Non Visual Studio

Dear Microsoft,

I use Visual Studio almost every day and I like it, but I have a big beef with it: the name is misleading.

You see, a long time ago I used Visual Basic. And Visual Basic, for all its sins, had an honest name: it was basic and it was visual. At least the interface part was.

Now, with Visual Studio, there is no visual anywhere, it’s just text all over. The visual interfaces are unusable in every project I work on. XAML, ASPX, HTML, you name it… None really seems to work well.

I could just be bitching about a problem that is impossible to solve. But it’s not: we’ve done it. We have a visual language and IDE that lets you see not only the interfaces you are building, but also the code and data in a visual way. It doesn’t let you create games, embedded systems, or desktop apps like Visual Studio does: it’s just for creating web and mobile apps. But our users say that, precisely because of this focus, it’s better at it.

Maybe my problem is not that you use that name. Maybe it’s that we can’t use it ourselves.

So, dear Microsoft, would you consider renaming your product to “Non Visual Studio” and let us have that cool name of yours?

Sincerely,Tiago SimõesOutSystems