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Comment by TNO | Hacker News Reader

".NET creates value from a fantastic IDE, great mainstream languages, and well-executed technologies like Silverlight, LINQ and the DLR [Dynamic Language Runtime]."

Silverlight is well executed? Is there any real uptake with the DLR outside Silverlight? I think the answer to both is no, can anyone point to evidence otherwise?

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In the absence of an objective definition of "well executed" I will give my opinion. Yes, Silverlight is well executed. I have done fairly complex apps in both SL and Flash, and the SL experience was better.

Some reasons: Flash is the 10th iteration of a platform on the 3rd iteration of a language, so Flash has several completely different and incompatible ways to do everything. Flash code must be written in ActionScript, which can be used in exactly one environment (well, not counting Flash Media Server).

The SL platform, on the other hand, is much more recent and has the benefit of throwing away years of iteration on WPF and doing things "right" from the start. It is well organized, consistent, and performs well. You can use libraries from non-SL projects in SL without rewriting them in a dead-end language.

I also wonder what "fantastic IDE" he is referring to. I constantly hear people talk about visual studio being great but I don't believe they have ever stepped outside their world to try some of the Java IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA.

I also wondered the same thing. Visual Studio is so bad, you have to actually buy another piece of software (http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/) for it to start approaching "good", but it's still not close to "fantastic".

Which IDE do you think is better?

Eh, it's not subpar either. I purposely didn't get Resharper because I hate how intrusive it is. TestDriven.NET and ViEmu make VS2008 a passable IDE IMO.

The number one thing that turned me off about IntelliJ IDEA was the horrible font rendering. I am not going to suffer the lack of cleartype for eight hours a day, thanks. The rendering made IntelliJ positively unusable. I really don't care about the awesome refactoring support and all that jazz if I can't read my source code comfortably.

What platform did you use IntelliJ IDEA on? I work with about 100 other (highly opinionated) developers that all use it, and I've never once heard someone complain about the font rendering.

Windows.

Huh. I've used IntelliJ on Windows for close to 8 years and never noticed any font rendering issues.

Well, looks like I have egg on my face. Your comment prompted me to download the latest version of IntelliJ and try it out, and the rendering has improved tremendously. It is now indistinguishable from ClearType (it probably is ClearType). :)

Recent versions of IDEA (7+) with recent versions of JDK (6+) support subpixel antialiasing.

Well, I haven't tried the most recent ones, and definitely not IntelliJ IDEA, but at the time I tried them, both Eclipse and NetBeans were substantially worse (slower, worse intellisense, debug options, etc...) than Visual Studio.

Visual Studio works fantastically for my line of work as an IDE. If I were doing some other line of work it would probably be unsuitable, but for Big Corp (tm) programming it is pretty good, much better than the Java equivalents.

So you've developed with Silverlight and understand its strengths and weaknesses in comparison with Flash/Air? I haven't done much Silverlight work but as someone who has done a decent amount of Flash work in the past, I thought it was a really solid approach. It certainly seems superior to the other alternatives in the context of developing for a phone platform (Windows Phone 7, or whatever that is called).

The DLR is used by IronPython and IronRuby. It's not the basis of Silverlight but it is what allows you to write apps in python or ruby.

The DLR is also the foundation for late binding in C# 4, which is a cornerstone of the new COM functionality.

You mean the dynamic keyword? I didn't know that was the DLR, that's interesting.

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