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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

#91

Post by choosername »

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…

I will guess

1. MS anticipated cheap Android OEMs

2. They anticipated VR and anticipated the need to integrate 3D audio in 3D hardware, which is the grafics cards at the moment. They were involved with VR from Kinect.

3. Multiplatform is not bad.

4. DX9 is probably good enough.

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

#92

Post by snaky »

smacktoward wrote: post #11
ape4 wrote: post #5

I just don't get why they did that.

As was the case with the old Soviet Union, Microsoft decisions frequently only make sense when viewed through the lens of internal politics -- of one apparatchik trying to stick a knife in the back of another, in order to increase their own power. My guess on this one: the new Metro-style app platform was the work of Sinofsky's Windows Division, while traditional XAML app tooling belonged to some other division. In s…

Yes, that's a story of pretty much every structure big enough.

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

#93

Post by FussyZeus »

JamesBarney wrote: post #83
FussyZeus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The wife and I both had one, I moved to an iPhone (iOS developer, perk from work, woo!) and she's still on the Lumia she had. She's switching as soon as her upgrade is ready. She actually doesn't mind the Store being so lacking (though it's not a selling point for her) but her phone is pure garbage. The thing loses charge inside of 11 hours, after the last software update the camera is crap, and her speaker has gotten progressively quieter over the year and a half or so she's had the thing, which is a problem because she doesn't have great hearing.

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

#94

Post by nycticorax »

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.

Is there any evidence that desktop users want UWP applications? Given the reception of Windows 8 and MS's subsequent backtracking with Windows 10, it seems like most desktop users prefer traditional winapi applications.

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

#95

Post by nycticorax »

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.

What are some examples of well-known desktop applications written for .net? Recent versions of Visual Studio are the only ones I know of, and those are only well-known to developers.

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

#96

Post by nycticorax »

pjmlp wrote: post #89
m_mueller wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Dyl…

I think your viewpoint is really wrong-headed. Since around 2001, Apple has given you pretty much a single way to write OS X apps: Objective-C and Cocoa. Yes, there was a brief flirtation with Java, but that lasted what? A year? And afterwards it was 100% clear that Objective-C was the way forward. Same thing with GC. They tried it, decided they didn't like it, and then got rid of it. No ambiguity. Furthermore, the basic structure of a desktop application has not changed much at all in the OS X era. In contrast, MS pushed C#+WinForms for a while, then moved on to C#+WPF (without really killing WinForms), then moved on to C++/WinRT (again without really killing C#+WPF). Also, none of these post-Win32 technologies seemed to get anything near universal buy-in from developers. Furthermore, the switch from C#+WPF to C++/WinRT was a profound change: If you had a WPF app, you pretty much had to redesign the whole UI when you switched to WinRT, because it's based on an entirely different way of organizing a UI.

And I say all this as someone who has mostly stuck with Windows since NT 4. Personally, I find it just sad the way they've mismanaged the developer story for the platform, starting, really, with the introduction of WPF.

On OS X, in contrast, the developer story has been pretty consistent since the introduction of OS X: Write your apps in Objective-C+Cocoa. Full stop.

Of course, now Apple has introduced Swift, and the coexistence of Obj-C and Swift does seem like it complicates the developer story. But not nearly to the extent the MS developer story has been, and continues to be, a mess.

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

#97

Post by m_mueller »

nycticorax wrote: post #96
pjmlp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Dyl…

I think your viewpoint is really wrong-headed. Since around 2001, Apple has given you pretty much a single way to write OS X apps: Objective-C and Cocoa. Yes, there was a brief flirtation with Java, but that lasted what? A year? And afterwards it was 100% clear that Objective-C was the way forward. Same thing with GC. They tried it, decided they didn't like it, and then got rid of it. No ambiguity. Furthermore, the b…

Thank you, that's exactly what I meant.

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

#98

Post by ljw1004 »

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,…

WinRT isn't tied to store apps. You can use most of it just fine from .NET/C++ desktop apps. (not the XAML bits obviously)

https://www.nuget.org/packages/UwpDesktop/

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

#99

Post by smithkl42 »

eyko wrote: post #68
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.

In hindsight, I'd certainly agree :-). At the time, given what we were trying to do, it was really the only platform available to us, as it was the only way (at the time, or since) that we could get raw access to local audio/video streams and manipulate them.
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