waffle

Steve Jobs on Apple’s Hot News page:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

Barring anything unforeseen, I’m taking the rest of the week off.

Let me introduce Jesper’s first axiom of developer tool pricing: if they’re trying to hide the price from you, there’s probably a reason for it.

The plaintiff calls to the stand: Visual Studio Team System for Developers. Microsoft goes to their utmost to hide the price (or even a Buy Now link), but at their store’s product page, all is revealed. $2299. And that’s if you have an MSDN Premium subscription that you’re renewing. Otherwise it’s $5469.

Why Visual Studio Team System for Developers? Because it is, believe it or not, the cheapest version of Visual Studio with any half-competent profiler whatsoever. (Yes, Microsoft offers a free CLR Profiler with source provided (!), but it is clumsy, can’t attach to running programs and only tracks memory allocation and not method performance.)

I’m starting to agree with Wil Shipley’s famous paraphrasing: “If you disagree, let me make you a deal: I’ll sell you all the tools you need to write software to compete with Delicious Library. Just send me a check for $600 every year and, uh, I’ll get back to you… maybe. I totally promise the tools will be really great, too. Really.”

But we’re not there yet. Microsoft is making good tools, and Microsoft is - sloooooooooowly - adopting .NET for its own application development. (Large chunks of the SQL Server 2005 management interface is written in .NET, if I’m not mistaken.)

What instead bugs me is that Microsoft is making you sell your house and take out a mortgage on the same first-born whose civil rights you just resigned in their EULA just to be able to make efficient and good software. What Microsoft doesn’t need is more crappy software on their platform; they get enough of that already, as you might have noticed. But instead of providing their best tools for a nominal cost, fleecing their base for a tidy short-term profit is more worth than restoring their reputation.

No wonder people are starting to peer over the fence where wonderful Instruments tidily arrive for zero cost right on the installation DVD; all of it part of a toolchain consisting of the same exact tools Apple themselves use, for free.

(Yes, I know about other people than Microsoft developing developer tools; I have been and will continue to use the wondrous free and open source AnkhSVN for version control, but the closest reputable profiler is JetBrains’ dotTrace, skidding in at a perhaps relatively facile and competitive $499, and has the Visual Studio integration of a toothpick.)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Even if don’t think there’s a change in climate happening, or even if you don’t think human intervention is a part of it, it just plain makes sense to pay a little attention to the climate and the environment in general. If it turns out that Al Gore is in fact wrong, well, the environment will still be a lot better off, and some people will get the pleasure of being smug.

If he is right, and people didn’t do anything because it would have cost money to do something…