31–40 of 193 posts
1) MS technology is designed as if no other exist - it aims to be a self contained ecosystem. It is the ultimate lock-in.
2) MS business practices - after the last 10 years i think many technologists will never trust them again.
Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup. We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues se…
I agree, and the shop where I'm employed is the same--we do lots of .NET development, but other products are built on other technologies. As far as bad devs go, don't they exist for most platforms? I mean, is every Ruby programmer a genius?
That said, I don't think it's fair to hold the same opinion of ASP.NET MVC developers - as it's essentially the same level of abstraction as Rails.
Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup. We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues se…
There is a strong perception (whether accurate or not--and I honestly don't know the answer) that it's the same old story with Microsoft: if you go the .NET route, you've gotta buy into the entire Microsoft ecosystem. It's not just .NET that you're choosing; you're also choosing Windows servers, IIS, Visual Studio, etc. If that perception is accurate, it's entirely reasonable to say, "Despite liking a lot of what .NE…
It's not accurate, for what it's worth. I'm working on a startup with .NET, and while I do use some parts of the MS Ecosystem (Visual Studio, C#, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, IIS) I use plenty of tools that aren't from Microsoft (NUnit, JQuery, Github, ReSharper, TeamCity, DotTrace, DotCover, Selenium). Any good technologist mixes and matches the things that work best for their solution, right?
The pieces you mentioned are either all on the Microsoft stack or irrelevant to it. jQuery and github, for example, have nothing to do with your backend's stack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree. Especially with tools like Mono that allow you to run .NET code on Linux/Mac OS X.
Mono lets you run some .NET code on Linux/Mac OS X. Some of my favourite pieces of Microsoft technology are missing or too broken to use - for example WPF is an excellent tool for building desktop applications but it doesn't work on Mono, F# sort of works until you try doing recursion with abstract data types.
The world doesn't need more apps with lowest-common-denominator UI. Ugly, kludgy, doesn't work well on any of its platforms because it cannot leverage any platform-specific UI strengths. If anything, the last decade of desktop and mobile computing has shown beyond a doubt that a highly refined user experience is paramount for anything that faces general users. In fact, an app with fewer features, but a superb user experience, will trounce a more capable app with terrible UI (see: Apple).
This is also why I dislike apps that use the UI components from Java - they don't look, feel, or work like native UI widgets. Their layout is often confusing, since they are trying to appease the learned design patterns of multiple disparate OSes with a single design. They end up being awkward, frustrating, and a very poor experience. I have never met a Java-UI app that even reached an acceptable level of usability.
For me, having Mono run well with the obvious cross-platform bits (threading? file system access? etc etc) is enough. I for one really like C#, and would much rather write it than Java.
Closed source. If it breaks (really breaks) I (or anyone without a Microsoft badge) can't fix it. And if they do fix it, it will take a while for the patch to get to me. Pretty simple if you ask me.
We should create a separate thread to list/show our stuff (for those ready to show).
The real answer is just as much about our industry’s culture as it is about technology. No, it's entirely about our industry's culture. Which is a shame. It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM. It never will though, thanks to Microsoft's boneheaded choices and the blog posts like 'Why I don't hire .Net developers'.
Many of us have been at this long enough to at least dimly remember Microsoft's antics in the 90s. Others of us are still dealing with other aspects of the Microsoft technology stack, and hating it.
For instance, I've spent most of a full work-week with a client recently because their SBS 2008 AD server went haywire. We've been troubleshooting ridiculous network issues ever since. We've had to deal with cryptic error messages, software that takes forever to do simple things, software that doesn't do what it tells you it's doing.
And the thing is, this feels normal for anything that comes with the Microsoft brand.
I'm sure there are exceptions. .NET may well be one of them -- I'm totally unfamiliar with it. But, if I'm building a startup, and I already know PHP (or Ruby, or Python...), and I've got all of these bad experiences behind me with Microsoft products, why would I even consider learning .NET?