Comments on: Project Management in Java: A Confused .NET Developer’s Perspective

By: Ryan Svihla

Ryan Svihla — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:13:20 +0000

@Eddie I understand MSBuild is a fuller scripting language, and again I’m not referring to that. Let me put it this way in any of the above things I’ve covered I’ve never had to put a [compile.**/*.java]. I have in Ant and **/*.cs in the csc task in NAnt, which again I’m not going over the scripting option but viewing these things as a Project Management format.

Now I’m going to admit I have not used MSBuild for scripting other than the most minor items , so my question is once you’ve marked that setting will Visual Studio see all included files? For example in Intellij, it has an exclude list instead of an include list (and just a source directory location), if you can get Visual Studio to exhibit that behavior, well awesome and I wish they did that by default, then you could not bother to check in the .proj and .sln files and all and everything would be fine and you could easily have cross version IDE teams, plus it would have prevented TONS of needless source tree conflicts when two people added a different class via the wizard and it added it to the same line in .proj file.

I understand the this is not a straight apples to apples comparison and this is in part what I was trying to highlight in the article. MSbuild is part NAnt and Project Management, and it can be used for both or either. Hence my complete confusion when I entered the Java world.

By: Eddie Garmon

Eddie Garmon — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:31:53 +0000

Truely speaking, VS project files are MSBuild files, no way around it. You can add a [Compile Include="**\*.cs"] element to do exactly what you are talking about.

By: Ryan Svihla

Ryan Svihla — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:24:48 +0000

@Eddie
In the article I’m in no way discussing MSBuild as a scripting language at all. You’ll note I did not make a mention of Ant. Visual studio does behave the way I have stated. Add a new class, and the MSBuild file created by visual studio aka .proj will actually add a line for that class and where it is located. MSBuild will be called for compilation.

Open up any Java IDE with a directory structure (with no project format) and a Java project for that IDE will be created on the fly and all the libs and .java files will be referenced and added to the compile list. Do the same in Visual and you have a .proj with no files.

By: Eddie Garmon

Eddie Garmon — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:09:27 +0000

You must not understand MSBuild at all. You can do everything you said a java IDE does, but you must understand its syntax. As far as needing a GUI to edit a build script, they (the GUIs) are only good for trivial tasks in pretty much any IDE. A specialized build file editor (not an IDE) is another story completely.

By: Ryan Svihla

Ryan Svihla — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:54:03 +0000

@Troy good comments and I appreciate the feedback. Java is nowadays my day job, so I really wanted to dive into it. I at least need to be able to “speak Java” enough to fit in and not have my ideas discounted as “oh it’s just a DotNet guy”. In the process I certainly dove into waves of competing perspectives and approaches, and most of them not in straightforward comparisons.

Also from a purely language perspective, C# 3.5 was pretty awesome compared to the current state of Java, and from a community point of view I still prefer Alt.Net to anything I’ve found in the Java community.

End of the day though languages are interesting it’s really the interesting people and different perspectives on solving problems that make all of this worthwhile for me .

By: Troy

Troy — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:56:28 +0000

I read your post having somewhat similar hands on experience. It seems clear. But as I read @Senthil Kumar B’s comment, my mind quickly traced my path of discovery. And I realized if I didn’t have that experience, this high-points-only overview could likely be confusing.

Personally, I appreciated the post as a good overview. But, without personal experience, there’s several weeks of discovery in there to follow it.

I’ve spent about a month in IntelliJ, a few weeks in Net Beans, a week or so in Eclipse. All were good experiences.

Getting one’s head wrapped around how dependencies work is very normalized between each IDE. It is mostly a search for where to do the same thing in each particular IDE. My day job is .NET. I’d say, on the whole, that language differences and hardware differences are the biggest factors that steer my preferences. I’ve only used c# 4 experimentally, but with great pleasure. I feel lost without extension methods in java, but any non-sealed class can be extended to get fluent methods–yet, it’s a little more work. It may be my general experience, but I typically find communication between dissimilar boxes less painful in the .NET arena.

By: Senthil Kumar B

Senthil Kumar B — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:46:06 +0000

That was a bit Confusing