Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

news.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 937 posts

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#311

Post by aerique »

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #224

I feel like the last couple years I've been cheerleading for MS and telling people how much they've changed, how open things are becoming, and how awesome the development experience is. It's fallen on deaf ears or met with resistance, but today's announcements are really gonna drive the point home. Developers need to start looking more seriously at C#/.Net. The Scotts (Hanselman/Guthrie), Miguel De Icaza and so many…

Too little, too late IMHO.

Also MS has always come across as very opportunistic, giving the impression they will drop support for this if it serves them better.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#312

Post by jameshart »

jacquesm wrote: post #266
tlb wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset. It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your…

> I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system. I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this c…

Same logic presumably applies to any kind of non-system application, then. Your OS shouldn't come with any particular choice of network client tool - wget (hey! Some of us prefer curl!), ssh, dig. Microsoft's inclusion of notepad.exe in windows is obviously unfair to open source and commercial competitors in the text editing space - and the fact that basically any windows standard text editor control is an instance of the notepad editing UI below the surface is precisely the kind of cross-layer mixing you object to.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#313

Post by dec0dedab0de »

tlb wrote: post #253
jacquesm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Stacker - Netscape - SCO And many others besides. Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation. This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in…

I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset. It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your…

The problem with them including IE with windows was that IE wasn't following standards. The idea was to force the server market to tend towards IIS instead of other servers. Netscape cared because they made their real money from server software.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#315

Post by valarauca1 »

Guvante wrote: post #281
pjc50 wrote: post #138

The politics of this are interesting, and IMO related to the decline of the PC as a platform. Suddenly Microsoft is the outsider crying for "openness" and "freedom" while hammering on the gates of the Google/Apple ecosystem. For Microsoft, it's less bad if everyone switches to an uncontrolled platform than if they switch to a platform locked in by a competitor. The embrace/extend/extinguish logic works the other way…

> The politics of this are interesting, and IMO related to the decline of the PC as a platform. Why would this signal the death of PC? If anything this is most closely related to the death of Windows Server, since a ton of application development is done via the web.

"Signalling the Death of X" is a horrible term to use.

Mainframes have been dead since the early 80's. Yet IBM maintained being relatively strong until only recently, surviving 30 years on a "Dead" platform.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#316

Post by Pxtl »

jpgvm wrote: post #61

I'm a hardcore *nix guy but boy do I love me some C#. Up until now it's been the best language I have worked with but the worst platform due to it's lack of 'nice things' that we just expect from languages/ecosystems these days. Where 'nice things' is defined as being open-source, having open-source ecosystem of developer tools etc. This isn't so much the beginning (as good stuff has been happening for a couple of ye…

Microsoft has been playing catch-up on developing that "nice things" like trying to build an open-source community. NuGet, open-sourcing the ASP.Net and EF stacks, etc. A long way to go, but they've recognized their big failing and are moving on it.

MS makes some great technology and some terrible tech... but the problem is the terrible tech gets the same blessing as the great tech. An open-source community is the best way to develop best practices and properly replace their false-steps.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#317

Post by eloisant »

jkrems wrote: post #258
eloisant wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# as a language is better than Java, but not as good as Scala.

Yes, that's why you would use F# in .NET if you want something like Scala. And then I heard many people say that .NET wins again.

F# is not really like Scala in the sense that it's more "extreme" in terms of FP, you can't easy fallback on more classical patterns if FP doesn't work well for your problem.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#318

Post by psibi »

jbooth wrote: post #297
eranation wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you are being down voted. Erik Meijer, a huge .NET contributor who worked at Microsoft (on C# among other things), and was behind the reactive .NET extensions (and also a big Haskell contributor) - he was saying exactly the same thing about Scala vs C# - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/covariance-contravariance... I can also testify as someone who uses Scala on a day to day basis and used C# at wo…

Probably because, A), it was an uncalled-for digression into language wars, and B), now that we're here anyways, a lot of us think the majority of features in scala and Haskell for that matter are fundamentally misguided. My goal is not to write elegant code, but to write the least complex code with the lowest cognitive overhead. TCO, 10x the man-hours in maintenance and all that. If the choice is between having to w…

> majority of features in scala and Haskell for that matter are fundamentally misguided

I'm interested in the Haskell part. What features do you think are fundamentally misguided ?

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#319

Post by jacquesm »

jameshart wrote: post #312
jacquesm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system. I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this c…

Same logic presumably applies to any kind of non-system application, then. Your OS shouldn't come with any particular choice of network client tool - wget (hey! Some of us prefer curl!), ssh, dig. Microsoft's inclusion of notepad.exe in windows is obviously unfair to open source and commercial competitors in the text editing space - and the fact that basically any windows standard text editor control is an instance o…

I think the line starts to blur as soon as your software uses API calls that are only known to you, the OS vendor, when you use your market muscle in the OS field to attempt to dominate or crowd out competitors in established fields and so on. I don't think anybody would read what I wrote as an objection to the presence of notepad.exe with the windows distribution and I note that that presence never stopped anybody from releasing more capable text editors, in fact I believe microsoft ships such a product themselves at a premium.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#320

Post by unoti »

bussiere wrote: post #243
jjoonathan wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question from an outsider: it looks like Epic and Crytek have finally gotten around to moving in to the "low-end" of the game engine market. What's still unique about unity?

Laziness. And your graphic designer can use it. As a lot of engine, it's nice when you want something simple very quick. But when you want to tweak it or make it things more specific it's a lot of time a pain in the *. It can save time in the beginning and you will prototype early. Easy to use and easy to access.

I work on a team with a graphic designer who cannot code at all, and is doing amazing things with Unreal Engine. This includes coding shaders (yes, shaders!) using only the blueprint drag and drop system. You just set up how you want it to look, and the system compiles it to shaders under the covers. The technology is super amazing.

The revolution in competition for indie game development platforms is here. I don't know why Crytek is doing, but Unreal Engine is very usable and amazing technology.

Post reply on HN