6 ms·

As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked

• robconery 16y ago
  It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost. I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the same ways - but there's a somewhat stunted element to the .NET OSS ecosystem. Hopefully that will change.
  • jawngee 16y ago
    That will never change because the surrounding ecosystem is expensive as shit. It's also very slow moving and wildly outdated.
  • SamAtt 16y ago
    My point really was only part technical though. To give an example you had to switch from Silverlight for a completely nontechnical reason. It wasn't even expense related. But you still had to switch and it still cost you time and money you wouldn't need to spend had you just gone with Flash in the first place. So the point to me is still "don't use Microsoft technology because you'll end up needing to switch"
    • robconery 16y ago
      Can't argue with that. Outside the corporate walls money is king - it's a hard truth and one I was not about to pay for personally :).
    • kenjackson 16y ago
      But isn't that the case with virtually any technology? We've used C, C++, Java, C#, VB, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Flash, etc... We always look at the stack and make a business and technical decision about what to keep and what to toss.
  • squidsoup 16y ago
    Rob, I've always enjoyed reading your posts as I've personally been straddling the gap between the two worlds (MS and OSS) for a long time now. Primarily this is due to our local job market - there simply aren't any OSS jobs where I live, and Microsoft is very deeply embedded in the New Zealand marketplace. C# is a fine language, and ASP.Net MVC is a great framework, but I can't help but feel like the 'other kids' are ransacking the candy store while I'm out on the curb. In terms of testing frameworks and tools, the Ruby/Rails platform is lightyears ahead. I know there are attempts to bring some of the core concepts in RSpec and Cucumber to the .Net platform, but we're not there yet, and probably never will be. The goalposts are always shifting - the OSS platform can respond to change and new ideas much more quickly than the MS platform. We have an MVC framework for web development now, but it has taken 10 years (Java Struts was released roughly around the same time as Webforms iirc)! Testing is only one element of this - in the OSS world we're also seeing an explosion of asynchronous queuing/messaging frameworks, object/document datastores, serverside js and other innovations. I also share your frustration with the coupling of the framework releases to a new IDE. I use Vim for everything other than .Net development, and like the fact that the rug isn't going to be pulled out from under me every two years. As a Microsoft developer it is hard not to feel envious of the OSS community. The Alt.Net community if anything appears to be shrinking, and it is presumably because those developers have come to a similar conclusion as yourself - the cost simply does not justify what the MS platform can offer.
    • euroclydon 16y ago
      BDD on .NET? Check out the S#arp Architecture, it's designed to be the RoR of the .NET world, and it has some nice BDD tools, plus scaffolding for IoC, Unit Tests, Services, and MVC. http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net
      • robconery 16y ago
        SharpArchitecture, while swell and neat, doesn't scratch the itch of "this stuff really isn't that hard". There's a metric s* ton of concepts and code in there that are more suitable for a military defense system, let alone a startup.
• jawngee 16y ago
  As a long time former .NET consultant (been using it since Beta 1), once I went OSS, it was nigh impossible to return to Windows land. Right now I'm the CTO for a largish image licensing shop (think Getty, but more boutique/high end) that is entirely .NET (I inherited it). We are now in the process of moving it off Windows onto an OSS stack. It's a miserable experience. And an expensive one.
  • pbz 16y ago
    Could you elaborate why it was a "miserable experience?" Was it because of the way it was written or the framework / stack itself?
    • jawngee 16y ago
      A combination of a lot of things. For starters, the thing is architected poorly, so that does play a big factor in it. I know, I know, it's always the new guy inheriting an existing system that lays to claim that the inherited thing is a piece of garbage, but in this case it is undeniably true. And I can tell you, as someone who has been doing .NET consulting for the last 8+ years, it's not uncommon for MS based solutions to be architected this poorly, but I'll get to the reasoning behind that later. So yes, poor architecture, lazy design choices (the wrong kind of lazy) but what is most aggravating are two other factors: cost and maintenance. Of course the very first thing I did when I settled in as the new CTO was to figure out how the thing was maintained and how much the thing was costing us a day to run. At my former CTO gig, massify.com, one of my proudest achievements was getting the daily cost of running the site below the price of a pack of cigarettes. Now we are talking about a user generated video content site with not exactly insignificant amounts of traffic and some very healthy storage requirements. When we started out, it was running us around $300 to $400 a day, but by the time I left, it was about $8 bucks give or take. And during the three years I was there, the site never came down unless we took it down for some kind of database migration or similar updating. And all of this happens thanks to OSS software and the ease of use of unix. Now we are in a situation where we are paying for the server OS's, the SQL server instances and a variety of other utilities to keep things running. Not to mention the yearly MSDN subscriptions. That shit is expensive. But what is worse is that it's such a pain in the ass to update and work on. Remote Desktop is retarded, but I have no choice as command line maintenance is simply gag inducing. Something that would take me mere minutes in a linux command line takes me an hour or more clicking around like an idiot in remote desktop. Good luck remotely admin'ing a windows server taking a massive CPU load. Now when I was at Massify, I could maintain and monitor our whole fleet of servers from my phone - and on a couple of occasions even did so while sitting through the previews at a movie theater. Do that on MS? MMM ... no. But back to bad architecture and why it's endemic in the MS development world. ASP.NET. ASP.NET is such a convoluted, poorly conceived, poorly executed pile of shit. THIS IS COMING FROM SOMEONE THAT USED TO SING ITS PRAISES. And when ASP.NET is a cornerstone of .NET development, I don't think it's implausible to rationalize the rampant bad development practices of your typical MS developer back to it and other MS technologies similar to it (I'm looking at you Sharepoint). You see, MS is chock full of shitty architecture. And MS devs learn from MS. It's a cycle of shit that is constantly perpetuated by each release of some new MS technology. And I can tell you, I've seen it time and time again - working for companies like Pfizer, R/GA, some of the top 5 interactive ad agencies, etc. Finding a great MS developer is like finding a great PHP developer. They exist, but are such a minority as to be almost mythical. We used to joke that MCSD stood for Microsoft Certified Shitty Developer. Well, we always pitched it as a joke anyways, in case anyone ever overheard. So, now we are currently wiping the slate clean and moving the whole thing to an OSS stack. And so far, even in the rough beta stages, we've already demonstrated how superior that whole ecosystem is to where it was before. It's very satisfying to show our licensing agents our new shiny search system (using a heavily modified Solr) and watching their eyes light up as we do things with it that the old MS based search engine simply could never do. So that's my rant about that. MS is dying shit as far as I'm concerned, only used by people who are somehow locked into it, or are the bad kind of lazy and don't want to challenge themselves. I know that's not very objective, but it's the lessons I've learned. PS. When I was interviewing with the company, I literally had a 4 hour conversation with the outgoing CTO about the benefits of MVC. He couldn't see them and I couldn't explain it to him in a way he understood. He kept pointing at ASP.NET user controls and how great they were. Of course, several months later I find a page on the admin site that is roughly 26K lines of code in the codebehind with a nice spaghetti mixture of HTML and SQL and C# code. I nearly quit when I saw it.
• percept 16y ago
  A lot of developers and managers I work with don't seem to realize that what's best for Microsoft isn't necessarily what's best for another company. Instead they get stuck in a cycle of adopting whatever MS throws down the channel (this week it's Entity Framework, last week SOA concepts, etc.). Good MS developers should learn to take what's best from the open source world and apply whatever is most useful behind the corporate firewall.
  • TomOfTTB 16y ago
    In fairness (and as the person who made the decision that forces Sam above to use .Net technology) there are reasons to use Microsoft technology even when it isn’t the best fit.   Let’s be honest about technology for a second: Things go wrong.  No matter what solution you use things go wrong and for the most part non-technical management doesn’t understand that.  When something goes wrong they want someone to blame.   If you decide to go with something like Ruby on Rails you have to contend with the fact that management doesn’t understand open source (or trust it) and have never heard of 37Signals.  So the blame falls to you for having gone with a small “experimental” company rather than a “trusted” one like Microsoft (and yes those words in quotes are actual quotes from my attempt at using such technology)   Where as when something goes wrong with Microsoft technology it’s written of as inevitable (that’s where the saying “no one ever got fired for using Microsoft” came from)                     It’s a sad reality but sometimes you can’t pick the best technical solutions.  Sometimes the extra time it takes to use proprietary Microsoft technology is worth the political capital you save by going with Microsoft.  That fact doesn’t make me happy but it’s true.
    • percept 16y ago
      Definitely, and in fairness these are situations where there's a huge investment in MS technologies, with entire teams dedicated to supporting and maintaining the infrastructure. It isn't feasible to throw it all away without a serious commitment from the highest levels of the organization, and a multi-year, multi-million-dollar implementation plan to do so. But at the team and individual developer levels I think there's lots of room for good open source solutions, and this option isn't always considered because developers are looking to MS for the next big thing. I believe this is reflected in the certification programs too, because they don't focus as much on building a sound programming foundation as on making good Microsoft evangelists. From Microsoft's viewpoint, why not? But it's that divergence again from the company's perspective.
• kenjackson 16y ago
  I'm not a web dev per se, but I never heard of Rob Conery until now. I now ScottGu, Anders, Cutler, Brumme, Dussud, Crowley, Russinovich, Spiro, even Luca, but never Rob. Not to say he's not a big name, but to say he's the most high profile MS employee beside ScottGu seems absurd. Even in the dev tools space I think you have to give that to Anders.
  • jmatt 16y ago
    I agree. I had only heard of Rob. And easily the top .NET employee is Anders by far.
  • troygoode 16y ago
    Rob is primarily well known by those interested in Asp.net MVC - which, given its roots as a RoR knock-off (I say that with love), tends to mean MS web devs with an interest in OSS will have heard of him. He is also well known from his SubSonic project - an OSS ActiveRecordish ORM. From your list of Technical Fellows it sounds like you're probably not a web dev, so you wouldn't have run into his stuff. An MS web dev these days would tend to list names like ScottGu, Haack, Hanselman, Conery, Walther, le Roy, Wilson, Verissimo, Lipton. In other news, Anders is totally the cat's pajamas.
• robgough 16y ago
  In the exact same position. .net by day, anything else by night.