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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

#61

Post by contextfree »

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.

Adding a store/apps does require core changes though - those apps need to be sandboxed, suspended, etc. which needs kernel support.

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

#62

Post by MichaelGG »

FussyZeus wrote: post #51
duskwuff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. I have them a shot. Bought two Lumias, including the flagship with the "nice" camera[1]. My wife, who isn't a power user, found it totally inadequate. Other users I know that really wanted to get into it also gave up. MS wasn't just late, they just bungled everything related to running the platform. Which is a shame because the Metro UI is really neat on phones.

1: Camera was able to take nice pics but so slow to actually fire that it turned it to be nearly useless.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by douche »

4rt wrote: post #58
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…

Even leaving SQL out of the equation, LINQ is basically just standard functional programming constructs, albeit with SQL-y names. Select() == map, Where() == filter, Aggregate() == fold

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

#65

Post by skalkin »

markbnj wrote: post #23

This article is dead on from my perspective. I was one of those long-time Windows devs, started on the Win16 API, and I had invested quite a bit of time and effort into WPF and Silverlight because I thought it was cool. I remember that exact announcement, and my immediate thought was that they were ditching WPF/XAML for this new thing, whatever it was, and I just could not see where that was going. I started working…

Same here. I have been heavily exposed to C# / .NET at that time, but after the announcement came out we started looking into other platforms, and it has never been the same ever since.

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

#66

Post by randomfool »

UK-AL wrote: post #37
randomfool wrote: post #29

Great to see someone holding Sinofsky to task for this! Some background, from what I recall: - During the planning for Windows 8 XAML was the leading candidate for the UI technology but late in the process Sinofsky personally overruled it to make HTML the preferred UI technology. - Through the first half of Win8 development XAML support for Win8 was essentially a side project by DevDiv with very little support by Win…

This isn't about Silverlight vs Browser HTML. This about creating "Native" apps using JavaScript and html as an interface for native apps. Fundamentally it still using the same components C++/Com store and .Net store apps. They've just written a language adapter for it. XAML is alive and well in the WinRT apps.

This is about the XAML ecosystem which got slaughtered while Windows was promoting Windows Web Apps and remained silent about the future of XAML.

XAML is now alive and well (to the extent that Windows is), but it went through a very very tough patch in 2010-2011.

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

#67

Post by FussyZeus »

MichaelGG wrote: post #62
FussyZeus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep. I have them a shot. Bought two Lumias, including the flagship with the "nice" camera[1]. My wife, who isn't a power user, found it totally inadequate. Other users I know that really wanted to get into it also gave up. MS wasn't just late, they just bungled everything related to running the platform. Which is a shame because the Metro UI is really neat on phones. 1: Camera was able to take nice pics but so slow t…

I had the Lumia Icon and bought the induction charger (another $50) and it worked alright, except if the phone wasn't aligned perfectly it got frighteningly hot.

Microsoft quality I suppose.

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

#68

Post by eyko »

smithkl42 wrote: post #16

Bob Muglia did something similar with Silverlight back in 2010. As I'd invested two years of my life into a Silverlight-based startup at that point, it effectively killed two years' worth of work, and left me rather soured on Microsoft. http://blog.wouldbetheologian.com/2010/11/its-about-trust-mu...

> Silverlight-based startup

Even without hindsight, it seems short sighted to have bet on Silverlight.

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

#69

Post by belgianguy »

This feels eerily reminiscent of my own dilemma 4 years ago: The lack of direction and leadership coming from within Microsoft when it comes to building software, the willy-nilly changing of core development strategies, creating unnecessary risk (learning curves, time, money) by getting a developer to invest in something that might be relegated to the dustbin by tomorrow (including his/her paycheck). Worst of all, you are to find out about that fact yourself, no announcements, just silence, and vague PR about the-next-big-thing, to lead you on once more. It just felt like they were flailing, thinking up something new well before the last new thing had decent support or community behind it.

I also wondered how a programmer used to strong-typed languages (like C#) and a robust IDE/debugger (like Visual Studio) would fare in the hell that was a browser 4 years ago, the joyful world of JS (vanilla + frameworks) debugging and the always entertaining fight with CSS (in)compatibility, (where IE in particular has caused many a dev to utter a sigh).

I even made a post about it back then: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/p1r3s/st... (and it got on here as well IIRC). It was titled "Stick with Microsoft WPF et al or jump ship?"

I ran as hard as I could from Microsoft and picked up Linux Ubuntu and Android development. I'm a full-time Java developer now (on Ubuntu as we speak) and very happy with that.

Pretty glad I dodged that bullet.

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

#70

Post by UK-AL »

randomfool wrote: post #66
UK-AL wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about Silverlight vs Browser HTML. This about creating "Native" apps using JavaScript and html as an interface for native apps. Fundamentally it still using the same components C++/Com store and .Net store apps. They've just written a language adapter for it. XAML is alive and well in the WinRT apps.

This is about the XAML ecosystem which got slaughtered while Windows was promoting Windows Web Apps and remained silent about the future of XAML. XAML is now alive and well (to the extent that Windows is), but it went through a very very tough patch in 2010-2011.

Was winrt(HTML/js apps, the thing this blog is talking about) even out in 2010/2011?
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