hello, I am not a system engineeer, instead I am an electronic engineer, but i known how to make small pieces of code in visual cpp, vbasic, MFC and vba.

As a person that sees the world from other perspective, i believe that systems engineers should stop thinking in their work as "art" that can be embellished with new techniques (more and more languajes, tricks,etc.) and begin to see what it is: a science.

The use of engineering terms (for instance: patterns, OOP, binary reuse of code and exchange of data, algorithms science and deveop, use of graph theory), would made the system engineers better.
The problem with the "art" component is that it includes a lot of (yes, a lot of) qualitative (or fuzzy) definitions so for each person in the world, it would be a possible answer for a problem.
The most of science included in the software analisys, design, implementation, deployment, maintenance (i think that i cover all the live of an application), the better, simplier, elegant, useful, user liked (etc.) the final product will be.

So, i belive that most of the creativity swhon lnes up tries to solve the "art" component issues included in the current way to solve system engineering problems. For example, i don??t believe that xml could be more efficient thah the old COM or CORBA stardards because it incrementes 100x the ammount of data to transmit, even the bandwidth. My point is simple: the fact it can not mean you should (or have to)

i remember 15 years ago when our digital systems teacher encourage to develop a board that would be installed onto a AT/XT computer (i can??t remeber the model) constrained to a 2MB of external memory, programmed in assembly, with access to the mouse, video card and keyboard, introduces to me the rule to decrease the size of things, no matter the computer would be more powerful. (Imagine such a program running now into a modern PC with 4 cores processor and 4 GB of ram. it wouldn't be enough space for other programs?)

In fact, the actual IDEs (aka, visual Studio, Mono, Eclipse, etc) should be focused into develop new tools to programers that can help them to use the science of programming rather that shortcuts or constrained to a particular problem.

I started to read abour the RUP methodology, the the new Agile update, the old data-view pattern of MFC applications and the updated model-view-controller pattern and i couldn't believe that it doesn??t exist a IDe that covers the entire phase of the methodologies mentioned, from the requirements phase until de maintenance and final disposition one.

Friends, you should focus your creativity on solve this kind of thinks

Regards,
Elias