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Leaving .net

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Re: Leaving .net

#71

Post by jacquesm »

twymer wrote: post #67
jacquesm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the safe way, if you want to follow that policy, is to say you develop for the JRE or for the JVM. Neither of these are lies, but they keep with the original idea of keeping peoples focus on "Java".

You are correct, that's the right way out.

Re: Leaving .net

#72

Post by thomas11 »

Rickasaurus wrote: post #28

"Real open source isn’t submitting a patch and waiting/hoping that one day it might be accepted and merged into the main line." So the Linux kernel isn't REAL open source then?

OSS projects cannot guarantee to merge any patch they receive, that would mean disaster. The difference between Linux and MS Codeplex is that if you submit a patch to the former, it will be discussed in the open and it will be judged on its technical merit.

Re: Leaving .net

#73

Post by mitkok »

dingle_thunk wrote: post #32

People tend to think of Microsoft as much more backward than they actually are. Yes, Microsoft isn't the brighest when it comes to open-source, but they do at least try. And yes, if you're going to live in the Enterprise world, things are a little old fashioned, but that's a reflection of the market, not the vendor. Microsoft makes tonnes of neat stuff that never gains traction because people seem to have convinced t…

IronRuby is dead and not because the "people seem to have convinced themselves that MS is an enterprise-only shop". Microsoft killed it.

Re: Leaving .net

#74

Post by recoiledsnake »

gbowyer wrote: post #55
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 !

Many feel the same way about the 'my shit doesn't smell' attitude coming from 37Signals, the _creators_ of RoR, not just a random user like in this case.

Re: Leaving .net

#75

Post by pilif »

in the very early PHP3 days (around 1998), on the official german PHP mailing list, somebody once was comparing the ASP (no .NET back then) and PHP communities.

He said that if he needs help in PHP, somebody will explain the issue and solve it with them. If he needs help in ASP, he'll get back a price list.

It feels like this hasn't changed over the years.

While I agree that it's nice (and necessary) to be paid for your work, if the prevalent attitude is to not help unless in the form of paid consulting or a closed-source software component, a community can't grow because at that point it gets more advantageous to not share information, but sell it (and forbid the recipient from sharing it).

That's one of the big points the OP was lamenting and I agree.

Re: Leaving .net

#76

Post by jeremymcanally »

herewego wrote: post #39

I work for a mid-size (read: 100+ employee) IT recruiting company and I have to tell you that this boils down to one thing and one thing only for most people that have chosen .NET: economics. If you want to be a developer and you're goal is to give your three kids a good life, drive that BMW 5 series, and own a $500k house, then you should be a .NET developer. The math is simple and I have a mountain of data that sup…

Your numbers must be pretty outdated for Rails people (or maybe you don't recruit into well-paying gigs) if you think those figures are well above what we're making. I'd say most salaries are comparable to that.

And I think you're probably right for PHP and Java. The talent pool is saturated, so there's little "demand" for that sort of employee. "Oh you want $70k? Sorry, we've got 10 candidates who will take $40k. Bye!"

But outside of the markets you specify, I think the same situation exists for .NET developers. I know a good number of .NET devs who work in government contracting work and make about half what you say they should make. I know a few who work for product companies in towns other than the ones you mentioned that make about half also.

It's probably different markets, business models, but let's not act like .NET is some magical cornucopia of money that will shower you with many monetary blessings if you just sell out to it (this coming from someone who worked in .NET from its beta until right after 2.x came out).

Re: Leaving .net

#77

Post by mahmud »

shoover wrote: post #49
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…

Did you HAVE to chase every new API as soon as they came out? Did MFC suddenly stop working? Did the Win32 API go away? Why couldn't you just keep going as you were until you really wanted to rewrite to new APIs?

Yes, if you want your corporate productivity app to be Office certified. The UI guidelines are pretty clear about how it should look and behave. First MS pushed the new CommonControls from IE on us, then there was an Office update, then XP came out with new UI elements, like rebars.

With every new release of Windows, Office or IE, the UI got tweaked. Pretty quickly you couldn't even use vanilla C++ anymore to embed the bulk of widgets/controls from Office to do basic stuff like showing spreadsheets in your app. You had to use COM.

I was a sole developer hoping to differentiate myself from other shareware authors by being on MS's good graces. Good grief! I didn't get peace of mind until I dropped them.

Re: Leaving .net

#78

Post by angstrom »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #53
konad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

Myopic viewpoints about code longevity tend to be driven by people that never worked on a project for more than 2 years. Few companies have business models that allow them to avoid the mess. It's not a problem for throw away projects or startups though.

Re: Leaving .net

#80

Post by sofuture »

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 probably a lot of 9-5ers who could have that switch flipped and go from code monkey to craftsmen, but they are stuck doing WebForms and have never really got bitten by the curiosity bug"

That's disingenuous bullshit. Hackers start a lot earlier than "fresh out of college". Disinterested coders aren't lost souls led astray by the ways of .Net, they're disinterested coders; they'd write Ruby with just as little interest.

"in the face of the stale joyless Microsoft platform."

Thanks for making it worse. The .Net community does labor under the illness/weight of the 9-5 couldn't-care-less crowd, but to turn a community problem into a gross stereotype of the framework only serves to demonstrate your unfamiliarity with .Net. .Net is a rock solid, cool as hell and dynamic/evolving platform.

.Net is steered with a much heavier hand than most frameworks, but it makes huge, deliberate moves of evolution (Linq, var/dynamic, PLinq, IronPython/IronRuby/F#, constantly-evolving-C#-syntax).

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