4 ms·
This article is dead on from my perspective. I was one of those long-time Windows devs, started on the Win16 API, and I had invested quite a bit of time and eff
by markbnj 10y ago
This article is dead on from my perspective. I was one of those long-time Windows devs, started on the Win16 API, and I had invested quite a bit of time and effort into WPF and Silverlight because I thought it was cool. I remember that exact announcement, and my immediate thought was that they were ditching WPF/XAML for this new thing, whatever it was, and I just could not see where that was going. I started working in python learning django on linux a few days later and haven't looked back at Windows much since. I don't know how the .NET ecosystem ultimately was impacted, but every developer has to make decisions about how to invest the scarce resource of time, and I am sure there were many people who reacted the same way the author and I did.
- UK-AL 10y agoWPF and WinRT share similar ways of working.
- markbnj 10y agoYou could say that about most Microsoft APIs/platforms over the years. The key difference for me is that when it was Win16 -> Win32 and then COM/DCOM -> MFC -> ATL -> .NET -> etc. there weren't really many viable alternatives to deliver software to a large user base. That has all changed dramatically, and so it was important for MS to be very clear, and they weren't. Of course there are other factors as well: it used to be cheap to be an MS dev and then it got very expensive and is now back to cheap-ish again; they used to be the jeans and a t-shirt insurgent and now they're the big enterprise IT vendor, etc., etc.
- skalkin 10y agoSame here. I have been heavily exposed to C# / .NET at that time, but after the announcement came out we started looking into other platforms, and it has never been the same ever since.