Funcoder Technology Blog » .NET

When will Mac OS X be ready for the Enterprise?

Jonathan — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:08:49 +0000

I have to admit that I am an Apple fan but I am also torn between OSX and Windows for development. You see all my clients are Windows based and would not consider moving to Mac for a number of reasons.

It’s not just the fact that PC’s are cheaper than their Apple equivalent, it’s also down to the fact that there are no good enterprise development tools for the Mac. XCode is a great tool, but it just does not have the capabilities to be used in the enterprise like Visual Studio.

Now this may be from my lack of real experience with XCode but I feel it is more down to it’s available features.

If you take the current project I am working on as an example. This project encompasses business rules, data objects, services, UI elements for both desktop and mobile. The client has a specific requirement for it to be non-web based, so the UI elements are desktop and mobile applications. The added complexity is the integration with a Windows based accounting system. There are no good accounting packages (UK) for the Mac.

To build such a thing in Visual Studio is relatively easy, but XCode needs to match this functionality if it is to be recognised as a true contender in the enterprise.

There is Java (no comments about Leopard and Java 6), but combining Java server components and XCode would be a nightmare to maintain.

There are other development environments in the Mac Space, like RealBASIC, but once again they lack the feature set required.

So the life of an enterprise developer becomes rather complicated. Just looking at my desk I have a MacBook on my left and my WindowsXP machine in front of me. I crave working on my Mac, but I always have to resort to the Windows PC.

I just can’t see the future businesses developing there internal systems for Mac now and in the near future. To me this is always going to be for the home consumer or a web shop. I just wish it was different or we could see a glimmer of this changing.

Technorati Tags: apple,xcode,windows,enterprise,visual studio

New ASP.NET Fun Screencast – Coming Soon

Jonathan — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:59:39 +0000

Just to let you folks know that I am working on a screencast to show you how easy it is developing Facebook apps in ASP.NET. The simplicity is thanks to the .NET Facebook Developer Kit.

After that I will be developing an iPhone app using IUI Javascript and CSS library.

Visual Studio Rails TextMate Theme

Jonathan — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 10:10:37 +0000

Rob Conery has been playing with Jon Lam’s Vibrant Ink theme for Visual Studio and made some color improvements.

Fantastic SubSonic 2.0 Beta 1 Release

Jonathan — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 10:36:50 +0000

I am a big fan of SubSonic being a .NET developer and Ruby on Rails evangelist.

Developing ASP.NET applications in SubSonic is a much more productive task as it takes all the benefits of Rails into the .NET environment. Subsonic is a zero code DAL (Data Access Layer) providing rich data features.

The one thing i love about this tool is being able to get a site up and running quickly using the scaffold. I just use the scaffold function as a temporary development environment until I am ready to build the templates ans start implementing some CSS to get the UI designed.

The new command line tool is a great addtion to SubSonic and provides a lot of cool generate functions and much more.

Check out SubSonic at http://www.codeplex.com/actionpack