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Alvaro Mendez wrote:
I think the extra verbage adds to the readibility of the code
Extra verbage is OK with me. The problem is that the burden of automatic cleanup lies on the user of a class. I've seen many cases where programmers are just too lazy to use using. Heck, I even know some .NET programmers who are not sure what using is all about.
As for readability, I have mixed feelings. As you said, extra verbage generally helps, but I am not sure about extra scopes that need to be introduced.
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
I am not sure about extra scopes that need to be introduced.
I know what you're saying but the extra scope serves to ensure that the resource cannot be used after it ends, since it has already been disposed of. Also, I don't know if you realize that using works just like any other scope-introducing statements, such as if, for, and while. The curly braces are only required if more than one statement is inside the using:
using (someResource)
doSomething();
Regards,
Alvaro
Give a man a fish, he owes you one fish. Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries.
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I thought a better example might be ...
using( ThousandsOfExtraClockCycles )<br />
DoSomeThingSlowly;
What's the point of producing applications in no time at all, if they take forever to run ?
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If you're complaining about C# programs running slow... oh puh-lease, buy a faster machine and stop complaining. But if you're so concerned about execution speed, by all means write your programs in Assembly. I hear it's super duper fast. 
Regards,
Alvaro
Give a man a fish, he owes you one fish. Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries.
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I hope u guys all go for .NET and become really dumb programmers. That way, guys like me, that love VC++, assembly, etc, will be very well payed, as no one else knows how to program in REAL programming languages, in situations where performance is critical.
Macromedia FLASH is made with VC++.
SAP Business ONE is made with VC++.
CA software is made with VC++.
....
Do i need to continue??
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What distinguishes REAL programming languages from OTHER programming languages?
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please dont.
I guess it will be interesting to see how many major commercial apps are written in c# after its had 30 frigging years to mature! Macromedia flash was written in c++ when c# didn't exist. Furthermore c# is really a Windows medium which didn't meet the need for flash to ported to other platforms. Different languages for different requirements. Keep your mindless evangelical posturing to ObscureLoons BBS.
Considering C# gets faster with each new version, I predict c++ will get pushed back exclusively to the realm of game development... or just get f*cked off all together (along with Miguel).
[worldspawn]
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So tell us, what language is used for the development of C#?
Nothing developded over the .NET framework will ever be near as fast as something developed in C/C++...
I remember when MS was trying to get programmers to stick with Visual Basic, the promises where not that diferent... but, how many large or small commercial software has been developed using VB?
When Microsoft anounces there releasing a servive pack 2 full of enhencements and bug fixes I know where were going and welcome this envolution... but I will not welcome a new layor of overhead and bugs, nor losing power and control over the hardware.
Miguel Hasse
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Tell us, what language was used for making C++? Tell us, what language was used to write assembly? Hmmm...
I don't think that the lowest-level language is necessarily always the best language for the job. Sometimes we have to sacrifice a little speed (and it is only a little) for numerous other benefits - security, the excellent type system, etc.
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Security? Do you really believe that?
What about the numerous benefits in using C++... I'm not willing to sacrifice those… give me a list of benefits of using C# and .NET and I will give you a list of problems with this framework and advantages of C++ without .NET.
Oh and if you try to reason with arguments like garbage collection then you will make me write a hole article 
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Not only can C/C++ make use of a garbage collector or not, but it can use diferent collection management schemes!!!
I never said garbage collection was not a worthwhile thing to have, but you should have control of when and where it should be used in your code.
Miguel Hasse
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Miguel Hasse de Oliveira wrote:
Not only can C/C++ make use of a garbage collector or not, but it can use diferent collection management schemes!!!
But ultimately, you have to settle on a single memory management model. If you're really worrying about which one, then you've got bigger design problems....
Miguel Hasse de Oliveira wrote:
I never said garbage collection was not a worthwhile thing to have, but you should have control of when and where it should be used in your code.
Which misses the point of garbage collection. You shouldn't control it, because the chances are it has a better idea of when to do things than you do, 99% of the time. You either adopt garbage collection and let it get on with it (saving you time and development costs), or you do it yourself, and spend 30% longer on your app avoiding memory corruption and memory leaks.
Doing it yourself doesn't even guarantee a better use of memory than garbage collection, because you usually have to put in your own reference counting schemes and smart pointer management code and so forth, and if you're using custom allocators, you have to store all that info too (which is normally punted off to new/malloc/whatever). Then you have write code to avoid memory fragmentation issues too (which we've encountered here in C++ apps, but never C# ones).
Ian Darling
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity ... that such complexity can arise ... out of such simplicity ... is the most fabulous extraordinary idea ... once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened - it's just wonderful ... the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned - Douglas Adams
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Miguel Hasse de Oliveira wrote:
but, how many large or small commercial software has been developed using VB?
I'd say a hell of a lot. Lots of internal apps within businesses are written in RAD tools like VB because you can get applications that meet the requirements of the business done really quickly - and any inefficiency trade off that results is usually acceptable. A lot of ASP sites will be written with VB as the scripting language, too.
Given VB programming is an order of magnitude more productive than C++ for your general "grab some data and process it" apps (the sort of thing COBOL was popular for a few decades ago), businesses will (and do) adopt it because it's just plain cheaper to meet your aims!
Code "efficiency" is a terrible metric to use much of the time, because a lot of software has business requirements of some sort, and meeting those quickly is more important than a VB app being a couple of seconds slower than the equivalent C++ one. You might also note that VC++6 and VB6 used the same compiler backends, so speed criticisms may not even apply that much.
I used to be a C++-is-the-best-and-only-tool-to-use guy one time. But not anymore. Ever heard the aphorism "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?". C++ is a good hammer, but you need more tools than that.
A good developer will know several tools, and know when it's appropriate to use them. C# is an excellent tool for much general application development because for many things it's easily fast enough, it has less headaches than C++ does, yet it's sufficiently familiar in style that it's easy to pick up. It (like C++) can interop with other components/languages through P-Invoke - and the ability to "break-out" of the language is one thing that helps makes a useful tool. This is why also VB is popular and useful too - you can use C and COM based libraries.
Oh, and a lot of the .NET libraries are written in C#.
Ian Darling
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity ... that such complexity can arise ... out of such simplicity ... is the most fabulous extraordinary idea ... once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened - it's just wonderful ... the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned - Douglas Adams
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I would say most RAD implemented solutions are for internal business use! And in most cases this makes total sense...
...but I was referring to boxed off-the-shelf products, mainstream products like Office, Photoshop, CorelDraw, SolidWorks, AutoCAD and millions of others
A developer that uses to many tools will never use the full power of any!
Oh, and have of compared .NET libraries written in C# with ActiveX libraries written with C++?
Miguel Hasse
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Miguel Hasse de Oliveira wrote:
...but I was referring to boxed off-the-shelf products, mainstream products like Office, Photoshop, CorelDraw, SolidWorks, AutoCAD and millions of others
All of which have been around for years and would therefore obviously have been written in C or C++ - you don't just throw away that level of work just so you can use recent tools. But as I mentioned in my other post, there are starting to be mainstream applications written in .NET such as Newsgator. You may not get a nice box in the shops for it, but it is the same sort of mainstream application. And I think you'll start to see more of them. Office will likely gain a managed codebase of some sort over the next few years.
Miguel Hasse de Oliveira wrote:
A developer that uses to many tools will never use the full power of any!
You really misunderstand my point. A developer uses the tools that help him get the job done in an appropriate way - and this will usually involve more than one tool. Tools have different benefits - C# and VB make good general application development languages because they're powerful enough for most purposes and can be used with other tools too. C++ is good for low-level work like drivers and some server platforms, but is also extremely complicated and unwieldy (Stroustrup even admits that there's a smaller language fighting to get out of C++). Java is good when you need to develop cross-platform. SQL makes a great query language. Python makes a great glue language (and is frequently used in conjunction with C++).
Knowing multiple tools well makes me a better developer, because I can see where one tool is better for something than another.
Of course if you just throw everything together in one pot you will get a mess, but that isn't my point! Relying on just one tool (doesn't matter what) means you waste a lot of time on things you shouldn't need to. This is why any significantly large project will frequently use two or more tools.
Miguel Hasse de Oliveira wrote:
Oh, and have of compared .NET libraries written in C# with ActiveX libraries written with C++?
Yes - I've written libraries using both (being a developer who knows multiple tools). So far, no significant differences in efficiency, and the .NET ones are generally less problematic to develop and deploy (particularly on the mobile and web platforms I work with most often).
There's only one control I've seen that would be tricky to do well in .NET - a mobile device control for signatures - and half of that was due to the smaller platform library missing a API needed for drwaing the lines the right way. But I've written owner-drawn multi-line, grouping list controls for mobile devices in both C++ and C#, and the C# one was as fast, and easier to maintain and deploy. If a mobile device can manage .NET, and web applications can, then the desktop will too.
Ian Darling
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity ... that such complexity can arise ... out of such simplicity ... is the most fabulous extraordinary idea ... once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened - it's just wonderful ... the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned - Douglas Adams
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At least Flash Player will never be written in C#, as it needs to be efficient. Also, memory managment in .NET sucks, so important programs like a program that controls a production plant and is required to work for a year without restart, will never be written in any interpreted language like C#.
Tell me, what kind of programs do you write??? It seems they all are small and a bit futil... there are thousand of situations besides games where C# wont be used!!
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Sure, buy a faster machine to get .NET programs running almost as fast as C++ compiled applications on slower machines... oh, and don't forget to double that RAM (because that managed code is hungry).
Imagine that MS ever came around to rewriting Word 2003 in C#, what kind of machine would we be talking about here? (of course this is strictly hypothetical)
Do you really thing getting more powerful machines so you can do as much and as smoothly as do now is positive evolution?
Miguel Hasse
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Are you certain you've tried to run .NET applications... I have two main work machines a 2.6Ghz with 1GB RAM and a 2.8Ghz with 512Mb... Small .NET applications don't run only these machines they walk and eat RAM.
MIguel HAsse
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MicroSoft is trying to slow down the speed of PCs with their newer OSs developed by new languages. It reminds me in the old Dos days, 80386 PCs with dos platform and 640kb ram or several MGs runs dos program much faster than 686 with Win9x, Win2000/XP with 256/512 MG Rams.
I by chance have had the opportunity to support such a program with customers using OS from Dos to WinXP. The program gets slower and slower with faster and faster PC, newer and newer platform. I didn't and I don't want to complain about M$ which gives me opp to earn my bread on table. In fact M$ has created alot of working opportunities for millions people, eg. VB, VC and now it is C#. I will put my hands on C# some days in the future just in case it disappears too soon.
Just a kidding;P, don't take it too serious .
Regards,
Ke
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Alvaro Mendez wrote:
But if you're so concerned about execution speed, by all means write your programs in Assembly. I hear it's super duper fast.
Only if you are very, VERY good in assembly programming, which I am not. Modern C++ compilers are damn good these days, and I don't think I would be able to write any non-trivial application in assembly that would outperform the same application I would write in C or C++.
However, I agree that this argument about "slow C# vs fast C++" is
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I think the real problem with using is that it is only truly helpful in situations where object lifetime is extremely simple. This method of resource cleanup falls apart when a resource is used more than once ( i.e. we maintain a reference to this resource for later use ). The object that holds a reference to an IDisposable can itself implement IDisposable but this also assumes that this object has simple lifetime patterns. And what about resources whose lifetimes don't match those of their owner? What about collections? Do they know anything about IDisposable? Do I need to keep track of everything I throw into a collection and never reference again? How would I even know when to reclaim those resources that are just sitting around, cached, waiting to be used again? I know there are ways around these problems but all of those solutions highlight the inherent disconnect between the purely managed world ( where the CLR manages everything for us ) and the world where I have to keep track of the lifetimes of my objects in very detailed ways. Coming from the C++ world where this is all explicit makes the problem here seem like a flaw of architecture, but I think that the real problem is that C++ programmers are lazy ( I'm not excluding myself from this ). Scoped resource reclamation is no longer possible and we have to actually think about disposing of our resources instead of allowing the compiler to handle it for us. It took me a while to figure out why I am a little uneasy with .Net, but it turns out that it has everything to do with managing details I've never had to manage before. I know that I had to call delete or free or RegCloseKey before but that was all right because the entire language is structured that way and its fairly easy to see where you are not releasing resources, but in the CLR, where the world is very dynamic and where I never have to think about reclamation, IDisposable and using look like hacks elevated to the level of infrastructure. Well, maybe its not quite that bad
-Lonnie
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