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Leaving .net

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Re: Leaving .net

#191

Post by malkia »

cubicle67 wrote: post #184
blub wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borland was (almost) killed by its own stupidity. Their RAD tools were miles ahead of anything that MS had, but they got buggier and buggier with each version and their C++ compiler had and still has poor standards compliance. I felt like I had taken a step back productivity-wise with VC++6, but it was solid compared to BCB.

There's a special place reserved in Hell for the management of Borland, right next to the management of Commodore A large part of their demise was due to their constantly pursuing the enterprise market (they even changed their name to Inprise for a few years) where they were largely ignored and unwanted, while ignoring the indie devs and smaller shops who loved them. In the end their developer tools went from best in…

I loved and used Turbo Pascal since the 3.0 days - 5.5 was probably my favourite, while 6.0 was real stable (bit bit bigger). Then I started learning Turbo C at the same time (was it 3.0), and TVision, Delphi for Windows.

Really cool products, and then Microsoft hired the guy from Borland that was responsible for the Forms Editing and other things in the IDE, and Borland changed their trademarks from the cool Delphi/Turbo/Borland to stupid names like Inprise/Kylix/etc.

The Turbo Pascal 3.00 was the smallest IDE ever in the world - 30kb of compiler, editor and libraries :)

Re: Leaving .net

#192

Post by phaedrus »

nkohari wrote: post #189
smiler wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Right now, as a .NET developer myself, it is impossible to keep up with all the new frameworks that Microsoft are releasing.

Hint: you don't need to. Use what works for you.

I disagree. Or at least, you will cause problems for other people. One of my coworkers was delivered a Windows app by a third party - it was written using MFC. I said, "Seriously? In 2010, MFC? MFC was bad even before it became obsolete." My coworker said, "They used it once before and decided it works for them, so that's what they use."

Here's the thing: part of being a developer is keeping up to date. If you find one thing that works for you and don't ever update you are not doing your job.

Re: Leaving .net

#193

Post by josephcooney »

liamk wrote: post #7

Out of curiosity, are people building their own for-fun-projects using .net or even Java? All I seem to hear are people using Python, Ruby and Javascript.

I have a 'fun' side-project written in C# that I'd eventually like to commercialize...it's not a web app though. http://lognv.com

Re: Leaving .net

#194

Post by wrs »

jewbacca wrote: post #190
jrockway wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, quite a few Haskell folks work for Microsoft Research. So it's more like the well-paid Microsoft employees are out there hacking on GHC. The broke mofos are the ones that are working on all that .NET stuff. Working for the government as a low-level programmer is not where the money is at.

> Actually, quite a few Haskell folks work for Microsoft Research What is up with that, anyway? Three of the most important people in Haskell -- the originators of the language and primary developers of GHC, and the foremost researchers in functional programming as I've experienced it who aren't employed by universities, Galois or wherever the fuck okmij works -- are employed by Microsoft Research [0] Seems like a ve…

There's a thing called F# that you should read more about.

Re: Leaving .net

#195

Post by bad_user »

Rickasaurus wrote: post #28

"Real open source isn’t submitting a patch and waiting/hoping that one day it might be accepted and merged into the main line." So the Linux kernel isn't REAL open source then?

I have 3 friends that have contributed patches to the Linux kernel.

How many friends have you had that contributed patches to any Microsoft MS-PL projects, outside of Microsoft of course?

(e.g. ASP.NET MVC, DLR, IronPython, IronRuby)

Re: Leaving .net

#196

Post by thomas11 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #181
thomas11 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS projects cannot guarantee to merge any patch they receive, that would mean disaster. The difference between Linux and MS Codeplex is that if you submit a patch to the former, it will be discussed in the open and it will be judged on its technical merit.

You don't submit patches for Codeplex - you submit patches to projects hosted on Codeplex. Some project managers and devs using Codeplex are better than others at reviewing and taking patches and involvement. So what? Most projects on Sourceforge are just plain dead, but everything there is 'open source'.

Sorry, I abbreviated "the projects on Codeplex that are run by Microsoft" as "Codeplex". That's how I understood the statement of the article where he said Codeplex wasn't real open source. If a project is under MS' wings, sure you can submit patches, but they might be rejected for business reasons or simply because no one cares.

Re: Leaving .net

#197

Post by bad_user »

DrJokepu wrote: post #44
liamk wrote: post #7

Out of curiosity, are people building their own for-fun-projects using .net or even Java? All I seem to hear are people using Python, Ruby and Javascript.

Yes, .Net is actually a nice environment for hacking. C# is a very good programming language, the standard library is very well designed, it's fast, but the what I really like about .Net is how seamless it is to work with multiple languages at the same time. It's ridiculously easy to write some parts of the code in F#, others in C# and some others in Python. This way, I can always chose the best language for each pro…

Some examples would be nice.

Re: Leaving .net

#198

Post by bad_user »

arethuza wrote: post #105
dschobel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for a client application or for the backend? SQL Server + Windows licensing can get crazy expensive. I know stackoverflow made it work via http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ but I believe even with that program you'll have to cough up the exorbitant licensing fees eventually. more here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/stack-overflow-and-biz...

Nothing stopping you using another database - I've started using CouchDB with an ASP.Net MVC application and it all hangs together pretty well. You could use MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite etc. just as easily.

The drivers for MySQL / PostgreSQL are very slow, not to mention stuff like LINQ / Visual Studio integration which are piss-poor, making you wish for SQL Server.

People are used to throw such examples in the air, like you forgot "hey, there's Mono if you want Linux" ... but how many real apps used by actual people diverge from the MS stack?

Hint: it's not ignorance.

Re: Leaving .net

#199

Post by Devilboy »

phaedrus wrote: post #192
nkohari wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hint: you don't need to. Use what works for you.

I disagree. Or at least, you will cause problems for other people. One of my coworkers was delivered a Windows app by a third party - it was written using MFC. I said, "Seriously? In 2010, MFC? MFC was bad even before it became obsolete." My coworker said, "They used it once before and decided it works for them, so that's what they use." Here's the thing: part of being a developer is keeping up to date. If you find o…

That's great in theory but once an application becomes big and settled it is usually too big to just 'upgrade'. Upgrading becomes a massive time sink and when there's other deadlines pressing for stuff that your clients will actually notice then upgrading won't happen. Ballmer wants to release a new VS every 18 months. Just skip every other major release and save yourself 1/2 the pain and effort.

Re: Leaving .net

#200

Post by bad_user »

jimbobimbo wrote: post #100
latch wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this often, but I don't buy it. The implications [seems] to be that most startups either succeed or fail within 3 years. Does anyone have proof of this? My personal observation is that most companies will still be around and they'll neither be millionaires nor broke. In such a situation, the bizspark bait-n-switch can be significant. Picking technology today on the basis that you'll either crash and burn or be…

My point is: if you're doing a startup, you want to have a business, not a hacking hobby. If three years down the road your business isn't generating enough profit one way or another, it's a "busyness" and you seriously should consider doing something else.

> if you're doing a startup, you want to have a business, not a hacking hobby

That's funny, because I know at least 2 businesses that started out as hacking hobbies ... Apple and Google.

You also don't know when your business will reach the "tipping point", going from barely profitable to hugely profitable ... it could be 3 years from now, it could be 7.

... and until then spending thousands of dollars on software for a single server is just plain stupid from a business perspective, when you could be investing in something else or just give those money away as bonuses if you've got nothing else to do with it.

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