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January 28, 2005
I see dumb people
Lately I have had to deal with many developers using Microsoft dev tools to create clients for the web services we provide at work. I have also dealt with others who were creating client applications in other environments, most notably Oracle PL/SQL (the craziest thing I have heard of doing in PL/SQL).
By far the clients who are using MS tools are the most high maintenance. The guy doing everything from scratch in PL/SQL has been no trouble at all, in fact he's been a joy to work with. Not so the MS developers.
Case in point: Client developer emails me to ask about how to do a search. I email him back some pseudo code showing how to do it:
request = new XMLRPCStruct();
search = new XMLRPCArray();
search.Add("foo");
search.Add("bar");
request.Add("floob", search);
He emails back complaining that he can't figure out how to create an XML-RPC array with the C# .Net toolkit he's using to talk to our XML-RPC service, thus throwing up his hands and calling it quits until I provide actual code to show him how easy it really is. I google for the name of the toolkit he's using, find the FAQs for the toolkit, email him the link to the documentation which clearly state exactly how to do what he wants using this toolkit (turns out you just use the C# native Array type). How hard is that? To actually read the documentation of the libraries you use in order to, I don't know, do your job? The sad thing is that we get this kind of thing all the time! Yet people developing in other environments don't seem to have nearly as many problems. Even the crazy one using PL/SQL.
I guess I'm just cranky today.
Posted by ed at January 28, 2005 3:42 PM
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