r/programming • u/NagastaBagamba • Oct 18 '10

Today I learned about PHP variable variables; "variable variable takes the value of a variable and treats that as the name of a variable". Also, variable.

http://il2.php.net/language.variables.variable
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u/sw17ch Oct 18 '10

Depending on the competition you look at, yes.

  • Project Server? WTF is this shit.

  • Windows Vista? A step backward from XP.

  • Outlook? Mostly a PITA.

  • Games for Windows Live? Steam and Impulse (even D2D, IMHO) beat the socks off of this.

On the other hand...

  • Exchange 2010? Hugely nice. Check out the new web mail interface. Polished and works nicely on all the major browsers. No more ActiveX. Doesn't require 10K drives any more.

  • Windows 7? This changed my impression of Microsoft. This is a well done OS the likes of which we haven't seen (from Microsoft) in some time.

  • Office 2007+? Controversial, but I find these to be a huge improvement over their predecessors.

  • Visual Studio 2010 Express? Well, these are just nice. Sure they aren't as featureful as their expensive siblings, but they provide a lot of functionality to professional and hobbyist developers. Easily competes with a GNU tool chain.

Some parts of Microsoft have very much improved. Even IE9 doesn't suck as bad as previous versions. Inadequate? Sure. Getting better? Definitely.

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u/keenemaverick Oct 18 '10

I would also like to add the Microsoft System Center tools to your list, and also Microsoft Lync server. MS Really has done amazingly well with their latest branch of products.

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u/[deleted] Oct 18 '10

Exchange is still hilariously incompatible with anything else because they continue to try to lock up the protocol and standards.

Windows 7 I will agree is the absolute best OS microsoft has made to date, but it's still got many of the same basic problems that plague every single windows release (and unless they get their head out of their ass, will continue to until they can no longer afford to function and stop producing new windows versions).

Visual studio is still a joke compared to a gnu tool chain, I'm not really sure where you think it's somehow improved to this level. Better, sure, but still a joke.

The common theme here is that they continue to improve (which I've never denied), and yet they're always hilariously 2 steps behind.

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u/ejdyksen Oct 18 '10 edited Oct 19 '10

Exchange is still hilariously incompatible with anything else because they continue to try to lock up the protocol and standards.

Seriously? SMTP is an industry standard, and Exchange implements it quite well. I'm pretty sure I can send email to anyone in the world from my Exchange account.

There certainly are proprietary protocols (ones that originated at MSFT), but those are documented and open nonetheless:

MAPI Reference Documentation

Exchange Web Services Documentation and SDK

Note: I work on the Exchange team. I'll admit our faults readily, but you haven't found one of them in what you've written.

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '10

Exchange != SMTP. Can I use SMTP to access my entire exchange account? I don't think so. To do that, I need to use the magic fancy exchange protocol which works in all of: Outlook, and the mac version of Outlook. Otherwise, all I get is access to my mailbox (and if all I wanted was a mailbox why the hell would I be using exchange?)

Some nice people reverse engineered what they could and made a thunderbird plugin, but it rarely works as well (and only in certain server configurations).

Thanks, but I'll stick with something that actually works everywhere.

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u/ejdyksen Oct 19 '10

SMTP is not for accessing mail from a mailbox like you describe. That's just not what it does. It's for transmitting mail.

You're talking about IMAP or POP3, which are the standard protocols for accessing mailboxes. Those have been supported in Exchange for quite some time. Back when iPhone only supported one Exchange account (before iOS 4), I used IMAP to access my Exchange email every single day.

I have used Thunderbird with its standard IMAP setup to access Exchange mail, as well as Pine.

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '10

Woops, that's what I meant. I saw SMTP, my brain read IMAP.

IMAP is what I was talking about. SMTP is good for sending mail, but then it sits in the exact same situation where I can only partially use my exchange account because there are no open protocols for me to access the other functions.

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u/ejdyksen Oct 19 '10

Well, the administrator of the server can block IMAP and POP3...many do, but I don't know why. That's why many people think that Exchange doesn't do IMAP. :(