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Leaving .Net

whatupdave.com

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Re: Leaving .Net

#91

Post by bad_user »

kenjackson wrote: post #32
marknutter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core rails team is pretty small and focused. The benefit of it being open source is that an army of people wanting to make a name for themselves are combing over their code to make sure all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed. The quality of Rails obviously doesn't scale with the number of contributors - there are only a few core contributors and a heckuvalot of casual contributors. Makes sense to me.…

I'm relatively new to web development, and I've never worked in an enterprise environment using enterprise software/frameworks, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone given the choice and assuming the cash is the same would choose to go the MS route. I admit naïveté. A lot of reasons. The big reason is that for a LOT of people, open source isn't all that compelling as a feature on its own. For certain classes of…

I agree with you but having to choose between 2 similar products, going with the one that's open-source is a no-brainer in most cases.

If a lot of people don't go with that route is mostly because of inertia or just bad uninformed choices, the idiotic kind of stuff that can drag your company into the ground.

It's not the license, it's the side effects: the ability to fix it yourself, community, popularity, documentation available (thanks O'Reilly) and support (the real deal).

I'm trying to picture what would happen if a customer calls in the middle of the night because the shit hit the fan and I blame it on Microsoft. As it is right now, the small company I work for has hired a kernel hacker and a contributer to Mysql that used to work for Sun, while also maintaining a healthy relationship with some of the core devs of the tools we rely upon ... we can fix and extend anything in our stack.

Can Microsoft provided support top that? I don't think so.

Re: Leaving .Net

#92

Post by troygoode »

bad_user wrote: post #79
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 which has probably 10x more people working on it than any commercial compiler Citation? Personally I think you pulled that figure out of your ass; especially since the GCC codebase is a mess (on purpose), it's been stable and good enough (and arguably stagnant) for quite a while and all attention shifts lately to LLVM. With relatively small developer teams, they've increased in quality as fast as any open source…

I agree with you regarding MVC being effectively a direct copy of a subset of Rails, but what are you suggesting Silverlight is a copy of? Flash? While they're used in similar ways they couldn't be further apart in implementation...

Re: Leaving .Net

#93

Post by ergo98 »

alexro wrote: post #81
ergo98 wrote: post #46

I love .NET the platform -- the VM is absurdly efficient (almost too efficient, making egregious algorithm choices functional), and C# the language is superb and absolutely first class. There is nothing that shames either of those contenders, and I would argue that there are few that even legitimately compete with them. Having said that, I couldn't agree more regarding the community . When MVC came out my only excite…

I develop on the Windows platform since its inception and I'm not aware of any Microsoft community you refer to. I know that there are millions of people who develop with the Microsoft tools and obviously the more people use something the more that something gets abused. On the other hand try getting a job in a decent company based on tech that is also a Microsoft partner and you'll be torn into pieces with the quest…

By community I mean user base.

I'm not talking about outliers. I am talking about the majority of the user base, with few exceptions. To put a bit of a bigoted statement into this, let me say that traditionally Microsoft had several development streams, with the least talented, least motivated career developers finding the Visual Basic stream. The streams converged and it is all the worse for it.

To use the search engine "index", it's a quick way to gauge how frequently a user base dares to go outside of the trivial. With .NET I am frequently amazed when I'm trying to do something remotely complex and in looking for people discussing the topic, find nothing but a few unanswered questions via search engines. It has always disturbed me, and it in essence speaks to the linked article's point.

Re: Leaving .Net

#94

Post by pmjordan »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #89
pmjordan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you might only be doing web dev, so I appreciate that you might not have experience with this, but: I've been looking at languages and VMs for doing GUI desktop app work. Specifically, cross-platform apps using native GUIs on each platform. Java (I normally use Clojure where I can) has decent cross-platform toolkits, but not so great native bindings. .NET obviously has good Windows GUI stuff, Mono's GT…

Like I said, I'm about a week away from forming a solid opinion, but my guess is that I'd use Mono. I'm doing very simple web stuff (fcgi-type, if I can get the fcgi bindings to work) Also a bit of command-line/batch work. As far as I can tell, .NET is the best match for what you want. If i were you, I might want to do a bit of poking around to see how the low-level stuff is configured first.

OK, thanks, will do!

First plan of action is to build a small, (more or less) throwaway app that uses all the major bits we're interested in to get a feel for the platform before betting the farm on it.

Re: Leaving .Net

#95

Post by alexro »

ergo98 wrote: post #93
alexro wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I develop on the Windows platform since its inception and I'm not aware of any Microsoft community you refer to. I know that there are millions of people who develop with the Microsoft tools and obviously the more people use something the more that something gets abused. On the other hand try getting a job in a decent company based on tech that is also a Microsoft partner and you'll be torn into pieces with the quest…

By community I mean user base. I'm not talking about outliers. I am talking about the majority of the user base, with few exceptions. To put a bit of a bigoted statement into this, let me say that traditionally Microsoft had several development streams, with the least talented, least motivated career developers finding the Visual Basic stream. The streams converged and it is all the worse for it. To use the search en…

Is the user base behaviour that much different from, say, php user base or javascript user base or whatever mainstream tool user base behaviour?

Re: Leaving .Net

#96

Post by MikeW »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #89
pmjordan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you might only be doing web dev, so I appreciate that you might not have experience with this, but: I've been looking at languages and VMs for doing GUI desktop app work. Specifically, cross-platform apps using native GUIs on each platform. Java (I normally use Clojure where I can) has decent cross-platform toolkits, but not so great native bindings. .NET obviously has good Windows GUI stuff, Mono's GT…

Like I said, I'm about a week away from forming a solid opinion, but my guess is that I'd use Mono. I'm doing very simple web stuff (fcgi-type, if I can get the fcgi bindings to work) Also a bit of command-line/batch work. As far as I can tell, .NET is the best match for what you want. If i were you, I might want to do a bit of poking around to see how the low-level stuff is configured first.

Do NOT use the fastcgi server for ASP.NET. They are too unstable for use in production. Use mod_mono instead.

Re: Leaving .Net

#97

Post by DanielBMarkham »

MikeW wrote: post #96
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, I'm about a week away from forming a solid opinion, but my guess is that I'd use Mono. I'm doing very simple web stuff (fcgi-type, if I can get the fcgi bindings to work) Also a bit of command-line/batch work. As far as I can tell, .NET is the best match for what you want. If i were you, I might want to do a bit of poking around to see how the low-level stuff is configured first.

Do NOT use the fastcgi server for ASP.NET. They are too unstable for use in production. Use mod_mono instead.

maybe you could help me.

I don't want ASP.NET. All I want is a resident .NET program that gets called when an URL is visited, getting all the parms passed like CGI. I can handle the rest.

I really don't want or need the ASP.NET stack.

Is there some way to do this? So far all I have is a stand-alone program that gets loaded each time using Apache and CGI. Can't seem to figure out how to make it resident and re-entryable without using the HttpHandler objects off the ASP.NET stack, which I don't want to do. Lord knows it was tough enough getting an environment working. Going through the motions of overriding a part of the ASP.NET pipeline in a foreign environment is probably just a bridge too far for me for this project.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Re: Leaving .Net

#98

Post by MortenK »

huertanix wrote: post #55
Encosia wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you've been working in soulless corporate sweatshops, which would be just as miserable regardless of which platform they adopt. Policy is the only thing preventing you from using log4net for logging and NHibernate for ORM (assuming that's what you mean by data mapping), for example, not .NET.

That's mostly true, but the culture dominated even in a small, non-corporate startup that I worked for in Scottsdale. Once, a few of us were attempting to utilize the CSLA framework in our app, but as soon as the CFO caught wind of the required reading of third party docs, etc, he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the p…

"he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the prevalent mentality in the .NET community."

This is an over the top and even somewhat offending generalization. I don't know if all companies in Scottsdale are like this, but I can promise you that it's most definitely not the prevalent mentality in the .NET community nor in most .NET shops I know of.

Re: Leaving .Net

#99

Post by regularfry »

ams6110 wrote: post #58
treeface wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oth…

I've not used Joomla, but Drupal is the same. Most modules are poorly documented, if at all. Figuring them out is a combination of trial and error and googling. SQL injection, XSS, and other vulnerabilities are discovered constantly. It's like running a never-ending update treadmill if you use more than a few modules. I might be getting a chance to work with Dot Net Nuke soon. We'll see if a more commercially motivat…

Having been there and done that, I can say that riding Microsoft's releases is also a never-ending update treadmill. It's one of the reasons I decided to leave it behind - it felt like they were intentionally releasing New Shiny to stop developers from having time to investigate other options.

Re: Leaving .Net

#100

Post by rbanffy »

alexro wrote: post #95
ergo98 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By community I mean user base. I'm not talking about outliers. I am talking about the majority of the user base, with few exceptions. To put a bit of a bigoted statement into this, let me say that traditionally Microsoft had several development streams, with the least talented, least motivated career developers finding the Visual Basic stream. The streams converged and it is all the worse for it. To use the search en…

Is the user base behaviour that much different from, say, php user base or javascript user base or whatever mainstream tool user base behaviour?

Comparing the .NET user base with the PHP user base also says a ton about its technical prowess. PHP is the Visual Basic of web development - it's considered an entry-level language and has a lot of problems. That said, Visual Basic paid a lot of my bills between 1991 and 1995.
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