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The dying platform: .Net

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Re: The dying platform: .Net

#61

Post by kvb »

potatolicious wrote: post #12
cl8ton wrote: post #3

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!

All of the above? 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.…

I think that the addition of WinRT has made a lot of things much more complex in the short run, but I'm willing to wait and see - I think that the long term vision of a portable subset that runs everywhere is pretty attractive. This is definitely a time of transition, so there's going to be some pain involved as everything gets sorted out.

I think you're a bit off base on open source - there's not the same level of emphasis as on some other platforms, but there's a fair amount of high quality open source stuff for the platform, whether by Microsoft (F#, ASP.NET MVC, etc.) or by the community (Mono, Service Stack, nHibernate, etc.). The move towards NuGet packages has increased the momentum here significantly.

I also think that you're not being fair when you talk about Microsoft switching directions on developers. It's certainly true that the new hot MS technology may come out in 3 months and the way you've been doing things may no longer be recommended, but I can't think of any company as good as Microsoft at supporting their legacy technologies.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#62

Post by gregd »

hga wrote: post #42
gregd wrote: post #17

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…

If they do that, they kill the commercial viability of alternatives, which among other things has anti-trust implications.

In what way? They already have Intellisense and controls built into the IDE. Red Gate and Jet Brains just make them better IMHO. Some people prefer CodeRush and JustCode, although with my scenario in purchasing Telerik, JustCode would become part of the deal... Some people prefer DevExpress and Infragistics to Telerik...

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#63

Post by sergiotapia »

crag wrote: post #55
maresca wrote: post #20

I've been programming .NET since 1.1 and love the platform. It just works. But, I pick my technologies carefully. I called silverlight not working out. I've been staying away from WCF/WPF. No one writes in the news when something goes right, only wrong. This article is more rabble rousing than anything. You can focus on the things that are going wrong. If you are putting out new technologies, some are going to fail.…

You know I was playing around with ASP Web Pages (Razor) and loved it. Too bad WebMatrix is Windows only.

Razor is the worlds most advanced and easy to use view templating enging. It's the easiest and most succinct view engine I've ever used and is a joy to work with.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#65

Post by new299 »

monstrado wrote: post #38

A few weeks back I spent a weekend playing around with .NET and Visual Studio, I was very surprised by how pleasant the language (C#) and the IDE was to use. Also, I went into it with virtually no C# experience (only Java), and I pretty much picked it up immediately, I'm sure there are many differences but I was able to figure out the syntax immediately. I found the IDE really nice, and the debugging tools really pow…

I remember the TechEd conference when C#/.net was introduced. The put up some Java and C# code side by side, it was almost impossible to tell them apart. They justified by saying they were both influenced by the same languages, but to be honest ".net" seemed like it was pretty much aimed as a play against Java at the times (CLR == JVM, C# == Java etc.)

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#66

Post by cygwin98 »

ramayac wrote: post #30
rubinelli wrote: post #16

Java isn't looking too good, either, at least in the desktop. You know your platform has jumped the shark when it comes bundled with a toolbar. 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.

"You know your platform has jumped the shark when it comes bundled with a toolbar.", that was such a sad episode. Oh well, while the Android ecosystem doesn't make a switch, I guess I'll keep using it.

It's coming, with the head of ChromeOS taking over Android now.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#67

Post by kvb »

saosebastiao wrote: post #50

> Inherent hatred for Microsoft and anything it does, even if it is good. I think is pretty sad since I see this attitude from people that should be objective from a technical standpoint, licensing can’t always be an issue. Actually, yes it can. I think Microsoft (especially Microsoft Research) is amazing and have been one of the most innovative companies of the last 30 years. But I'm not gonna pay them for the right…

What is Mono missing for your needs? Between Xamarin Studio and the free editions of Visual Studio, you can now use F# to target iOS, Andriod, Windows Phone, Linux, Mac, and Windows. To me, this is pretty compelling.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#68

Post by forgotAgain »

I would agree with the headline but I find the reasons given to be off target.

The web frameworks have become too complex and bloated. Every major release of Visual Studio seems to bring another layer or way of doing things as well as denser configuration files. A decade or so into it there is just too much there there.

I've used Mono but I'm starting to get concerned that Xamarin is concentrating more and more on mobile tools and less and less on the base .Net libraries. As an example I would point to version 3 still being in beta and the documentation on mono-project falling behind.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#69

Post by new299 »

sergiotapia wrote: post #56
monstrado wrote: post #38

A few weeks back I spent a weekend playing around with .NET and Visual Studio, I was very surprised by how pleasant the language (C#) and the IDE was to use. Also, I went into it with virtually no C# experience (only Java), and I pretty much picked it up immediately, I'm sure there are many differences but I was able to figure out the syntax immediately. I found the IDE really nice, and the debugging tools really pow…

The dev tools for the .NET ecosystem are bar none. It's one of the only things I miss about working with C# when I switched over to Ruby. That and Linq. :P Give me a visual debugger over some terminal crap any day. In this regard RubyMine is a very good solution to debugging Rails applications and Ruby code.

It's kind of been that way since VisualStudio 6 I think, the MS debugger in VS6 was quite neat. The visual debugging tools were always pretty good.

Hmm, this has got me wondering if there's anything like this available for vim, this looks like it might be neat:

http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=663

But no C/C++ support. Could be useful for Ruby though.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#70

Post by potatolicious »

cl8ton wrote: post #29
potatolicious wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the above? 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.…

Some of the things MS pulled the plug on needed it. I can’t vouch for WinRT development but the .NET 4.5 is rock solid and predictable for WinPhone & Win7/8 from my desk. Have you used NuGet yet with over 1100 packages? Microsoft is a public company that makes software and sells it for a profit, what is wrong with this business model? All the free open source software you use to make a product, do you then give your…

> "Some of the things MS pulled the plug on needed it."

Sure, the complaint isn't about pulling the plug on things in general, but rather how fragmented and difficult the documentation has become.

If class Foo has been deprecated in favor of class Bar in a different namespace, say so on Foo's page. If class Foo is a basic utility class, it would greatly help if the documentation could point to Bar, if Bar was the supported equivalent in WinRT.

Things like that. Considering how sparse the community support can be (I find .NET discussion on StackOverflow to be substantially less voluminous than, say, iOS/Cocoa dev), the reliance on first-party docs is not really optional.

> "Have you used NuGet yet with over 1100 packages?"

Yes.

> "Microsoft is a public company that makes software and sells it for a profit, what is wrong with this business model?"

You seem to be under the impression I'm railing against Microsoft. I honestly couldn't care less about Microsoft's business model. I'm strictly speaking from the perspective of an app developer - a demographic Microsoft seems to be keen to court. My experiences so far seems to indicate 3 choices:

- Develop on Android/iOS, gain access to enormous volume of free (as in beer) libraries that will speed my work along and make my life easier.

- Develop on WinRT (and WinPhone? my exposure on that side is limited) and home-brew a lot of core utility functionality because it doesn't exist in free (as in beer) form.

- Develop on WinRT and pay astronomical licensing costs for core utility functionality, which is an easier pill to swallow if the profitability of the Windows Store is more reliable.

This isn't a philosophical argument about profiting off of code, about the freedom of knowledge, or anything like that. This is a plainly pragmatic argument about developing for Microsoft's latest-and-greatest platform, and how there are very large consequences that make their platform much less attractive to developers as a consequence of both their business model as well as their approach to support and documentation.

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