Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 99 posts

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

#81

Post by maxxxxx »

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.

Just wait until they change their mind again.

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

#82

Post by speeder »

kuma4 wrote: post #79
speeder wrote: post #2

Microsoft is just that good in "Orborning" themselves. (also "Ratnering" too, and saw some people here in HN creating the name "Elop effect" that is when you do a "Osborne" and a "Ratner" in the same announcement). Some examples: 1. That Memo "Symbian is dead", when in the third world Symbian was crushing the iPhone like a hydraulic press, due to its sheer utility/price performance (ie: being almost useful was the iP…

In PC gaming, Windows 10 is 38% now. It's more than Windows 7. PC gamers prefer Windows 10 because of DX12. See in Steam. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

You mean in "Steam Gaming", Steam is not all PC gamers.

Also, Steam defaults to "Windows lastest version" in some situations (example: the stats for game purchases by platform, count as lastest windows when you buy using mobile)

Also Wine counts as Windows.

Finally, you forgot to count the 32 bits versions of each OS.

Win10 64+32 is 39.51%, Win7 64+32 is 39.54%

And for a dev standpoint, going exclusive DX12 now would still be a stupid decision, if you look in the "DX graph", you will see that only 33.52% has Windows 10 AND DX12 GPU at the same time, meaning a DX12 exclusive game would lock itself to a minority of the market.

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

#83

Post by JamesBarney »

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.

Previous windows phone user. I loved the OS, I had a $40 brand new windows phone and I never once ran into any performance problems. Now with a considerably more expensive galaxy s5 I miss the responsiveness of my windows phone. But I sure as heck don't miss that app store. So much crap and so little quality.

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

#84

Post by novaleaf »

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…

I learned my lesson a couple years earlier with XNA.

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

#85

Post by mixedCase »

douche wrote: post #31
j_s wrote: post #28

Microsoft used to make most of their money by continuously moving the cheese; hopefully their transition to a focus on cloud stuff will continue to reduce this needless churn.

When I get all of the cheese that I used to have back, I'll be happy. There's still a lot of stuff there that I used to have fairly solid, powerful libraries for that has been replaced by brittle, incomplete APIs.

There's always moving to cross-platform solutions, use their nice API and let them handle the shit-show behind curtains. As a bonus, you now have portability!

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

#86

Post by pjmlp »

belgianguy wrote: post #69

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, yo…

> Pretty glad I dodged that bullet.

Yes, because Oracle is so much better.

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

#87

Post by m_mueller »

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,…

I don't even understand the naming. Wasn't WinRT supposed to be the ARM version of Windows 8? Thus the Surface RT product? Which is now pretty much dead?

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

#88

Post by m_mueller »

pjmlp wrote: post #20
jbandela1 wrote: post #12

When see stuff like this I think of Joel Spolsky's post http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html This I think was the beginning of the downfall of Windows as the controlling force in personal computing.

If that is the downfall of Windows, then it is also the downfall of Apple and Google development tools and OSe as they also have their share of "API of the year", deprecations or just plain removal without way forward.

At least for Apple I don't think it's fair to say that. Apple tends to deprecate little parts of the API of their API, but the core has been quite stable. By that I mean Cocoa / Cocoa Touch. Since the introduction of OSX these two and Carbon were the only core APIs you had to care about. Now with Swift there's some movement again (which isn't enforced yet), we'll see where that goes. All in all not bad for ~16 years of development. If you count things like the move to ARC or Auto layout, I think these transitions were handled well and didn't lead to that much additional investment, it's on the order of expected support you need to do.

It's a different kind of stability though. Windows tends to support everything old written for their platforms in some way or another through tons of compatibility layers. It's 98% legacy and 2% of what's currently the favourite thing Microsoft would like you to do (which is constantly shifting). With Apple it's a lot less legacy support but the stuff actively sanctioned by Apple is also more stable.

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

#89

Post by pjmlp »

m_mueller wrote: post #88
pjmlp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the downfall of Windows, then it is also the downfall of Apple and Google development tools and OSe as they also have their share of "API of the year", deprecations or just plain removal without way forward.

At least for Apple I don't think it's fair to say that. Apple tends to deprecate little parts of the API of their API, but the core has been quite stable. By that I mean Cocoa / Cocoa Touch. Since the introduction of OSX these two and Carbon were the only core APIs you had to care about. Now with Swift there's some movement again (which isn't enforced yet), we'll see where that goes. All in all not bad for ~16 years…

I remember when Java was being sold as having the same first class support as Objective-C, Web Objects, the Qt framework for Java, how GC support in Objective-GC was going to be great, how Carbon was going to stay around.

Before Mac OS X, I remember Pascal being the best thing, only to be replaced by C and C++, then as they couldn't improve their own tools, having them based on Metrowerks.

I remember Common Lisp, Dylan, Hypercard, Newton, Quickdraw, Quickdraw 3D,...

So I think it is more than fair to put them on the same bag.

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

#90

Post by danielkornev »

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…

I was always wondering why did this happen? Why there was so much hate for XAML/C#?

And why Jupiter didn't get full backwards compatibility with WPF?

Post reply on HN