May, 2008

For twenty years, the technology industry has been enthusiastically preaching the message "computers are easy" to the unsuspecting public - people who have, unsurprisingly, believed the myth is true.

The myth of easy computing is very alluring - perhaps this is why we have, as an industry, fallen for it so thoroughly. Unfortunately, it's a myth that has caused a great deal of pain and cost a vast amount in terms of lost productivity and lost information.

This week, I've been doing some maintenance work on a Delphi application. So I'm spending a lot of time back in the Delphi IDE - a place that used to be the centre of my comfort zone.

A few years ago, while making the transition from Delphi to .NET, I was pretty vocal about the "sharp corners" I found in Visual Studio - things that were oh-so-simple in Delphi that were hard work in Visual Studio.

Barring a few unusual individuals, all of us are very good at remembering moments of pain. For the most part, these memories serve us well, helping us to avoid danger and make good judgements. Sometimes, though, remembered pain can blind us to changed circumstances.

I've been working for a couple of weeks on a somewhat lengthy post summarising my experiences with Windows Vista, but Ed Bott has beaten me to the punch with a very well written post.

My experience with Vista hasn't been totally smooth - but the problems have been relatively minor.

User Access Control pops up only occasionally - when installing new software or when an existing product self upgrades. I don't use any applications that misbehave and provoke a UAC storm (*).