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And all the technologies/hardware he mentions here are agnostic to the web/network portion of a system.
From what perspective are you coming from that you think .NET is dying (student, education, corporate, open source)? MS has never been a technology leader as they tend to let others make the early mistakes then charge in, ask Netware, OS2/IBM, Sony, Netscape. Early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese!
A little background: some of my earliest bits of programming were on VB5, then VB6, and then .NET 1.0 when that first showed up. I spent most of my early years on MS platforms, and for the most part I liked them.
I picked up a Surface RT to hack on last year, after a long absence from .NET. The state of .NET shocked me.
For one thing, the subset of .NET that's available on WinRT vs. "real" Win8 vs. WinPhone is really poorly defined. The documentation is incredibly fragmented, and it was very frustrating the even some relatively basic utility classes weren't available on some platforms. It was a struggle trying to cobble even a basic WinRT app together because of how much trial and error there is ("does this class exist? oh shit, no, okay... what's the equivalent class that's named slightly differently in a slightly different namespace...")
There's also a tremendous lack of open source. I develop iOS apps for a living nowadays, and open source is a huge part of that community. .NET has a huge lack of it - everything substantial is proprietary and commercial. Where I can Google for a bit and slap together some libs in an hour on iOS, on .NET it's downloading the trial libs of some commercial libraries, trying them out, adding the totals, and realizing that the same feature set will cost you $10K a year for these licenses. The alternative on Android/iOS is free.
A more general complaint is MS's schizophrenic support of .NET. When .NET 1.0 first came about it was touted as Microsoft's long-term direction. This was the new platform, and we can count on it being supported as a first-class citizen on all MS platforms for a long-long time. That didn't pan out exactly. Microsoft has a really bad habit of making 90-degree turns every so often that destroys any developer trust. You can't rely on anything on a MS platform because in 3 month's time they could pull the rug out from under you with little to no warning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not if you factor in Windows and SQL Server licensing costs. Most people are using ASP.NET (one of the many incarnations, at least). .NET on individual workstations is... irrelevant. Largely.
Not sure what you mean. Ignoring the server side for a moment, are people not using .Net or do you just not like it? And once you've paid for Visual Studio, what other costs are there, assuming your workstation already runs Windows?
I see no reason why I should be ignoring the server marketplace, because IMHO frankly that's where the corporate dollar is.
I'm apt to agree. I have used .net before in a large desktop app and it was brilliant but I'm sure I will never use it again - deskwhat? Only thing I can think of that might save the day is if MS properly open sourced it. Chances of that have to be pretty much identically zero though.
I mean, ten years ago, did you think lots of people would be coding in Objective C? It's funny how things change.
.Net is one of our workhorses in desktop app development. Maybe it's not the latest trend but there are still a lot of utility apps written in .Net. If your corporate PCs run Windows, as almost all still are, then .Net is your most convenient choice.
Not if you factor in Windows and SQL Server licensing costs. Most people are using ASP.NET (one of the many incarnations, at least). .NET on individual workstations is... irrelevant. Largely.
In your world maybe. For bespoke LOB applications, it really isn't.
The question is, where to next? I've been watching Go for a while, but it looks like a tool from Googlers, for Googlers. Pulling all my dependencies from HEAD? No, thank you. Ironically, Javascript looks very promising right now, compared with the alternatives.
They should also buy Red Gate and Jet Brains and bake their products into VS and SSMS themselves, while happily releasing updates and enhancements for FREE.
Bah...what do I know?
One of the things that I've often thought MS could do to attract more developers to this platform, is to release the brilliant piece of software that is Visual Studio, for FREE. Not just the "Express" edition...the full blown "Ultimate" edition. They should also buy Red Gate and Jet Brains and bake their products into VS and SSMS themselves, while happily releasing updates and enhancements for FREE. Bah...what do I k…
Maybe the author has the feeling it is dying because other platforms are in the news more often?