This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Marketing your product Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I'm learning to program. Not learning to use Visual Studio. I wanna know how to branch my code. How to properly call objects. Send around strings. How to write algorithms.

Why would I want to do that in Visual Studio when I'm a beginner? To tell you the truth, I also am playing with Visual Studio as I work through the books that I'm working with. Why? Cause I wanna see what the experience is like in both places. But, Visual Studio is an awfully confusing place to be for a beginner. Tons of icons. Debuggers. Properties. Options. What again do those have with writing a loop or dealing with strings?

Now that's amusing. VS is too confusing for beginners? If that's the case, then there's a problem - MS spends gobs of money on studying user interactions and user suitability, and they've ended up with the same issue we fret about with VisualWorks - only we have virtually no marketing budget, and no budget for user studies. If the tool is too hard for beginners, then that's something that needs addressing, and fast. We are trying to do that with VisualWorks - I think Scoble should find the relevant people on the VS team and explain why VS is too hard for people like him to use while learning. Trust me, they would appreciate the feedback. The whole point of an IDE is to make cumbersome tasks easier. If it's not doing that, it's a problem.