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How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

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Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#51

Post by FussyZeus »

duskwuff wrote: post #25
FussyZeus wrote: post #3

I wouldn't be surprised if this contributed either directly or indirectly to the extremely barren Windows Store marketplace in terms of apps. I think Microsoft burned a whole lot of bridges with this affair in terms of people who were long time Windows developers.

In early 2013, shortly after the store opened, Microsoft had a thing going where they'd pay developers $100 for every app they published: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4124548/microsoft-paying-d... This was actually a net negative for the store, as it led to the bulk creation of a lot of crappy, low-effort applications, setting up the expectation for users that most of the content in the store was junk, and makin…

As a Lumia owner for about a year, I totally buy that. The Store was garbage.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#52

Post by djsumdog »

pjmlp wrote: post #36
resoluteteeth wrote: post #32

It's not just one announcement; they keep changing their mind about what the future of the windows API is. WinRT is the final nail in the coffin. Now with WinRT on one side being tied to Windows Store apps and .net/WPF on the other side being limited to normal desktop applications, who in their right mind would devote time to building an app in either? In particular, if you're making enterprise software, for example,…

.NET runs on both, just not 100% API compatible. Mac OS X and iOS aren't also 100% compatible, neither are ChromeOS and Android.

I thought the ChromeOS/Android thing wasn't true anymore; that Android apps will soon run without any porting nescessary for ChromeOS.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#53

Post by jpmattia »

eganist wrote: post #39
jpmattia wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because the underlying guts of Windows have gotten much better since Win7. I'd love to read a summary of the improvements if anyone has a link handy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8 Everything other than #2 --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10 Everything other than #s 1.3, 1.4, 2.3, and 3.3

I guess I was specifically curious about the "underlying guts" comment. Things like adding a windows store + apps seem more like bolt-on additions rather than improvements in the underlying core OS.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#54

Post by pjmlp »

codingmyway wrote: post #48
pjmlp wrote: post #17

I don't agree. Switched my main focus to .NET around 4 years ago, and we keep on having more requests for proposals than we can fulfil, including new applications.

Now yes, .Net is gaining popularity a on the asp.net and web api side since they open sourced it so you aren't tied to MS and still have Mono and Linux support but Windows is dead AFAIC. I've moved to F# and may well move to Reason from there as I switch my skills to Linux. I totally agree the mishandling on the Windows 8 announcement is what killed windows just as it was getting good. The freedom to style WPF apps w…

.NET never lost any popularity on the enterprise space, that is what I care about.

All our projects are either Java or .NET stacks, both with native and web deployments, with some C++ on the side when required.

We started to focus again in .NET around 2010, way before any of the open source announcements took place.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#55

Post by pjmlp »

djsumdog wrote: post #52
pjmlp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.NET runs on both, just not 100% API compatible. Mac OS X and iOS aren't also 100% compatible, neither are ChromeOS and Android.

I thought the ChromeOS/Android thing wasn't true anymore; that Android apps will soon run without any porting nescessary for ChromeOS.

They will run inside a container with API redirections to ChromeOS syscalls.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#56

Post by mwcampbell »

UK-AL wrote: post #40
0x0 wrote: post #35

It's crazy to think that the owner of the win32 API, probably the strongest asset in contemporary computing, ended up with such a disorganized developer story - winforms, wpf, winrt, silverlight, html. The last thing you want your "developers, developers, developers" to do is to stop and think about which APIs they need to evaluate switching to. Because that's how you build mindshare on iOS, Android, OSX, ChromeOS.

It's WinRT via .net/C++/js for future apps. Everything else is legacy supported.

And what if I need to continue to support users who are running Windows 7?

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#57

Post by MichaelGG »

duskwuff wrote: post #25
FussyZeus wrote: post #3

I wouldn't be surprised if this contributed either directly or indirectly to the extremely barren Windows Store marketplace in terms of apps. I think Microsoft burned a whole lot of bridges with this affair in terms of people who were long time Windows developers.

In early 2013, shortly after the store opened, Microsoft had a thing going where they'd pay developers $100 for every app they published: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4124548/microsoft-paying-d... This was actually a net negative for the store, as it led to the bulk creation of a lot of crappy, low-effort applications, setting up the expectation for users that most of the content in the store was junk, and makin…

And Microsoft refused to help ISVs that had fake versions floating around the store. Even Netflix had trouble getting fake versions removed. It took several attempts and months before MS permanently fixed it.

I contacted several vendors during this time to figure out what was happening. All of them said MS was unhelpful.

Even when MS made that "email us about junk" push thru didn't respond to people and kept the junk piling up. Often, the store's own "Top" lists had this crap.

Bizarre, and a total waste of goodwill and trust in their new platform.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#58

Post by 4rt »

tostitos1979 wrote: post #6

I used to do quite a bit of Windows development back in the day (started with win32/MFC, moved to winforms). I was wondering the other day why I stopped (to some extent because the modern Microsoft seems to be more hip with Linux support, containers, etc.). My guess was that things started getting wonky around the time LINQ came out. It seemed pretty unnatural to me personally, and it was being pushed hard. The metro…

LINQ is far from wonky, it's essentially just a bunch of lambdas built to create execution trees which can be optimised then converted to e.g. SQL.

it's powerful and using typed-compile-time-checked LINQ for building DB queries is far superior as a developer experience than some monolithic blocks of SQL text and a test suite.

asp.net5 is getting pretty decent (and close to release) so for current projects I use c# to host my API and bootstrap the app up, but all the frontends are modern js frameworks (using typescript) rather than MS MVC.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#59

Post by douche »

jpmattia wrote: post #53
eganist wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8 Everything other than #2 --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10 Everything other than #s 1.3, 1.4, 2.3, and 3.3

I guess I was specifically curious about the "underlying guts" comment. Things like adding a windows store + apps seem more like bolt-on additions rather than improvements in the underlying core OS.

In my experience, Windows 8 & 10 boot faster, are more stable, and use less memory. I was able to install and run Windows 8.1 on a eeePC 901 that could just barely handle a severely stripped down version of XP when I bought it.

There's some other nice things, like finally being able to mount ISOs natively without DaemonTools.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#60

Post by leviathant »

jpmattia wrote: post #53
eganist wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8 Everything other than #2 --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10 Everything other than #s 1.3, 1.4, 2.3, and 3.3

I guess I was specifically curious about the "underlying guts" comment. Things like adding a windows store + apps seem more like bolt-on additions rather than improvements in the underlying core OS.

A few examples that come to mind: The task manager got better. Copying multiple files is handled better, as is the dialogue box you see while that's going on. Window snapping (Win+arrow keys) is pretty great - there were a few other nice Win-key combos that got introduced that I don't really use, related to projectors and multi-screen stuff. The wifi code's better. I believe Windows 8 introduced the ability to natively mount ISOs.
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