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Leaving .net

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Re: Leaving .net

#51

Post by d4nt »

mahmud wrote: post #2

There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much happened. He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own "blessed" framework. Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are not using the…

I agree, but would add this.

Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done.

Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them.

What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to keep everything loose and open.

I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of it's direction.

I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.

Re: Leaving .net

#52

Post by jacquesm »

lelele wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually. It sucks, but it is the reality of the business environment, web side stuff that is abstracted through some HTTP interface you…

Customers will not worry about "alien" technologies, unless you sell the latter as such. This is a basic sales principle. Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. Clojure is just a Jar, isn't it? Then you are just using a Java library, aren't you? Prototypes usually end up in production, don't they? Then develop such prototypes in an agile language and just make them follow th…

> Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java.

That would be lying though, and it could get you in to a whole pile of hot water. Such 'technical tricks' may work a few times but eventually you'll have a real problem.

Re: Leaving .net

#53

Post by CWuestefeld »

konad wrote: post #22
mahmud wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

Yep. That's why I bailed back in '99. You needed an MSDN subscription just so your apps could tread water. Phone rings "Hi, we upgraded our NT server and now your software is broken". Many hours later "Oh MS changed the DB connection pooling to OFF" Me: Hmm, this Personal Home Page things looks ok, I'll give that a try. And as horrible as PHP is, it behaves itself.

I don't see how this is any worse than trying to keep up with the latest version of some OSS library. Whether it's MS that's revving or open-source developers, changes happen, and if it's a breaking change in a shared library, sometimes you get hurt.

Just yesterday there was a "goodbye python" article posted here, that blamed the fact that so many Linux installations have old installations of python, and so many things are broken when modules in the installation get updates.

Re: Leaving .net

#54

Post by mmphosis »

It's in the best interest of Microsoft that governments and government-sized and super-sized corporations procure systems that need indefinite upgrade$. I think that it is unfair to only pick on Microsoft because watch as that aging but curiously mission critical mainframe, Oracle license, and the entire fleet of Dell, HP, Apple, or fill-in-behemoth-brand-name hardware-software-network combo is going to need upgrade$ too.

Re: Leaving .net

#55

Post by gbowyer »

mahmud wrote: post #2

There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much happened. He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own "blessed" framework. Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are not using the…

"You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier."

Thats the quote of the day !

Re: Leaving .net

#56

Post by city41 »

liamk wrote: post #7

Out of curiosity, are people building their own for-fun-projects using .net or even Java? All I seem to hear are people using Python, Ruby and Javascript.

This weekend I shall be putting the finishing touches on my iPad game, written in C#. If I had written it in C, C++ or ObjC I don't think I'd be anywhere near done with it. For sure, .NET is very "enterprisey" and has all the caveats that come with that. But .NET has grown into an interesting beast in other unexpected ways too.

Re: Leaving .net

#57

Post by cageface »

lelele wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually. It sucks, but it is the reality of the business environment, web side stuff that is abstracted through some HTTP interface you…

Customers will not worry about "alien" technologies, unless you sell the latter as such. This is a basic sales principle. Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. Clojure is just a Jar, isn't it? Then you are just using a Java library, aren't you? Prototypes usually end up in production, don't they? Then develop such prototypes in an agile language and just make them follow th…

What makes you say Python is more appropriate for greysuits? Ruby and Python seem very much alike to me.

Re: Leaving .net

#58

Post by dangrossman »

ihumanable wrote: post #9

I can't agree more with the observations on MVC. It's really a symptom of .Net and Microsoft locking in the vast majority of inexperienced users with overly abstract components. Developers fresh out of college who were taught .Net in school and get a job in it become experts at Partial PostBacks and Code Behinds and binding data to the latest whiz-bang GridDataAwesomeControlForTheWin. The problem I've seen time and a…

There are colleges teaching .NET? I'd never heard of that.

Re: Leaving .net

#59

Post by fiveo »

bbsabelli wrote: post #19
mahmud wrote: post #2

There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much happened. He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own "blessed" framework. Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are not using the…

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.

I thought it wasn't that long time ago MS released Powershell and the latest MSBuild? These are necessities to automate some tasks in software development. Have you seen your build.proj file lately? Is it as nice as ANT or Maven?

Depending on what your practice style is, Java seems to be far ahead in terms of being agile (excuse me for the buzzword). Of course PHP/Python/Ruby are even better.

Re: Leaving .net

#60

Post by mattmanser »

dschobel wrote: post #36
st3fan wrote: post #30

What do people here think of .Net as a choice of platform for startups?

for a client application or for the backend? SQL Server + Windows licensing can get crazy expensive. I know stackoverflow made it work via http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ but I believe even with that program you'll have to cough up the exorbitant licensing fees eventually. more here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/stack-overflow-and-biz...

Only exorbitant if your app isn't making any money but generating a lot of db time.
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