Leaving .net

I have noticed the lack of community as well but I suppose the choice of using .Net has more to do with your goals. My company's product uses .Net and I chose that because I know it best. I didn't really have time to learn something new when I was trying to get a product to market.

It's a very marketable skill I suppose in certain companies but I've noticed that few companies I see talked about around here use it much. I mostly see interest in Ruby, PHP, and Python skills. If you want to start an open source project then .Net probably isn't your best choice. I haven't met any .Net developers who work on open source .Net projects. They work on projects in C or Python on their own but almost never C#. The C# open source projects that I've used in the past like Lucene .Net are just straight ports from Java. Lucene is a little frustrating because it doesn't take advantage of many C# features so it feels like programming Java when you're interacting with it.

If I already have a full-time job, and I just want to hack around as a hobby in my spare time, I don't want the language features and runtime to be tied up in the same (probably more) red tape and politicking I have to deal with at my day job. I just want to relax and hack, and if there's money involved, that's a lot less likely to be enjoyable.

It was Microsoft's answer to Java, with hindsight 20/20. I wanted to see their take on portable bytecode, JIT techniques, security, distributed computing, performance, etc. Nearly everybody there was burned by MS's short attention span when it comes to system libraries (OLE, COM, DCOM, DCOM+ for one, and the mess that is data-access libraries, OLE-DB,MDAC, ODBC, ADO, Jet, etc.)

We wanted closure, at least I knew I did. Was barely 20 and had my first serious application. Hundreds of MFC files, elaborate Win32 API integration, MS Office integration and a whole lotta crap. They fucked me over seriously bad, and I have already sunk in a year and a half of my time, skipping classes just to make it. Everytime I implemented a subsystem a new memo would come out on MSDN Magazine telling me to use a component bundled with Office for that, or tie my app into the latest IE release, or "just" use ActiveX.

I fucking wanted an answer. Instead, the fat guy they paid to talk to us said we could all get highly paying jobs if we only learned this new, new thing.

I left that mess for good. First to Perl, then Lisp. Never going back to the API carrots on a stick thing.

I can't up-vote this enough. I started out as a .net developer. I didn't know anything else so I thought that's all there was.

I was very wrong.

I'm trying to get out as fast as possible, but applying for a job as a python developer with 4 years of asp.net experience isn't easy.

It sounds like he is annoyed at the community that surrounds asp.net MVC development.

There was no mention of money, but not all broke mofos chose to not use asp.net for their web app.

I also believe that asp.net would be completely dead for web development without stackoverflow.com. A shame, because C# with Visual Studio is a very nice environment. Lonely (i.e. no community), but nice.