition-signing text (the slogans were put everywhere in hardcopy and they were usually written in yellow characters on a red background - this is why I also use these "crazy" colors here): |
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| IDL and ATL/COM will never die! | ||||
| Stop attributed ATL madness! | ||||
| The place of the flawed RCW is in the history's garbage collector! | ||||
| Delegates are the fetters of the cowboy C++ developers! | ||||
| IDL and ATL/COM are unite forever! | ||||
| "We will, we will rock you!"... :) | ||||
I invite you to send me your own slogans on the subject of this article and if I find they fit existing ones then I'll put them here with the reference to your site as I did put the title of the Queen's Lyrics song... You may ask why Queen lyrics are referred here? Because the madness of the Soviet times and the Queen's lyrics are very tightly bound in my memory with my youth times when here we saw and we heard Soviet slogans on the streets and in the same time we used to listen to the songs of Queen, The Beatles, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin to name a few... The first (Soviet slogans) were false and hypocritical and the latter - the rock'n'roll songs and ballades were fair and giving the hope there is an outer World where the true human values are in favor... The Soviet times are in the past now and they should never return in this country. Queen Lyrics are alive and will never die I think and my kids are listening them as the real classics. We know now what is the fair Outer(Western) world and how it almost constantly keeps "under pressure" the most active its habitants. We know also what is the wild capitalism we have got built here in the past 15 years, which keeps most of the population of this country under the poverty level and the only real opportunity for this current population is a "bycicle race" :( Yes, the Western world is free and fair but we do know now that it favors winners and that it disfavors the losers. Is that fair? Yes, that's fair I think in the case the winners do not suppress and do not exploit the losers but give them the chance to "keep on fighting till the end". A lot of people here born in Soviet times still to learn how to do that if they ever have a chance to take these lessons in a fair competition not under oppression of this state and the "new Russians" - wild capitalists and merchants, many of them are "recolored" ex-communists, which care a little about the people of this country who made and continues making them rich. The "show must go on" as it is going now or this country deserves a better destiny for its population, ordinary people, usually hardworking, hospitable, hothearted and with an open soul ?... Yes, the show must go on. It happened this year that Russian Orthodox Christian Church has Easter today on 1st of May 2005. (For who are unaware the Catholics and Protestant Easter dates are always different from Russian Orthodox Church's Easter date but the usual difference of these dates are about two weeks not more than a month as it happened this year. BTW, that's remarkable that this country's weather usually follows Russian Orthodox Church's dates and when Easter is shifted that far to the end of the spring season then spring comes later here and lasts more and the summer becomes shorter as it happened this year.). I'm not Christian, I'm Muslim by birth. But in Russia's most of the population are Christians and I'm married on a Christian by birth women. (Yep, "Have you heard, I married an angel"?! :)) The Easter eve and Easter here are becoming as "crazy" as they are in Western countries as I saw when I did work in Germany. (By "crazy" I mean the Easter eve shopping crowds "occupying" hypermarkets and smaller shops to get the gifts to their relatives and friends. And all is the same here now (except main religion): similar hypermarkets with similar goods crowded with shopping people... ). And I recall my youth "memoirs" again, with enforced by ruling communist party but being background and false for most of the population of this country soviet apologetics, and with true life and love coming from rock'n'roll lyrics and even some hardrock songs a lot of which had religious motives. That memoirs of the past with the exercises like this one: When I find myself in times of troubles - Take this cup away from me! Imagine there is no countries, Love changes everything, With the new day comes the resolution - To be a rock and not to roll... Hosanna Heysanna Sanna Sanna Ho... Bismillah! We will not let you go... Let it be... I'm sorry for this eclectical quoting of rock'n'rol and hard-rock classics and mixing different religions verses.... I just wanted to show by it (being Muslim by birth and writing this on Russian Orthodox Church Easter day. (Hope God will save me, quoted verses authors will not see in that quotation their copyrights violations and that Russian Orthodox Church believers will take that easy.)) - I wanted to show by this my borrowed and compiled lyrics that despite all the national and religious differences, skin colors, different languages we speak, some of us being true believers and others being atheists - despite of all that countless differences we are sharing this World and we are very much alike: "...let's realize that a change can only come when we stand together as one..." |
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I feel I should close down my writing now: "I'm going slightly mad. And there you have it"... |
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-- Shamil Salakhetdinov (change ' AT ' to commercial at(@) sign) -- |
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Freelance Developer, System
Analyst and Consultant and a casual technical and humor writer from St.Petersburg, Russia |
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| "I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all"... | ||||
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-- (*) The idea of porting my current customers' VB6/VBA code base to ATL/COM and C++ is simple and not original of course and it is hunting the simple and clear purpose to have as much as possible saved source code in this rapidly changing IT-world where only C++ (and of course good old principles of OOP&D) look "chiseled in stone" what COM interfaces promised to be ten years ago but failed to keep their promises. (Failed in the sense of well-known, now mainly in the past, "DLL Hell" problems, and in the sense that COM objects are broadly giving up "buried" under .NET RCW shells. Of course COM is still here and it will be here for a long time, the indirect sign of that is that VS.NET Design Time Environment consists mainly of COM objects, including upcoming VS.NET 2005) So the proposal to the customer was to have as much as possible code in ANSI standard C++, which VS.NET is able to support rather well, to have thin ATL/COM wrappers on top of that code and to have .NET RCW on top of that and/or use managed C++ to communicate with .NET world.. Of course GUI part should be just what it should be - free of any kind of business and even(?) navigation logic - with all that logic kept in standard C++ code classes running in middleware and also kept in the database backend and communicating with GUI controls using (variations of disconnected) Model-View-Controller and other proven software design patterns, under pure COM environments using connection points, DCOM and COM+ and under .NET using events and delegates and .NET remoting. Nothing new here of course but such simple architecture promise to be effective and to serve for a long time all my customers needs with any innovations built on top of that with as little as possible new investments in running solutions and mainly investing only in the new applications software development... Somebody could note that Unix/Linux are also very good in supporting backward compatibility for years and that the Linux world is getting stronger and stronger every day: yes, they are right but all of my customers are from MS Windows world so I have to find the way to preserve their investments in software development as much as possible living in this shaky MS Windows world... |
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Copyright (c) 1998-2005 by Shamil Salakhetdinov.
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| Last updated: May 1, 2005 | ||||