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Leaving .Net

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Re: Leaving .Net

#51

Post by huertanix »

I've been waiting for someone to say this; Every development language includes a development community, and in this case, .NET communities are more or less stenciled across internal department lines and rarely extend much further. When I first started working as a developer, I thought it was just my then employer's department tribalism, but no. These patterns are things I've seen in every .NET shop I've ever worked for. Each shop had their own interal closed-source data logger, data mapping, and some other frameworks that were shared internally, but accomplished in an unpolished, mediocre manner. Each shop's code was redundantly similar and none of it was impressive.

The internal frameworks developed in .NET shops are inefficient and mediocre not because the Ruby or Python communities are full of pure genius, but because they have more than a single person continuously working on improving them. Pythonists and Rubyists have a culture of sharing and coding in a constant loop of feedback. They talk to and work with each other. People in .NET culture do not. As a .NET developer I have rewritten code that has been created several times before, and it will die in obscurity behind the closed doors of the companies I've worked for.

This is something I only begun to realize by talking to JS, Ruby, and Python developers. I've been teaching myself Ruby since September and hope to leave .NET as soon as I can.

Re: Leaving .Net

#52

Post by ChRoss »

okaramian wrote: post #47
ChRoss wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASP/VBScript Are you referring to classic ASP? VS (for .NET) has great debugging features.

I am indeed referring to classic ASP, when the poster said taking a step back I assumed he meant classic ASP over ASP.NET.

I'm sorry for that, I guess I missed out that details since the topic is about .NET.

definitely several thousand leaps above ASP/VBScript

But still, I disagree with the choice of words in your comment. I used VS Interdev for classic ASP debugging in the past, and I find it sufficient enough. Yes, I'm sure there are other IDE/tools which can do more than Interdev, but I don't think it will be several thousand leaps.

Re: Leaving .Net

#53

Post by Encosia »

huertanix wrote: post #51

I've been waiting for someone to say this; Every development language includes a development community, and in this case, .NET communities are more or less stenciled across internal department lines and rarely extend much further. When I first started working as a developer, I thought it was just my then employer's department tribalism, but no. These patterns are things I've seen in every .NET shop I've ever worked f…

It sounds like you've been working in soulless corporate sweatshops, which would be just as miserable regardless of which platform they adopt. Policy is the only thing preventing you from using log4net for logging and NHibernate for ORM (assuming that's what you mean by data mapping), for example, not .NET.

Re: Leaving .Net

#54

Post by keyle »

treeface wrote: post #33
keyle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not what I think of it, it's what I've been exposed to. I've done some open source projects myself, although that was in flex and nobody really picked up after me ;-) I'm a strong believer in Open source, I used open-bsd for years and I really enjoy Mono and Monotouch. However the state of 95% of open source project is rather dirty and messy, scruffy development.

95%? Would you like to back that number up with anything? Even if I grant you that arbitrary statistic, it says nothing about the state of the selection developers have for open source projects. If 5% of all open source projects are good, that leaves an enormous quantity of good open source projects. What languages do you code in?

Point taken, 95% was a nerf gun guess.

I write in C#, AS3, php, js, etc.

Re: Leaving .Net

#55

Post by huertanix »

Encosia wrote: post #53
huertanix wrote: post #51

I've been waiting for someone to say this; Every development language includes a development community, and in this case, .NET communities are more or less stenciled across internal department lines and rarely extend much further. When I first started working as a developer, I thought it was just my then employer's department tribalism, but no. These patterns are things I've seen in every .NET shop I've ever worked f…

It sounds like you've been working in soulless corporate sweatshops, which would be just as miserable regardless of which platform they adopt. Policy is the only thing preventing you from using log4net for logging and NHibernate for ORM (assuming that's what you mean by data mapping), for example, not .NET.

That's mostly true, but the culture dominated even in a small, non-corporate startup that I worked for in Scottsdale. Once, a few of us were attempting to utilize the CSLA framework in our app, but as soon as the CFO caught wind of the required reading of third party docs, etc, he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the prevalent mentality in the .NET community.

Re: Leaving .Net

#56

Post by dennyferra »

I'm in the same boat but for different reasons. I find learning a new language challenging and fun, I've just become bored with .NET and decided to pick up Ruby on Rails. I've seen great community in RoR, beyond what can be found for .NET, but that's not to say .NET has no community.

Re: Leaving .Net

#57

Post by Encosia »

huertanix wrote: post #55
Encosia wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you've been working in soulless corporate sweatshops, which would be just as miserable regardless of which platform they adopt. Policy is the only thing preventing you from using log4net for logging and NHibernate for ORM (assuming that's what you mean by data mapping), for example, not .NET.

That's mostly true, but the culture dominated even in a small, non-corporate startup that I worked for in Scottsdale. Once, a few of us were attempting to utilize the CSLA framework in our app, but as soon as the CFO caught wind of the required reading of third party docs, etc, he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the p…

I know those attitudes prevail in some shops, but that hasn't been my experience at all with the .NET community as a whole. I do choose my clients carefully, but I've literally never had a client tell me that I couldn't use a third-party library that I chose, open source or not.

Another data point: My posts on using jQuery to replace the client-side ASP.NET AJAX stuff got hundreds of thousands of views before Microsoft officially endorsed jQuery and began supporting it. There are tons of .NET developers out there using the best tool for the job.

I think your criteria has to be who and what you're working on, not the platform. There are absolutely shops out there using Rails and Django with the same mentality that makes some Java/.NET shops miserable.

Re: Leaving .Net

#58

Post by ams6110 »

treeface wrote: post #30
keyle wrote: post #8

Funny, but I felt the opposite. I'm sick of open source software that's documented like a donkey's ass and that never works. And all those 'developers' that can't be productive and create things, instead all they're doing is plumbing joomla with jquery while high on json. I guess it's like a mid life crisis, you just have to flip side.

I, too, am sick of open source software that's poorly documented and never works. Fortunately, I use open source software that is quite well-documented and almost always works. What's your beef with jQuery? What better closed-source JavaScript libraries are there? How is JSON even relevant to this discussion? Why use the disaster that is Joomla as an example of open source when you could have picked any number of oth…

I've not used Joomla, but Drupal is the same. Most modules are poorly documented, if at all. Figuring them out is a combination of trial and error and googling. SQL injection, XSS, and other vulnerabilities are discovered constantly. It's like running a never-ending update treadmill if you use more than a few modules.

I might be getting a chance to work with Dot Net Nuke soon. We'll see if a more commercially motivated CMS is any better.

Re: Leaving .Net

#59

Post by shortlived »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24
alnayyir wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't enjoy being a lone gunman. Being able to lean on other peoples' libraries and works on Github is an incredible boon and timesaver. Reinventing everything yourself on F# is scarcely an option, especially if you're seeking a valuable community to collaborate with. You might as well tell everyone who doesn't like the government to go buy a farm and live off the land. When I am in the mood for being adventurous,…

I guess I don't understand your criteria. There's plenty of help available on F#. Mono was painful, at least for me, but nothing like C++ or .NET internals. When I'm coding I look for community support and ease of solutions. I have that. So why again would I switch? I guess what I'm saying is that I don't understand your criteria. Who cares if famous person X answers your question? I just want to get my work done, no…

> Mono was painful, at least for me

I'm interested to hear more about mono, what was painful exactly? How is the performance compared to the MS implementation?

Re: Leaving .Net

#60

Post by shortlived »

okaramian wrote: post #25
angrycoder wrote: post #20

Funny timing. I've been a .net developer, mostly web - some desktop, since the first release. I am currently going through the interview process with a company that focuses on rails. Part of me is excited, I've been wanting to get away from MS technologies for a couple of years now. Part of me wonders if I am going to miss the safety net of the compiler and IDE, and if the grass truely is greener. I started out doing…

I've been doing development with Rails on personal projects and while Netbeans isn't Visual Studio, it's still a pretty solid development tool. I also dig how the local Rails environment shows you every call that's being made, plenty of solid logging integration, etc. Also the gems and other libraries being open source and freely available is great, and Ruby crushes C# with regards to Metaprogramming if you're going…

> Netbeans isn't Visual Studio

You can say that again. It's also way behind Eclipse. It's amazing how good an IDE can be when you have a large corporation behind it (I.e. MS or IBM).

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