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Well I didn't build it. It was first contracted to an outside company, then outside consultants were brought in to try and get it working. They wanted me to join the team, but after looking at the project, I told them that is was doomed to fail.
I did, however, replace it with a C# program.
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Member 14840496 wrote: It was first contracted to an outside company, then outside consultants were brought in to try and get it working.
It is a very complex product. We had to hire a consultant to come in and train us on how to use it and even then it was not easy.
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Well, in the training class I had, the instructor couldn't explain why some of the labs didn't work. That's a bad indicator right there.
Months later I flew to Tampa because the BizTalk project they were building wasn't working. When we met in the room with the numerous programmers, they had literally printed out the workflow of the project and taped it to the walls. Note, I said 'walls', not wall. It went 1/3 of the first wall (about 6 feet), around the corner down the entire next wall (about 15 feet), and around the corner on the next wall for another 3 feet or so.
It was all I could do not to break into hysterics. All I could think was, are you people serious?
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Member 14840496 wrote: in the training class I had, the instructor couldn't explain why some of the labs didn't work. That's a bad indicator right there.
 
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I concur.
I've been using SSIS for the last ten years -- leaving the easy stuff to my colleagues while I implement the difficult stuff in C# "Script Tasks".
Before that, I was on a contract where they used an in-house "rule-based" system -- with a GUI to define which rules to use in what order, branching, etc. What if I need a new rule? Write it in VB.
It's not much different in SQL Server either -- I write a lot of CLR functions in C# to deal with the hard stuff.
Off-the-shelf tools contend only with low-hanging fruit.
If all you have is low-hanging fruit, then an off-the-shelf tool may be sufficient.
But no enterprise of significant complexity has only low-hanging fruit, so highly-skilled developers will still be required. But by all means let the highly-skilled developers concentrate on the difficult tasks while low-skilled developers work on the easy tasks in an off-the-shelf tool.
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Your statement "What if I need a new rule?" is precisely the problem, and it happens all the time.
How do you write a new rule with a black box? Users are very rarely satisfied with the status quo.
I wish I had a dollar for all the times I heard "Can we add this?", "Can we change that?". In the real business world, it never ends.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: I write a lot of CLR functions in C#
Crikey in all my years of writing TSQL I never had to resort to the CLR, I guess I was only doing the simple stuff.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: PIEBALDconsult wrote: I write a lot of CLR functions in C#
Crikey in all my years of writing TSQL I never had to resort to the CLR, I guess I was only doing the simple stuff.
My thought exactly.
I've been writing SQL for over 30 years and TSQL for nearly 20 and, although I've played with some functions in CLR, I've never found a need for it in production code.
I suppose the over 600,000 lines of SQL under version control in the main project at work is also all simple stuff! 
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Member 14840496 wrote: All this relates the infamous 'black-box' approach using some of Billy-Bob's code that is supposed to work. But what happens when you find it not working? Google to see if Handy-Andy's code will work?
Get thee to QA, and you will see both that in action, and the other solution: when Billy-Bob's YouTube tutorial code doesn't work, try to get CP or SO to fix it so you can call it your own work ... 
To a large extent, I blame governments and Apple: the former for assuming anyone can code so making it compulsorily for students, and the later for making said students assume they are computing geniuses for being able to get to Google and FaceBook ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: being able to get to Google
Not a skill you see being used much by the QA script kiddies.
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I'm assuming they used it to find the code they copy'n'pasted. After that it all goes blank for them ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: I'm assuming they used it to find the code they copy'n'pasted. After that it all goes blank for them ...
1) Post a question in QA
2) Use link in response
3) Cut/Paste
4) If it works continue if not goto 1
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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So sad and so true...
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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"Kids are cute when they think they invent stuff" comes to mind rather often when on online forums. I don't think all of them are younglings never seen anything, I rather think it's the general attention span of a geriatric fly.
Or maybe the desire for drama. That, of course, is best served by repeating it.
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Is that the article citing how Excel is a great example of low-code democratisation?
Reading that my first thought was " had this clown ever looked at any Excel spreadsheets designed by the 'democratised'"?
Also, our favoured software supplier is very fond of providing solutions which have 'low-code' front ends for business numpties to 'develop' with (to protect them from doing any real harm) and they invariably make it impossible to do much more than change the colour of a font....
But hey!, the 'potential' is there for you to use...
And, of course, Management (who will never, ever have to use it), buy into the crap and expect wonders from staff who have no idea what the hell they're doing....
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I thought similar things when reading that article. I once wrote a bit of code to use a database for powerlifting meets to replace a ghastly Excel solution they use. Their response? We don't want our members in a database  So at every meet we copy the spreadsheet and use it and I dream of database structure and easy apps. Oh well.
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I couldn't agree more and I have been programming probably as long as you have.
I remember the efforts with "Magic PC", a product that promised to eliminate code altogether. A similar product has recently appeared but I have heard little about it's success.
I also attended a seminar where Oracle demonstrated its "no-code" database application development environment. It started out well and good but as the demonstration application became ever more complicated, so too did the tasks that one had to perform top build it.
About every 10 years, someone in the industry comes up with a new product that promises to be the panacea for businesses for the elimination of developers and software engineers. To date, not a single product has ever worked... and probably none ever will. This is because complex tasks require thought and innovation, which is something outside the box of these fads...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Right.
Now there is some usage for SSIS packages in SQL. But these are relatively small/short ditties that, for example, sucks in a file and populates some data table, or spits out a file from some data.
The problem is - all this creates code fragmentation. A little code in SSIS, a little in SQL, a little in C#, a little taste of jQuery/jScript, a GitHub file or two, et. al.
So if you are not aware of all the pieces and parts to this basket of 'stuff', you can be stranded when you take it over from someone who created the mess unless someone provides you with a road map.
Another goofball process created by those trying to prove their worth with little else to do is MFC. I once created a new MFC project in VS and sat there for a good 10 minutes while it loaded in literally a ton of support files. Tagged and sold to management (and some self-proclaimed gurus as the next best thing since fire), you don't hear a lot it about lately.
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Instead of Microsoft spending money on no-code/low-code bloatware like PowerApps and Logic Apps, why not create a UI designer for XAML (Xamarin Forms, MAUI, etc.) and HTML/CSS (Blazor)? It is hard to find developers today who were not raised as "script kiddies. They prefer hacking out reams of UI code, and are confused that a UI designer can do a better job much faster - indeed, they have little concept of what rapid application development (RAD) is.
Most of the ones I have talked to are surprised to learn that Alan Cooper's small team created the VB WinForms designer in a relatively short time. When I ask some of them (including the few MS program managers I talked to), they thought it would take huge teams several years to write a useful UI designer. That Alan Cooper and his small team did it in such a short time, with just as complicated a UI syntax as HTML or XAML, is news to them.
Microsoft could hire a small team of sharp, knowledgeable individuals and get back to prominence in the area of RAD.
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Good point.
For business development, RAD development is a must. Sadly, some of these new languages are really not RAD. Say what you want about this one is good for this, and that one good for that, RAD is best for business development.
While the original VB did not provide the vast abilities as C# now does, you could access the API if needed. But the speed of development was great because the entire syntax for VB could be printed out in a medium size binder - no intellisense needed. The only pitfall VB had was DLL hell, which with care, could be avoided.
Except for Delphi, which I used for several years, I have not found any other RAD development environment that beats VisualStudio - specifically C# in my case.
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I was actually writing more to the point of a UI designer, not the language, being the RAD context. The fact that MS's UI designer in Visual Basic, before the days of Visual Studio (but the UI designer was carried over into Visual Studio as .NET came along) was the de facto RAD standard for UI development (that others like PowerBuilder tried to copy) says a lot about the concept of reducing UI development time to 1) reduce overall development time, 2) provide consistency while allowing manual changes, and 3) allowing more of the finite time devoted to a project to be spent on what has to be coded instead of grunt-level UI coding.
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Check out OutSystems.com
You can spin up a test environment for free to test drive it.
They have good tutorials to help you learn it.
I think of it as an alternate IDE/forward code generator for C# apps or a cloud-ready Microsoft Access.
If you need to drop down to code C# or JavaScript, you can. Web or mobile. Need to tweak CSS, you can.
It is a developer oriented low code platform.
For web based LOB apps, it is hard to beat.
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Okay, but this is a developer assist, not a user created application; which is what my original topic was about. BizTalk was supposed to be used by analysts/power users, which never happened.
While probably automating some standard processes, at $4000/$10000 per month, it would be hard to justify that expense to many medium/smaller companies. That is $48,000/$120,000 per year.
Not knocking the product here. From what I see, it probably does provide some time savings - but for a steep price.
But I would still bet that in complex applications, you would still be adding code.
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It was nice while it lasted. But it seems you're now owned by mercenaries who put even the Ferengi to shame:
Star Trek on Paramount+ on Twitter: "To our international #StarTrekDiscovery fans...… "[^]
Less than two days before Discovery season 4 was due to air on Netflix, and suddenly all Star Trek content has been pulled. It will be available "at some point" next year, but only if you subscribe to the new Paramount+ streaming service.
Yeah, just what we need: another single-show streaming service.
Now, which way to the bay of pirates? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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