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Leaving .Net

whatupdave.com

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Re: Leaving .Net

#71

Post by savoy11 »

Another day, another leaving .NET/Java for Ruby/Python post. This very link btw got posted twice, the first post was 3 months ago. Aren't you guys tired of that? We get it - HN is the place where people will go at great lengths to contribute/code all night rather than use something that works out of the box and juts move on. I am always surprised on the often hardcore technical problems discussed here and the relative lack of in-depth startup/business topics - and this is what starting up a company really is all about.

ASP.NET MVC is probably in the top 3 web frameworks created, and WebForms is not that bad either. ViewState/Page-Lifecycle - you can use this or not - it is up to you. You can always do the HTML5 stuff in ASP.NET too, and most of the code is jQuery now anyway, so why the big fuss?

And what do you mean there is no community around ASP.NET? Have you heard about StackOverflow? The majority of the devs are ASP.NET developers there, with ASP.NET and C#/Javascript being the most tagged posts - literally every single question gets answered asap.

And what's wrong with the 3rd party vendors? They exist, support and enhance the eco-system producing some great tools along the way. Like Rasharper. Like UI widgets. Like database tools. How many times have you seen an open source project with great potential just die because there was nobody to take over and maintain it? Understand - some companies have REAL business out there - not the next social this, web that average crap startups have on $0 revenue. They want REAL partners that they can rely on and WILL pay for that. Heck, you are paying $100K to your developers, why not pay $5K for a proven software and win some time/use the resources of the partner? What is the friggin' deal with that?

Grow up. Is it like mid-age crisis? You just need switching things now and then and trying to figure out the reasons? One of the top reasons I've seen companies fail is to switch technologies just for the sake of switching and "keeping it fun" - from a business point of view it is ridiculous to invest 8 years in a framework and then just switch, like that.

Re: Leaving .Net

#72

Post by maheshs »

Being as a core asp.net developer for 7 years and now working as a python/django from last 5-6 months; I can say every .net developer should change his development platform at least for couple of months, because it make you more mature developer.

.net is a good platform, but the real problem is you have to wait for MS to develop something. For example before "asp.net mvc" there is no option to use mvc in MS world.

For me learning python/django was not a big pain; but running them on ubuntu is a real pain; and i think this is true for every ms developer who want to change his platform.

On linux platform options are great and there are lots self motivated developers and fun projects which is not true in the case of MS.

One more thing - lots of start-ups work on the non ms platform. Once people talk about asp.net mvc they only talk about http://stackoverflow.com/, but we can find more successful example in rails, or django or php; which makes every ms developer on back-foot.

PS: I love c#, asp.net mvc and VS as a developer tools.

Re: Leaving .Net

#73

Post by savoy11 »

maheshs wrote: post #72

Being as a core asp.net developer for 7 years and now working as a python/django from last 5-6 months; I can say every .net developer should change his development platform at least for couple of months, because it make you more mature developer. .net is a good platform, but the real problem is you have to wait for MS to develop something. For example before "asp.net mvc" there is no option to use mvc in MS world. Fo…

This is not correct. There were multiple MVC frameworks on top of ASP.NET years ago, including Monorail and FubuMVC and a lot more actually. All of them were open source. Some of them were quite good, actually.

Were you active there? Did you contribute something? Did you commit fixes/features. No, you did not. But of course you do contribute to the complaining.

Re: Leaving .Net

#74

Post by psadauskas »

kenjackson wrote: post #43
gcr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The classic example is GCC which has probably 10x > more people working on it than any commercial > compiler, yet the Intel and MS C/C++ compilers > generally kill it. Oh? Interesting; I thought that gcc was one of the better ones. Could you elaborate?

GCC has generally had perf numbers that lag the commercial compilers. Although GCC has narrowed this gap recently as C/C++ has generally fallen out of favor by the major vendors (and commercial vendors aren't working much on raw C/C++ performance anymore).

I think thats because GCC will compile anything anywhere. MS is only Windows platform, and ICC prefers Intel x86 CPUs. Since the other compilers didn't stand a chance to compete with GCC on portability, the only other thing they could compete with it on was performance. Since they focused on it, they should clearly be more performant in their niche.

Re: Leaving .Net

#75

Post by lone_coder »

I think that the recently announced NuGet (http://nuget.codeplex.com/) will be a big boost to the .net community. Having the global library repository like Perl's CPAN will be huge in bringing the community together. More users of libraries will mean more improvements too them.

It also seems like the existence and success of sites like codeplex and stackoverflow negates his thesis.

Was glad to read that he was leaving for purely non-technical reasons. I bet he'll be back someday.

Re: Leaving .Net

#76

Post by lone_coder »

shortlived wrote: post #59
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I also had a bad experience with mono. I tried to run a very heavy site on it when asp.net first became available for it. It totally crashed. I'm sure it's matured a lot since then.

After that happened I saw a blog post by someone at microsoft about their testing. They have 1.6 testers for each dev working on asp.net and they've got a warehouse of servers running millions of different tests for months before shipping.

Then I read about who was working on mono's asp.net implementation. Just two guys in a basement. No testers of course.

Re: Leaving .Net

#77

Post by lone_coder »

savoy11 wrote: post #71

Another day, another leaving .NET/Java for Ruby/Python post. This very link btw got posted twice, the first post was 3 months ago. Aren't you guys tired of that? We get it - HN is the place where people will go at great lengths to contribute/code all night rather than use something that works out of the box and juts move on. I am always surprised on the often hardcore technical problems discussed here and the relativ…

I think this story is so interesting because so many of us could never imagine leaving .net. It's got a real shock factor to it. Like someone winning the lottery and throwing away the ticket.

Re: Leaving .Net

#78

Post by sciolistse »

ams6110 wrote: post #58
treeface wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 motivat…

> I might be getting a chance to work with Dot Net Nuke soon.

Prepare to be disappointed.

I used DNN back in '08, and there were plenty of vulnerabilities if you peeked around in the code a bit.. The up side I guess was that they're rarely actually discovered, since there's not much of anyone paying attention.

Actually working with it was slow and tedious as well, really not an experience I'd like to relive (though for all I know it could have improved a lot in the past years.) When forced into using a .Net CMS I find that Umbraco can do the trick and be.. comparatively painless.

Re: Leaving .Net

#79

Post by bad_user »

kenjackson wrote: post #10

Dave has some reasonable points, and frankly I think MS is going where he'd like them to go. But he does miss the boat on a few things. One thing that I do think he discounts too much is the surprising effectiveness of small focused teams. In the same way a small startup is more effective than a lumbering machine, a small team of devs is often more effective than 1000 loosely organized volunteers. The classic example…

      GCC which has probably 10x more people working on it than 
      any commercial compiler
Citation?

Personally I think you pulled that figure out of your ass; especially since the GCC codebase is a mess (on purpose), it's been stable and good enough (and arguably stagnant) for quite a while and all attention shifts lately to LLVM.

     With relatively small developer teams, they've increased in 
     quality as fast as any open source projects I know of
When speaking of both Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC ... they are copying other projects. And we aren't talking only about high-level ideas here, but actual implementation details.

They are great followers, yes, but what did you expect from a company with virtually unlimited cash?

Re: Leaving .Net

#80

Post by jister »

fleitz wrote: post #11

Compared to anything except rails, ASP.NET is pretty good. Yes, the viewstate / gridview bs is annoying and should not be used. The problem is primarily that corporate dev departments want interchangeable parts. They want to be able to hire a developer and him to know the API that everyone is using. They don't want magic. They want everything spelled out so that the code looks identical to the UML and identical to th…

>> In corporate dev you get promoted for doing everything to the letter not something new and exciting. I've seen pages with more than 100 checkboxes on them and arranged in a grid, it was like someone when mental with excel putting a checkbox in every cell.

That is because organizations have their own set of company rules/policies that you have to follow to the letter. Mess one up and you end up being scolded or worst, fired. People that don't have enterprise experience often say things like development should be "fun" and "exciting" without considering that working in an enterprise means that you have to develop "Business Applications" not web 2.0 stuff. This means less graphics, more business rules to follow and tons of reports to generate. At the end of the day what matters is that the accounting department or HR people used the system correctly based on standard policies of the company.

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