Windows Live, Twisted

This is the first posting via the Windows Live Writer. Today my MSN Messenger pops up and literally forced me to upgrade my Msgr to the Windows Live version.

What surprises me was the list of other services that you get to choose to install apart from Messenger itself  and one of them is this Windows Live Writer.  It allows you to post to various blogs (the first  one in the menu is MS own service naturally…)

The online office documents is the other apps. This  put the power of the MS Office to the internet for laymen. It makes google docs looks like cavemen offering. The google doc is laden with incompatible glitches when uploading MS documents over, and MS answers to this is a solid one.  Try uploading a powerpoint and you will get what i mean….not a big issue , minor displacement here and there but still…

So what has this gotta do with Twisted ? Nothing really, except that the solid feel you get when using components from MS compared to Twisted (open source component) sometimes is evident, at least to developers that are not just MS bashers. On the other hand, MS is super slow in adopting and promoting what is evidently internet driven standards and if you want to develop for Windows, chances is  that MS already have some offering that is either free, “included in the OS/will be” or some bundling Server products. The development for Windows software is a grim future to many Windows developers (except for project based solutions) . Of course the gang of MS partners and those getting projects from MS as partners via MS solutions are making tons.

For independent product development, Windows leaves Anti-virus, some security related fields and libraries/components the only profitable playing field for Windows Developers looking at “off the shelf” development. 

Now back to twisted, i was  looking at imap4.py, the “search_” functions have a typo bug that will never work , a simple one…missing an “s” on 3 functions of which i have reported to twistedmatrix. If MS components have such bugs, it would be totally unacceptable and laughable.  I was thinking to myself, is this a framework that has so much hoo-haa in Python and over 7 years of evolution? Don’t even want to start on its poor documentation. If its not because of its beautiful skeletal architecture for various protocols, i would say asynch chat in the standard Python library would be more productive.  (noob ! noob!, yeah spare me the insults)

Python is the best  thing i have found in the OSS world. Each day passed by and i still find it the most attractive programming language.  I place Python on the same playing fields as C++, Java, C#, not Perl and other scripting languages. Its meant for serious development and deserved to be used in an IDE and adopted by full fledged teams.

Are you using C#? Try python, use the Wing-ide. You won’t regret! You won’t lose much of the VS pampering that you are so used to and you get to think …somewhat…differently.