This is from TempWorks CTO, Paul Czywczynski:
Just saw your blog post and wanted to post an opinion. I don’t see the things we do today any easier than in the mainframe days. My dad taught me machine code back in the day and I wrote many programs in it that I sold. Not on the scale of TempWorks but for a 10-yr-old it wasn’t bad money. Back then I didn’t have to worry about networking layers or multi-threading on multi-core machines. Today maybe the code has become easier to write and I don’t need to worry about jmp’ing off into the wrong spot and writing to the wrong register but challenges have become more complex.
For version control, TFS in my opinion is on par with anything available today like CVS, subversion or git. Its continuous integration features even surpass those other products.
Last item about the command line. Microsoft has two products available for you; PowerShell and MSBuild. Visual Studio behind all the clicking actually uses MSBuild at the command line level. I have written all our Enterprise customer deployment scripts at the command line using MSBuild. The only click I have to do today is tell the TFS scheduler to start the command line MSBuild script to run at 3am.
I guess what I am saying is there are many ways to do the same thing. If you want to click around and do everything in Windows and VS thru the gui that is prerogative but most of the time the gui is built on command line tools. You always have access to them if you want to get your hands dirty.
