December 04, 2002
Sam is reminiscing about the good ole' days when OLE was new and COM was shiny. That Brockschmidt book changed my life.
But not in a good way. It made me give up writing software.
Software in C++, anyway. At the time I was working at Lotus in Dublin, building localization tools. Windows, OS/2, C++. Shortly after being introduced to OLE2, a few things were obvious to me: [a] this was really complex, [b] we'd be using it a lot, and [c] to become an expert would take more effort - more specialization than I wanted.
So, this is the book which made me a marketing guy. I literally didn't fire up a compiler for years afterward. In the process, many things passed me by (in particular the incredible STL).
But hey, I'm writing heavyweight code again, and went through breadth rather than depth. Not a bad path to take.
Hahahah! You too! I also hit a brick wall with that book. I didn't enjoy programming again until I started programming Java Servlets and could program for hours at time without just the occasional glance at the manual for reference.
I hated MFC too. I used to spend hours surfing the MSDN CD and then the MSDN website to find some obscure fact in a technote or in an MSN article that allowed me to express programmaticly what I wanted to achieve.
When you have to be an expert in the framework before you can understand every line of the program on your screen something is wrong.
Good story. That book really sucked-) It made more people confused than enlightened. Basically by drilling into OLE2 and making everone believe that was COM, it created tremendous damage that lingered for years. It confused the heck out of me.
But here you are-)
Me too!
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see also:
{groove:
[ ray,
matt,
paresh,
mike,
jeff,
john ],
other:
[ /* more blogroll to follow */ ]
}
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