Comments on: (Re)building a house

By: Schwieb

Schwieb — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 03:52:34 +0000

rylps, i believe that the licence terms for Rotor are that it can be used only for non-commercial purposes. See this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/002/097/ShSourceCLILicense.htm

That obviously means that we can’t ship Office using Rotor. Beyond that, C# has almost all the same limitations for us as Cocoa — it means a complete rewrite with the attending bugs, source incompatibilities with WinOffice (they use a little C#, but 99.999% of their code is C++), and lack of new features. Besides, its even *less* new-Mac-technology-based than Carbon, and doesn’t help us access any of the cool new toys like CoreData and whatnot.

By: Schwieb

Schwieb — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 03:48:28 +0000

epong, what do the termites equate to in Carbon?

By: epong

epong — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:40:32 +0000

Interesting analogy. I personally like to think of it this way: if there’s been a plan to build homes with a special, more sturdy foundation to fend off an approaching epidemic of home-eating termites, would you rather deconstruct and rebuild your home now or let the termites chomp it to pieces and then build amidst all the rubble?

By: enricopulatzo

enricopulatzo — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:36:23 +0000

Why there is still a noticable behavior difference between Cocoa and Carbon apps.

Anyone who thinks moving Office from Carbon to anything (Cocoa, Mono, Lisp, or Python) else should spend some time meditating on Joel Sposky’s blog.

By: rylps

rylps — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 07:33:58 +0000

Yes, I know that it’s quite old. And you guys are definetly doing a great job!

So, what’s about C#? There is Mono, Cocoa bindings for C# (Mono), at least two different C#/Objective-C bridges. Are there any plans at Microsoft? Or was rotor more a proof of concept?

By: Schwieb

Schwieb — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 22:03:27 +0000

That quote was from a long time ago. BillG has been very supportive of the MacBU. Besides, if I said that to my manager now, I’d be looking for another job the very next minute…

By: rylps

rylps — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 21:11:03 +0000

C# is a good point. What happend to rotor, the shared source C# compiler?
I remember it being available for MacOS X (and FreeBSD) in 2001 or 2002.

Regarding Cocoa, I cannot resist to post a quote from a quite well known person at some quite well known software company: “Develop for it? I’ll piss on it!”.
(Though I’m not questioning your explainations about not using Cocoa for Office)

By: chrisg

chrisg — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:31:42 +0000

Excellent post. I never really understood the notion that rewrite a massive application in Cocoa/Objective-C would somehow magically result in code that defies the laws of common sense. The Office codebase is a huge investment that Microsoft gets a pretty good rate of return on — as you said, why tear-down only to get back to where you are? I’m sure one of the forward design goals of Office is to continue to make it as modular and componentized as possible to allow you the freedom of choice to extend the product in the best way you see fit, from a user experience, support and (gasp) cost perspective. Personally, I use Mac Office every day and exchange thousands of documents with my Windows colleagues and haven’t felt one bit of pain because Office isn’t written in Cocoa. However, if you guys could work some SharePoint integration into the next product rev, I’d almost burst with happiness!

By: jhawk28

jhawk28 — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:07:24 +0000

Hey, I grew up in Middlebury, Vermont!

Joshua