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The dying platform: .Net

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Re: The dying platform: .Net

#81

Post by drharris »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

Microsoft has too many developers and not enough innovation. They encourage a design attitude that everything has to operate like the flight deck of a 747. Their culture has been incestuous so long that any change is terribly unlikely. There are some really, really sharp guys at Microsoft. Not only does the community deserve better products from such a great company, the developers in many cases have an very unpleasa…

Microsoft is so hit or miss. They're incredibly innovative in the research department, but business tools are definitely overcomplicated (Dynamics, SharePoint). I use C#.NET daily, and it is the programming tool I'm most in love with. There is no easier way to make business desktop apps, and with the new MVC and Entity Framework libraries, there aren't many easier ways to make significant web applications (i.e. beyond a to-do list or blog). Azure level of functionality makes other cloud companies look almost archaic.

I think where they're losing is that they've stopped communicating. With customers, with developers, even internally. They are proceeding down paths they imagined to be important. Some of them are, some of them aren't, and thus the hit-or-miss nature of their current business. I think a lot of this is Ballmer. He's trying to be a Jobs and failing miserably, when all he needs to do is allow his people to actually communicate with the community.

Another part of it is that they can't do anything these days without a bunch of FUD from the media and Anti-MS sheep. I actually like Windows 8 and appreciate the innovation even if there are some hiccups to take care of. .NET is great, and I hope they make it easier to move forward and migrate existing apps to whatever they do next. Will they die anytime soon? Probably not. But if they don't start communicating soon and often, they'll lose some market share for sure.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#83

Post by martijn_himself »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #77
martijn_himself wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They encourage a design attitude that everything has to operate like the flight deck of a 747 I agree. If you have ever done any development using SharePoint or Dynamics CRM API's and SDK's you will know how much of an overengineered mess these applications are. The unnecessary complexity of these applications does however create demand for thousands of developers to untangle the mess.

I feel very sorry for my friends who are actively writing projects in the latest .NET Whiz-Bangedness. They're all so optimistic, with regurgitated Microsoft marketing-speak about how this bell or whistle is going to magically solve this or that problem, and how easy everything is to do now. They've been eagerly awaiting a new customer to try this stuff out on. Then, sometimes just within days, I start hearing the pa…

Absolutely spot on, and I have exactly the same experience.

What completely baffled me when I did quite a bit of SharePoint development of late is, that you are essentially doing web application development, except everything you know about web development is somehow not valid anymore because it has been buried under layers and layers of abstraction.

So you have to go on at least one SharePoint development course, to re-learn web development as you know it.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#84

Post by untog »

The most interesting web-based future of .NET is out of Microsoft's control. Xamarin allow you to make iPhone and Android apps in C#, Nancy.FX is the simple web framework MS never made, Moq allows you to greatly improve TDD...

I'm still glad I know C#, but I haven't had a use for .NET in a long time, and have little reason to. Desktop apps are something else entirely, of course.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#85

Post by marcosdumay »

eduardordm wrote: post #74
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #24

.NET has a long life ahead of itself in the enterprise, where companies on "the Microsoft stack" typically won't even use 3rd party libraries where there is a Microsoft sanctioned alternative. Until Microsoft comes out with a replacement for things like Windows services and web application development, .NET will be around. I don't see there being an alternative even on the horizon. Presumably they could create a Node…

Keep in mind that .NET is relatively new to the enterprise and lots of those companies didn't even get out of cobol yet. Opinion: Timing is a important factor here. My bet is those enterprise companies skipped the .NET/JavaEE era and will jump right into what is coming next. I know a couple of banks that are heavy Adabas/Natural users for decades. When .NET/JavaEE boomed they opted to just wait. Now, no single framew…

> You will have a lot of mini libraries that you will put together to fit your needs.

Like a framework?

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#86

Post by powertower »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #24

.NET has a long life ahead of itself in the enterprise, where companies on "the Microsoft stack" typically won't even use 3rd party libraries where there is a Microsoft sanctioned alternative. Until Microsoft comes out with a replacement for things like Windows services and web application development, .NET will be around. I don't see there being an alternative even on the horizon. Presumably they could create a Node…

And also on the Desktop of every Windows OS, since .NET for-the-most-part is the new Windows API - an abstraction layer that sits and manages the older Win32 API (yes, it's also a few other things – framework, library, runtime, etc).

The author of this peace works on making games. Hence why she thinks .NET is "dying". Her reasoning (points) have little to nothing to do with her argument and just seem to be there to help influence the clueless readers and to collect those that have agendas or chips on their shoulders (80 up votes for this delusional blog post).

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#87

Post by DanielBMarkham »

martijn_himself wrote: post #83
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel very sorry for my friends who are actively writing projects in the latest .NET Whiz-Bangedness. They're all so optimistic, with regurgitated Microsoft marketing-speak about how this bell or whistle is going to magically solve this or that problem, and how easy everything is to do now. They've been eagerly awaiting a new customer to try this stuff out on. Then, sometimes just within days, I start hearing the pa…

Absolutely spot on, and I have exactly the same experience. What completely baffled me when I did quite a bit of SharePoint development of late is, that you are essentially doing web application development, except everything you know about web development is somehow not valid anymore because it has been buried under layers and layers of abstraction. So you have to go on at least one SharePoint development course, to…

Several years back I had a friend with a small business who wanted to do some SharePoint stuff, so I picked up 3 or 4 books on it and read them all.

Oh. My. God. That tool will solve world hunger, land a fighter on a carrier deck at night in a storm, and compute the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It does frickin' everything.

So it also does nothing. You end up having to digest a huge learning curve, creating all these specialty libraries to handle workflows, understanding that you need a view for this, a link for that. It's like having to learn Klingon just to get a cup of water.

Whenever I hear SharePoint any more, I just smile. It's a great tool, and it can do an incredible ton of stuff. I just know the pain that's involved with it, and unless I have no choice I want no part in it -- except for maybe using it as a document repository, and even then Dropbox does all I want with zero learning curve.

Microsoft is constantly distracting me with the coolness of their tools instead of enabling me to quickly solve somebody else's problem. The developer has become the market for them -- and that's really bad for both developers and end users.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#88

Post by snowwrestler »

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.

The Java browser plugin is thankfully dying--that's what comes with the toolbar.

Java on the server is still going very strong; in fact I believe many of Google's services are still coded in Java.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#89

Post by samfisher83 »

C# is a great language. It takes things from java and improves simple things like passing by reference, setter, getters etc. It has great features like linq and it had things like generics before java. VS is by far the best IDE. I feel it is much faster than eclipse. Other than the not being free part it is my favorite language to program since I started out with c++.

Re: The dying platform: .Net

#90

Post by MatthewPhillips »

eduardordm wrote: post #74
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #24

.NET has a long life ahead of itself in the enterprise, where companies on "the Microsoft stack" typically won't even use 3rd party libraries where there is a Microsoft sanctioned alternative. Until Microsoft comes out with a replacement for things like Windows services and web application development, .NET will be around. I don't see there being an alternative even on the horizon. Presumably they could create a Node…

Keep in mind that .NET is relatively new to the enterprise and lots of those companies didn't even get out of cobol yet. Opinion: Timing is a important factor here. My bet is those enterprise companies skipped the .NET/JavaEE era and will jump right into what is coming next. I know a couple of banks that are heavy Adabas/Natural users for decades. When .NET/JavaEE boomed they opted to just wait. Now, no single framew…

I disagree, many if not most cities in the East coast have been dominated by .NET since at least .NET 2.0. There are cities where it is hard to find a programming job in anything else. And the holdouts are mostly old Windows-centric tools like Delphi and VB6.

I also disagree with your outlook for the future. Enterprise loves frameworks only slightly less than they love expensive proprietary software packages where support is built-in. I'd love to see non-Microsoft tech like Go move into the enterprise in a serious way but I don't see it happening. For most of these companies their developers have no experience in anything but the Microsoft stack and a good portion of them either can't or won't learn something else. So you're immediately talking about losing a large chunk of your staff. And good luck finding Go developers.

I can't see Microsoft abandoning this segment so it doesn't make sense to even talk about alternatives.

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