Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

A couple decades late to the party, but surprising nonetheless. ^_^

Thank you! I'm working on a team that inherited some Scala code from contractors that no longer work for us and we've found that (at least their) Scala is almost as hard to read as bad Perl. Compounding this is a severe lack of good online documentation outside of the standard library reference and simple tutorials which don't go into the depths we need to know (like how do you create a Manifest from Java to call into Scala code that needs it? Or what even is a Manifest?). At least with Perl you have decades worth of online discussions and pretty good documentation of the core language.

It's not the "what" they did to Netscape (releasing a free browser), it's the illegal "why" they did it (to break the cross-platform web).

As the government wrote in a trial brief:

"In short, Microsoft feared and sought to impede the development of network effects that cross-platform technology like Netscape Navigator and Java might enjoy and use to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. Another internal Microsoft document indicates that the plan was not simply to blunt Java/browser cross-platform momentum, but to destroy the cross-platform threat entirely, with the 'Strategic Objective' described as to 'Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#...

This is the strategy an MS exec described as "embrace, extend, extinguish":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

The "embrace" part is particularly gross. IIRC, the court found that Microsoft deliberately misled developers to make them think that apps developed with MS-JVM would work cross-platform, when really it was designed to prevent that. They lied to developers to trick us into wasting our time, to destroy cross-platform technologies that threatened their monopoly.

Want to make it practical? There are thousands of us here who have each spent hundreds of hours struggling with IE compatibility when we could have been building cool stuff. We're building the future as fast as we can, but you and I and Bill Gates will all get to see less of that future before we die, because Microsoft set out to break the web and it took a whole lot of time to fix it.

Of course that was going on 20 years ago now. Microsoft probably has interns now who were born after IE came out. I realized recently that I'm not mad about this stuff anymore. But it's not a history we should forget or repeat.

OTOH, WPF apps already look different than native apps on Windows. Look at pushbuttons for example, they are completely flat in WPF and have a gradient in Win32. (WPF controls are not drawn via uxtheme, but have styles defined in XAML.)

WPF is part of a trend I believe to see, going away from strictly consistent UI styles:

QT used to emphasize simple widgets that you could theme consistently. With QT quick the emphasis is on individual per-app styles themed with css (but you also have the old widgets). Very similar situation in GTK3, where cross-desktop themeing is deemphasized (they removed support for changing theme colors, hid the theme changer in gnome-tweak-tools, and some developers advocated removing themeing altogether). At the same time, individual GNOME3 apps experiment much more with nonstandard widgets and CSS than before.

Windows 8 "Metro" apps are similar. With the simple, clean design language, I thought they would be really design-by-intent. A la "I want a list here, and I want to link it to a detail view. My elements have these properties. Build me a CRUD interface and spice it up with these colors." and it would generate a Metro UI. But instead, after playing with Visual Studio, I find it's almost the opposite: "Place a rectangle at these coordinates, a label there. When the user clicks here, run that code." There is very little in the development experience to encourage consistent UIs, and you have to look up stuff like recommended font sizes manually on MSDN. Naturally, it makes it impossible to upgrade the UI style over all apps in a later Windows version.

Same in Android. Try to make an app look up-to-date, even on currently unreleased OS versions is impossible. UI code is way to low-level, considering a huge fraction of apps are just fancy list-views.

I could go on for a while. The point is that (unfortunately) UI consistency is not a priority nowadays (maybe except on OSX), at least when it comes to tooling (the efforts of many developers to still make consistent UX/UI are very laudable). And compared with the competitors, you could write at least as nice apps in WPF.

The reason they are called corporations is language and vocabulary. The word is like body, as in the body politic. The etymology of corporation is Latin compare "combine in one body" or "persons united in a body for some purpose". That is why we have the word. Everything you added is modern and irrelevant to the question of why we use this word.