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Leaving .Net

whatupdave.com

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Re: Leaving .Net

#21

Post by kaffiene »

kenjackson wrote: post #10

Dave has some reasonable points, and frankly I think MS is going where he'd like them to go. But he does miss the boat on a few things. One thing that I do think he discounts too much is the surprising effectiveness of small focused teams. In the same way a small startup is more effective than a lumbering machine, a small team of devs is often more effective than 1000 loosely organized volunteers. The classic example…

GCC targets way more platforms and compiles way more languages than the Intel and MS compilers do. That's not an apples and oranges comparison.

Re: Leaving .Net

#22

Post by Pewpewarrows »

fleitz wrote: post #11

Compared to anything except rails, ASP.NET is pretty good. Yes, the viewstate / gridview bs is annoying and should not be used. The problem is primarily that corporate dev departments want interchangeable parts. They want to be able to hire a developer and him to know the API that everyone is using. They don't want magic. They want everything spelled out so that the code looks identical to the UML and identical to th…

It appears you've never heard of Django or Pylons/Pyramid.

Re: Leaving .Net

#23

Post by okaramian »

fleitz wrote: post #11

Compared to anything except rails, ASP.NET is pretty good. Yes, the viewstate / gridview bs is annoying and should not be used. The problem is primarily that corporate dev departments want interchangeable parts. They want to be able to hire a developer and him to know the API that everyone is using. They don't want magic. They want everything spelled out so that the code looks identical to the UML and identical to th…

My company is currently getting folded into a dev shop with... sub par developers/management that follows pretty much every paragraph you've written (except the F# thing, but I have similar newer code that would weird managers out to some degree).

It's depressing, the framework is great but it's like there are external forces that cause the framework to be used poorly.

I feel like .NET is solid for smaller shops, but once you get bigger those shops seem to want to fold weaker devs in and that tends to put up a lot of barriers/management.

Re: Leaving .Net

#24

Post by DanielBMarkham »

alnayyir wrote: post #16
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #13

I'm a .NET programmer, and i really don't hold allegiance to any one technology or platform. There are some good points here, but who cares? The real issue is that Microsoft treats developers as if they were a separate marketing channel -- with promotions, partnerships, walled gardens and the like. So don't play that game. I'm working in F# on mono, on my own stack. Do I care about branch commits, bad abstractions, o…

I don't enjoy being a lone gunman. Being able to lean on other peoples' libraries and works on Github is an incredible boon and timesaver. Reinventing everything yourself on F# is scarcely an option, especially if you're seeking a valuable community to collaborate with. You might as well tell everyone who doesn't like the government to go buy a farm and live off the land. When I am in the mood for being adventurous,…

I guess I don't understand your criteria.

There's plenty of help available on F#. Mono was painful, at least for me, but nothing like C++ or .NET internals.

When I'm coding I look for community support and ease of solutions. I have that. So why again would I switch?

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't understand your criteria. Who cares if famous person X answers your question? I just want to get my work done, not become a celebrity or hang out with the cool kids.

Once I decided to move to linux I thought about moving to OCaml, Java, or Haskell. It's really not that big of a leap, and I've done some Java and OCaml in the past.

But in the end I liked having other .NET folks making assemblies that I could pull into .NET and use. A zillion guys out there coding for the CLR, and I can leverage that.

All that other stuff -- TDD, CI, good abstractions, dependency management, etc -- that's just good coding practices. Has nothing at all to do with .NET, does it?

In you have a hammer and it's not working, stop hammering. But you don't have to throw out your entire toolbox. Just pick up the screwdriver. In fact, that's the difference between the tool -- VB, C#, MVC, whatever -- and the toolbox. Seems like you just jumped from one example to a broad generalization.

Whatever works for you, though. That's my whole point: instead of making big generalizations about the state of microsoft, .net, and the community, just mind your knitting. You'll kill more time thrashing around reacting to perceived problems than you'll save from a new platform. Don't do that.

This isn't really an argument for or against .NET. Perhaps Java rocks for you. Just don't waste time trying to find the perfect language. Instead go make things that people want. Even if you do that at 50% efficiency, you're still better off than using the perfect tool making a bunch of stuff that has no value. There is a cost to switching.

Re: Leaving .Net

#25

Post by okaramian »

angrycoder wrote: post #20

Funny timing. I've been a .net developer, mostly web - some desktop, since the first release. I am currently going through the interview process with a company that focuses on rails. Part of me is excited, I've been wanting to get away from MS technologies for a couple of years now. Part of me wonders if I am going to miss the safety net of the compiler and IDE, and if the grass truely is greener. I started out doing…

I've been doing development with Rails on personal projects and while Netbeans isn't Visual Studio, it's still a pretty solid development tool.

I also dig how the local Rails environment shows you every call that's being made, plenty of solid logging integration, etc. Also the gems and other libraries being open source and freely available is great, and Ruby crushes C# with regards to Metaprogramming if you're going to go deep (which you probably will).

The debugging style is different but it's definitely several thousand leaps above ASP/VBScript. You'll be more than fine.

Re: Leaving .Net

#26

Post by jules »

keyle wrote: post #8

Funny, but I felt the opposite. I'm sick of open source software that's documented like a donkey's ass and that never works. And all those 'developers' that can't be productive and create things, instead all they're doing is plumbing joomla with jquery while high on json. I guess it's like a mid life crisis, you just have to flip side.

I agree with you. The languages, documentation, and standard libraries of .NET are awesome. The community is definitely lacking though. These days you can get excellent help on IRC about F# and on stackoverflow for everything, but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#.

Re: Leaving .Net

#27

Post by whatupdave »

angrycoder wrote: post #20

Funny timing. I've been a .net developer, mostly web - some desktop, since the first release. I am currently going through the interview process with a company that focuses on rails. Part of me is excited, I've been wanting to get away from MS technologies for a couple of years now. Part of me wonders if I am going to miss the safety net of the compiler and IDE, and if the grass truely is greener. I started out doing…

I've found it to be a really great experience stepping out of a world where I felt like I was constantly re-inventing the wheel into a world where I was constantly seeing the result of a lot of eyeballs and a lot of great decisions.

Once I started relying on my tests/specs to ensure my code was working properly I started to appreciate the beauty of the code I was able to write. I also started noticing the volume of code I _didn't_ have to write.

I think you'll find it a great step forward, good luck with the job hunt!

Re: Leaving .Net

#28

Post by keyle »

patrickaljord wrote: post #14
keyle wrote: post #8

Funny, but I felt the opposite. I'm sick of open source software that's documented like a donkey's ass and that never works. And all those 'developers' that can't be productive and create things, instead all they're doing is plumbing joomla with jquery while high on json. I guess it's like a mid life crisis, you just have to flip side.

Is that how you think of the open source world? A bunch of people writing jquery scripts for joomla? You may want to investigate a bit more (hint: google, facebook, yahoo and a bunch of other all rely on very solid and well documented high quality open source projects).

No it's not what I think of it, it's what I've been exposed to. I've done some open source projects myself, although that was in flex and nobody really picked up after me ;-)

I'm a strong believer in Open source, I used open-bsd for years and I really enjoy Mono and Monotouch.

However the state of 95% of open source project is rather dirty and messy, scruffy development.

Re: Leaving .Net

#29

Post by keyle »

jules wrote: post #26
keyle wrote: post #8

Funny, but I felt the opposite. I'm sick of open source software that's documented like a donkey's ass and that never works. And all those 'developers' that can't be productive and create things, instead all they're doing is plumbing joomla with jquery while high on json. I guess it's like a mid life crisis, you just have to flip side.

I agree with you. The languages, documentation, and standard libraries of .NET are awesome. The community is definitely lacking though. These days you can get excellent help on IRC about F# and on stackoverflow for everything, but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#.

I think it just takes longer for .NET developers to get to that point with fairly new technologies.

Most of them, incl. me, are too busy working as contractors and raking per-hour rates. We're not going home coding until the sun rise.

I did find .NET contractors to have normal social lives, that might have something to do with the lacking community?

Re: Leaving .Net

#30

Post by treeface »

keyle wrote: post #8

Funny, but I felt the opposite. I'm sick of open source software that's documented like a donkey's ass and that never works. And all those 'developers' that can't be productive and create things, instead all they're doing is plumbing joomla with jquery while high on json. I guess it's like a mid life crisis, you just have to flip side.

I, too, am sick of open source software that's poorly documented and never works. Fortunately, I use open source software that is quite well-documented and almost always works.

What's your beef with jQuery? What better closed-source JavaScript libraries are there?

How is JSON even relevant to this discussion?

Why use the disaster that is Joomla as an example of open source when you could have picked any number of other good CMSs? Besides, Joomla uses MooTools, not jQuery.

Maybe you need to reevaluate the landscape.

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