13 ms·

Leaving .net

355 points by chrislloyd 16y ago

mahmud 16y ago
There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much happened. He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own "blessed" framework. Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are not using the system for the love of hacking. No. These people want to learn marketable skills and get/keep jobs. Whatever MS pushes out is what the market will buy, and hire for. What do you think killed Borland? Certainly not the lack of excellent quality products. Rather, their incompatibility with Microsoft. Even if your engineering is superior to Microsoft's, you can't afford to break rank, since the market will not follow your lead. I went to a D.C. area meeting of early .NET adopters, a group of hardcore MS-specialists working for gur'ment. One of the organizers had a fat .NET book on the table, which he slapped with his palm three times and said: "Gentlemen, this is where the money is at". You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier. .NET is nice and you can do pretty things with it, but corporate platforms are first and foremost careers and cash-cows for people. The broke mofos are out there hacking on GHC and SBCL.
- arethuza 16y ago
  I presume GHC is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and not Guarded Horn Clauses?
  - mahmud 16y ago
    Yes.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually. It sucks, but it is the reality of the business environment, web side stuff that is abstracted through some HTTP interface you can build in whatever you please but good luck trying to sneak your locally hosted rails app past the Microsoft only mentality prevalent in plenty of businesses.
  - lelele 16y ago
    Customers will not worry about "alien" technologies, unless you sell the latter as such. This is a basic sales principle. Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. Clojure is just a Jar, isn't it? Then you are just using a Java library, aren't you? Prototypes usually end up in production, don't they? Then develop such prototypes in an agile language and just make them follow their destiny. What are you doing around Hacker News, if you aren't able to hack the system? EDIT: However, you should also understand when your language of choice just doesn't fit a gray-suited environment, and indeed I think Ruby doesn't. Python does.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      > Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. That would be lying though, and it could get you in to a whole pile of hot water. Such 'technical tricks' may work a few times but eventually you'll have a real problem.
      - gaius 16y ago
        It's a matter of semantics. "A Java application" is perfectly honest. Just like when someone says "a native application" it says nothing about if it was actually written in OCaml.
        jacquesm 16y ago
        Until the time that HR hires a person to collaborate on your project with 'java' experience and it turns out you wrote your code in clojure. Stuff like that tends to have consequences, especially when there are contracts and liabilities involved.
        gaius 16y ago
        We used to say that Tcl/Tk was a C library with a very complex configuration file ;-)
- shin_lao 16y ago
  Why making money with programming makes you feel dirty?
  - sp332 16y ago
    If I already have a full-time job, and I just want to hack around as a hobby in my spare time, I don't want the language features and runtime to be tied up in the same (probably more) red tape and politicking I have to deal with at my day job. I just want to relax and hack, and if there's money involved, that's a lot less likely to be enjoyable.
    - bruceboughton 16y ago
      The reality is that any reasonably complex endeavour will suffer from this, OSS languages included.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
      Then make it enjoyable: the last bit of code I hacked was "for profit" but I told the guy who wanted it to just pay me with a bottle of Patron. He gets the code he wants, I get drunk on good tequila. What's not to love :-)
      - mahmud 16y ago
        How well do you code? I know of a few startups that will happily send you to AA.
        HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
        Ha! Thanks, that made my morning :-) Seriously though, he was willing to pay me, but I wasn't comfortable taking money for something I had zero experience with (this was my first time using a Web API). And I could tell he didn't want to feel like he was ripping me off by getting my work (all 45 minutes of it) for free, so we met in the middle and both parties were happy.
  - 16y ago
- jrockway 16y ago
  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.
  - jeffreyg 16y ago
    And there's too much money in consulting for the government as a low-level programmer.
  - jewbacca 16y ago
    > 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 very odd place for them to be. Microsoft has absolutely no official relationship with Haskell, but it is the closest thing Haskell has to a patron. I suppose bits of their work are trickling down into C#/LINQ (and VB) at as fast a pace as the ecosystem can absorb it, and it would be unthinkable, inappropriate, and probably disastrous in sociologically interesting ways, for Microsoft to try to push direct Haskell on conservative enterprise. I suppose "they" view it as an obscure research tool, by and for the top talent they retain, granted apparent freedom in their research, to keep a strategic reserve of deep magic. It's more likely that "they" don't think of Haskell at all. ----- Also, while I don't think this strange relationship could be credibly attributed to any calculation of PR or prestige, I'll admit that noticing a sizeable chunk of the best stuff I've read in the field is written by known Microsoft employees has done as much to salve my personal opinion of the brand as their fall from threatening malevolence. It would be interesting to see what it would look like for Microsoft to officially recognize Haskell. [0] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonmar/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/emeijer/
    - wrs 16y ago
- bbsabelli 16y ago
  It sounds like he is annoyed at the community that surrounds asp.net MVC development. There was no mention of money, but not all broke mofos chose to not use asp.net for their web app. I also believe that asp.net would be completely dead for web development without stackoverflow.com. A shame, because C# with Visual Studio is a very nice environment. Lonely (i.e. no community), but nice.
  - fiveo 16y ago
    I thought it wasn't that long time ago MS released Powershell and the latest MSBuild? These are necessities to automate some tasks in software development. Have you seen your build.proj file lately? Is it as nice as ANT or Maven? Depending on what your practice style is, Java seems to be far ahead in terms of being agile (excuse me for the buzzword). Of course PHP/Python/Ruby are even better.
    - regularfry 16y ago
      There's also Rake.net.
- blub 16y ago
  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.
  - cubicle67 16y ago
    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 class (by a very large margin) to an embarrassing copy of Visual Studio, but not quite as good and a hell of a lot more expensive. Kylix was a bold move though, and could have been something good (it wasn't). For anyone interested, Lazarus is still going; it's a cross platform open source ide heavily inspired by Delphi (version <= 7) http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/
    - malkia 16y ago
      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 :)
      - cubicle67 16y ago
        Yes, Turbo Pascal was one of the most underrated languages ever. Blisteringly fast to run and way faster than C to compile. Clean simple language, native strings (yay!), no need to worry about memory management, pointers etc. Built some pretty good stuff with Delphi, and I think sometimes that there's many cases where Delphi 7 is still one of the most productive desktop development packages of all time, even when compared to the latest Visual Studio. and to those who doubt me - well, I like my rose tinted glasses, and I'm keeping them on :P
- d4nt 16y ago
  I agree, but would add this. Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done. Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them. What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to keep everything loose and open. I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of it's direction. I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.
  - smiler 16y ago
    This. Right now, as a .NET developer myself, it is impossible to keep up with all the new frameworks that Microsoft are releasing.
    - nkohari 16y ago
      Hint: you don't need to. Use what works for you.
      - phaedrus 16y ago
        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.
- gbowyer 16y ago
  "You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier." Thats the quote of the day !
  - recoiledsnake 16y ago
    Many feel the same way about the 'my shit doesn't smell' attitude coming from 37Signals, the _creators_ of RoR, not just a random user like in this case.
- palish 16y ago
  Speaking of SBCL, I really wish someone would make SBCL stable on Windows. Please. (Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Don't even worry about 64-bit right now, just get 32-bit fully functional and stable.)
  - mahmud 16y ago
    OT, but here: http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-win32-threads/ http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-...
samstokes 16y ago
Great paragraph at the end of the article: (emphasis mine) To those who want to be part of a vibrant community of passionate developers crafting new and innovative solutions, start hanging out with people who *aren’t tied to a particular language or framework*. Get to your local user groups. All of them. Get a github account and start forking the hell out of everything!
liamk 16y ago
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.
- PonyGumbo 16y ago
  I do. Personally, I love it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  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 problem without having to use the same language throughout the whole project. (I also do a lot of Common Lisp fun coding as well so I'm not exactly a Microsoft fanboy, just to provide some context).
  - bad_user 16y ago
    Some examples would be nice.
- heretoo 16y ago
  <hand-waving> My impression is that .NET just isn't that much for-fun, mainly because the community isn't based in the hobby arena. A decent package repository might help this (I guess there is one, but I don't know it) -- something like PyPi for python, rubygems for ruby (is this correct? [not a ruby programmer - yet!]), cliki for common lisp (okay, asdf isn't so nice), etc. My impression is that .NET development, at least in the web arena, is quite backwards. Another observation to add to my first, is that .NET developers (at least where I work), aren't working on their own projects in anything else, so aren't benefiting from the way of working that RoR (CRUD, HTML templates, gems, etc) seems to have. </hand-waving>
acabal 16y ago
A sizeable chunk of .NET development happens in the corporate/enterprise world. That sort of environment isn't interested in collaboration, open source, etc.--they're interested in the guaranteed support the MS stack provides, and the idiot-proof web basics provided by ASP/webforms/MVC. If shit hits the fan in the .NET stack for a big enough corporate project, someone in the office can phone/email MS and get support for their problem. If a bug is found in the stack itself, it won't languish unsolved in bug trackers for years, like many OSS bugs do. MS will probably fix it in their next cycle, and the corporate devs won't have to waste their time figuring out the nuts and bolts of the stack to fix the bugs themselves, like in OSS. So I think it's this requirement for enterprise support that keeps MS from accepting OSS patches and locking everyone in--it would be too much work to track, validate, and test 3rd party patches when they can just fix it themselves with their own devs and keep going to sleep on their piles of money surrounded by many beautiful women. Unfortunately this sort of view isn't very compatible with the indie developer ideal, or the ideals the author holds--which might one of the many reasons why you see so much Rails/PHP development in the non-enterprise space.
- berntb 16y ago
  >> If a bug is found in the stack itself, it won't languish unsolved in bug trackers for years, like many OSS bugs do. Oh, please... Over the years, I've personally fixed bugs. And sent in fixes. (Stop complaining -- I promise to send tests too, next time!) If I run into one that I am unable to grok in a reasonable time, there are always job boards and money. Bugs -- not to be confused with full sized features -- are generally not that big a problem in even non-popular open source. You don't have to decompile the damn code!! And you can get bugs fixed without waiting for a new release, next year... maybe.
  - acabal 16y ago
    >>Over the years, I've personally fixed bugs. And sent in fixes. (Stop complaining -- I promise to send tests too, next time!) >>If I run into one that I am unable to grok in a reasonable time, there are always job boards and money. That's fine for a smaller shop, or even a medium-sized shop. But when you enter a true corporate behemoth type company, you don't have the option of posting an ad on the 37signals job board and hoping a dev cowboy will show up the very next morning and fix your problem. There's HR hoops to jump through, budgets to watch, schedules to keep, managers and colleagues to keep appeased--that's the kind of red-tape stuff that makes hiring anyone, even a short-term freelancer, enough of a PITA to not bother. And as a corporate dev, you have better things to do than waste time hunting, fixing, merging, and patching a piece of software that should really only be a black-box cog in your greater machine.
ihumanable 16y ago
I can't agree more with the observations on MVC. It's really a symptom of .Net and Microsoft locking in the vast majority of inexperienced users with overly abstract components. Developers fresh out of college who were taught .Net in school and get a job in it become experts at Partial PostBacks and Code Behinds and binding data to the latest whiz-bang GridDataAwesomeControlForTheWin. The problem I've seen time and again is that they have no idea how this is implemented. Ask a green .Net developer about the ViewState lifecycle and see if they know how that really works. I don't mean to disparage all .Net developers or to try and say that being a .Net developer precludes you from ever understanding how these things work. I am trying to say that for a lot of people for whom coding is their 9-5 way to make money, they will never look behind that curtain to better understand their craft. They will believe that Microsoft invented Model View Controller, they will only get exposed to technology at the pace Microsoft cares to expose them to it, and that's a shame. There are probably a lot of 9-5ers who could have that switch flipped and go from code monkey to craftsmen, but they are stuck doing WebForms and have never really got bitten by the curiosity bug in the face of the stale joyless Microsoft platform. Other platforms can be just as dangerous, even RoR has a preponderance of gems that solve common problems in web development that there are probably RoR web devs that have never thought about have you would implement authentication on the web, just slap :acts_as_authenticator_unicorns_rule on the model. It just seems to be a much more pernicious problem in the .Net community and one that grew up out of trying to hide Web Programming and make it Windows Programming rendered in HTML.
- dangrossman 16y ago
  There are colleges teaching .NET? I'd never heard of that.
  - jtdowney 16y ago
    It isn't the first thing they teach you at Purdue but a sizable chunk of CS and CIT students learn C#/.NET
    - arethuza 16y ago
jswinghammer 16y ago
I have noticed the lack of community as well but I suppose the choice of using .Net has more to do with your goals. My company's product uses .Net and I chose that because I know it best. I didn't really have time to learn something new when I was trying to get a product to market. It's a very marketable skill I suppose in certain companies but I've noticed that few companies I see talked about around here use it much. I mostly see interest in Ruby, PHP, and Python skills. If you want to start an open source project then .Net probably isn't your best choice. I haven't met any .Net developers who work on open source .Net projects. They work on projects in C or Python on their own but almost never C#. The C# open source projects that I've used in the past like Lucene .Net are just straight ports from Java. Lucene is a little frustrating because it doesn't take advantage of many C# features so it feels like programming Java when you're interacting with it.
djhworld 16y ago
A lot of enterprise software development suffers from the implementation of boilerplate code and custom in-house frameworks, I think a lot of businesses enjoy and value the level of control they can have over their own development eco-system rather than relying on third party libraries.
braddunbar 16y ago
I can't up-vote this enough. I started out as a .net developer. I didn't know anything else so I thought that's all there was. I was very wrong. I'm trying to get out as fast as possible, but applying for a job as a python developer with 4 years of asp.net experience isn't easy.
- megamark16 16y ago
  I was in the same boat as you a few years ago. I had worked on .NET for a few years, mostly webforms, because that's just what was available when I got started. I started tinkering around with Python because I needed a load testing tool and found an open source one written in python but it needed some tweaking to work with the viewstate. Anyway, I started learning Python and Django, built a few little sites and webapps just to try it out (ok, I was hoping one of them might take off...they didn't) and eventually a Python dev shop here in town found me on DjangoPeople.net, looked at some of my Django work, and asked me to come in for an interview. Now I'm hacking Python (almost) full time, plus side gigs and personal projects, and I couldn't be happier to only have to look at .NET once in a while.
- PandaWood 16y ago
  Maybe there's something to be said for those too lazy to get involved or to try and make a difference. Dave suggested he did get involved, he turned up to usergroups, created new GitHub projects in C#, what did you do? I'm hanging around because while I don't seem to need the extreme, passionate, awesome, 5-million committer projects to keep me happy, I still contribute something. http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/dotnet-zombies_dave-is-leaving-the-hoard/ http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/dotnet-zombies...
nopal 16y ago
"Third party vendor support forums are swamped with questions like 'I put a GridView onto my CallBack control and now I get a ViewState is corrupt error'. The real answer to this question is not the one supplied: 'this is fixed in the next version'. The real answer is of course 'STOP USING SO MANY ILL-CONCEIVED ABSTRACTIONS AND LEARN FROM YOUR PEERS HOW THE #@$#@% WEB WORKS!'." I've found this to be the case, too, to a surprising degree. I wrote a little about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120777 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120777
MikeMacMan 16y ago
My buddy and I are starting a web project (a Q&A site for translations) and have chosen ASP.NET MVC. It doesn't abstract away the innards of the web like WebForms did. It has no more magic than RoR. Why are we using .NET instead of something like RoR or (my framework of choice) Grails? Because my buddy knows it inside and out, the tools are great, and we'd like to minimize the number of unknowns in our project. We're pragmatic. There's plenty of .NET open-source projects out there for things like dependency injection and ORM.
- nopal 16y ago
  Are you participating in BizSpark to get the tools?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - MikeMacMan 16y ago
    You betcha!
- mgkimsal 16y ago
  Sorry to hear you didn't go with Grails (my framework of choice too). Sounds like the .Net choice was based on his skills, and not yours. The domain-first approach of Grails, especially with greenfield projects, is so tempting that it'd be really hard for me not to choose it for something these days. I have chosen non-Grails tech in the last year, but it's been a tough choice in those cases. :) How's the project site coming along?
  - MikeMacMan 16y ago
    Yes, choosing .NET was based on his skills, but also the fact that I'll be focusing on product design and development of the front-end. That work is mostly platform independent. I have another startup project that I'm building in Grails, and I love it, but MVC with Fluent nHibernate doesn't feel that different, lemme tell ya. We just started building the site. We have our ORM, authentication, and DI all setup. I've created some mockups using Balsamiq and we're going to try to use Rally's product to keep us focused and on track.
chrisbaglieri 16y ago
Personally, it's less the lack of community and more the lack of OSS adoption as a result of the lack of community that's a hindrance. .NET developers need to stop drinking Microsoft's Kool-Aid and explore what's out there. If nothing else, they ought to explore the major ports from the Java world (e.g. NHibernate, Spring.NET, etc.). .NET developers are effectively slaves to their tools; don't get me wrong, Visual Studio is an impressive IDE and development environment but it over-shields. It's shocking how out of their comfort zone most are with anything that does not start with the letter 'n' or end with the word 'dotnet'. I agree with the points made about economics and marketability, but, at least for me, if you want to stand out from the .NET crowd (in turn making yourself more marketable), learn something, anything, as long as it's not a first class citizen on Microsoft's stack. Become familiar with a language other than C# or (gasp!) VB.NET. Try IronPython or F#; you're still on the CLR! Learn to appreciate and leverage patterns. The Java community embraces open source, and as a result, patterns become an integral part of their vocabulary. .NET developers need to become more proficient in this realm.
- huherto 16y ago
  "The Java community embraces open source, and as a result, patterns become an integral part of their vocabulary." Generally good advice; but apply good judgment on using patterns. Learn when to use them and don't go overboard. We (the java community) are getting bad reputation for overusing patterns.
Rickasaurus 16y ago
"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?
- thomas11 16y ago
  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.
  - mgkimsal 16y ago
    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'.
    - thomas11 16y ago
      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.
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  I disagree with that as well. You can always fork if you're not happy with the way the project is managed. If your fork is considerably better, chances are, people will pick it up, as it already happened in the past a few times (EGCS, X.Org, etc.)
- bad_user 16y ago
  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)
st3fan 16y ago
What do people here think of .Net as a choice of platform for startups?
- PonyGumbo 16y ago
  The tools are great, and there are a variety of MS programs available to get you using them at low (and sometimes zero) cost - Websitespark and Dreamspark (for students) are both good. From my perspective, the major drawback is that hosting is more expensive.
  - troels 16y ago
    Not merely playing the devils advocate here, but what exactly do you mean by "the tools are great"? I have heard that numerous times about MS stuff, but I don't really get it. I find that the oss/linux/socialist camp has some excellent tools available. But maybe you mean something different by "tools" than I do.
    - regularfry 16y ago
      Visual Studio is excellent. I have my doubts about MSBuild, but the actual code-wrangling side is very good. Doubly so if you plump for ReSharper.
    - PonyGumbo 16y ago
      No hidden message - I just meant that from my perspective, the tools are really nice. I use Visual Studio 2010 with Resharper for .NET development. I use Red Gate's tools for database management. There's plenty of great FOSS stuff. I didn't intend for my message to suggest otherwise.
- dschobel 16y ago
  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/ 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-bizspark/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/stack-overflow-and-biz...
dingle_thunk 16y ago
People tend to think of Microsoft as much more backward than they actually are. Yes, Microsoft isn't the brighest when it comes to open-source, but they do at least try. And yes, if you're going to live in the Enterprise world, things are a little old fashioned, but that's a reflection of the market, not the vendor. Microsoft makes tonnes of neat stuff that never gains traction because people seem to have convinced themselves that MS is an enterprise-only shop... Some examples: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2010/06/01/conventions-for-code-first.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2010/06/01/conventi... http://microsoft.com/web/webmatrix http://microsoft.com/web/webmatrix http://ironruby.codeplex.com/ http://ironruby.codeplex.com/ | http://ironpython.codeplex.com/ http://ironpython.codeplex.com/ http://visitmix.com/ http://visitmix.com/ | http://edge.technet.com http://edge.technet.com http://officelabs.com http://officelabs.com | http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch http://microsoft.com/express http://microsoft.com/express | http://microsoft.com/dreamspark http://microsoft.com/dreamspark | http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.asp...
- cryptoz 16y ago
  I tend to think of Microsoft is backwards because of their reluctance to allow the Internet to be important. For a decade (say, '00 to '10) they basically ignored all the good things about the Internet and tried their best to keep "the old way" relevant. They're slowly getting better (see IE9, Bing and Office Live...all good, but also all very recent) but it's absurd how far behind they are on the Internet. I don't doubt that there are cool, modern projects going on at MS. But they corporate push over the last decade has definitely been: ignore the Internet.
- wipt 16y ago
  On the same train of thought, Barrelfish is a pretty cool project... http://www.barrelfish.org/ http://www.barrelfish.org/
- mitkok 16y ago
  IronRuby is dead and not because the "people seem to have convinced themselves that MS is an enterprise-only shop". Microsoft killed it.
herewego 16y ago
I work for a mid-size (read: 100+ employee) IT recruiting company and I have to tell you that this boils down to one thing and one thing only for most people that have chosen .NET: economics. If you want to be a developer and you're goal is to give your three kids a good life, drive that BMW 5 series, and own a $500k house, then you should be a .NET developer. The math is simple and I have a mountain of data that supports the reality that .NET developers get paid significantly more (20-30%) on average than any of the hot whiz-bang alternatives (Ruby, PHP, Java, etc). The average mid-level .NET developer in a dev-friendly town (san fran, boston, new york, etc) is making $80-90k, Senior $90-110k, Architects $110-130k, Director/Managers $130-160k. Those are averages that don't include bonuses. There are of course exceptions (finance industry add 20% to the above figures, start-ups subtract 10%, etc). Never underestimate the position that money holds in ones relationship with their chosen path in life. I think the authors argument is valid and is the reason why most of the developers that leave the .NET world do, but my observations indicate that most .NET/MS developers are lifers. On a side note, I actively practice development in.NET, PHP, Java, and a few other languages at my 9 to 5. I like to think that I'm fairly unbiased.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jeremymcanally 16y ago
  Your numbers must be pretty outdated for Rails people (or maybe you don't recruit into well-paying gigs) if you think those figures are well above what we're making. I'd say most salaries are comparable to that. And I think you're probably right for PHP and Java. The talent pool is saturated, so there's little "demand" for that sort of employee. "Oh you want $70k? Sorry, we've got 10 candidates who will take $40k. Bye!" But outside of the markets you specify, I think the same situation exists for .NET developers. I know a good number of .NET devs who work in government contracting work and make about half what you say they should make. I know a few who work for product companies in towns other than the ones you mentioned that make about half also. It's probably different markets, business models, but let's not act like .NET is some magical cornucopia of money that will shower you with many monetary blessings if you just sell out to it (this coming from someone who worked in .NET from its beta until right after 2.x came out).
mmphosis 16y ago
It's in the best interest of Microsoft that governments and government-sized and super-sized corporations procure systems that need indefinite upgrade$. I think that it is unfair to only pick on Microsoft because watch as that aging but curiously mission critical mainframe, Oracle license, and the entire fleet of Dell, HP, Apple, or fill-in-behemoth-brand-name hardware-software-network combo is going to need upgrade$ too.
reymundolopez 16y ago
But Mono is a totally different story.
pilif 16y ago
in the very early PHP3 days (around 1998), on the official german PHP mailing list, somebody once was comparing the ASP (no .NET back then) and PHP communities. He said that if he needs help in PHP, somebody will explain the issue and solve it with them. If he needs help in ASP, he'll get back a price list. It feels like this hasn't changed over the years. While I agree that it's nice (and necessary) to be paid for your work, if the prevalent attitude is to not help unless in the form of paid consulting or a closed-source software component, a community can't grow because at that point it gets more advantageous to not share information, but sell it (and forbid the recipient from sharing it). That's one of the big points the OP was lamenting and I agree.
- nlawalker 16y ago
  Who is "somebody," and where do they come from? .Net has tons of community support. The MSDN boards and the blogosphere are thriving and StackOverflow is extremely .NET friendly. Microsoft sponsors MVPs and provides tons of free training content and solid (in most cases) documentation. Product teams and individual architects and developers inside and outside MS publish blogs, videos, tutorials etc. out the wazoo. Microsoft charges money for its products and development tools, but their goal is to get people using their software, and that means getting people to create software running on their platform. Supporting developers who want to write software in .NET is in their best interest.
bhjodokast 16y ago
This blog post was a waste of time to read, and it seems he should not be a developer. He can't seem to handle the job. He's also ignorant. MVC2 is out. Use it over MVC. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/03/11/asp-net-mvc-2-released.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/03/11/asp-net-mv... These types of developers should be administrators, not developers.
augustl 16y ago
This explains the unexpected presence of .Net devs on yesterdays local Ruby user group meeting!
zentechen 16y ago
asp.net mvc was a community effort and open source from the every beginning. It even packed in with jquery javascript library. It can have the same collaborative community support as any other framework. However, I suspect that the most of developers are not interested in contributing is because the learning curve it has for who coming from traditional ASP.NET background. Among those so-called developers most are contractors who are used to hack up quick and dirty web applications that aren't scalable in a few years. On the other hands, we have to give kudos to Microsoft that making things easy for people with little programming background get off the ground.
redstripe 16y ago
I would be worried about the lack of community integration in the asp.net platform if it was stagnant - but it's not. It's moving forward very rapidly. I guess he's unhappy that he can't contribute to that progress. I agree, it would be nice if MS at least reviewed contributions from the community but I imagine that is something decided by lawyers and not programmers in a company that size. Personally I prefer stability in a platform over the exciting ups and downs of open source projects. I just want to get stuff done. I want my challenges to be in the code I write and not in maintaining a patchwork machine. Finally, as a support base I find the .net community to be very good. Just look at how large and helpful the community on stackoverflow is. Communication from MS is also pretty good. You would certainly never see Scott Gu pull one of these: http://blog.wekeroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dhh-fu.jpg http://blog.wekeroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dhh-fu.j...
jasonkester 16y ago
This guy lives in a different world from me. In my world, .NET is just a really good set of class libraries and a well thought out templating system that you can use to present HTML. I realize that it advertises itself as a lot more than that, and that there are thousands of terrible ASP:whatever controls and the ability to drag and drop them in a visual designer, and a nightmare of ViewState and EverythingIsAPostBack and all that other stuff that people complain about. But I've never met anybody that uses any of it. ASP.NET MVC came out, and it didn't change the way I build my stuff in any fundamental way, because the way it expects you to work is the way that anybody who knew their stuff was working already. In the middle of ASP.NET lives a little core of "good". Find it, use it, and you'll be happy.
diego_moita 16y ago
I will never understand this. Whenever I look at a programming technology, all I see is a tool; I just can't see all the moral drama and tragedy this guy describes. Might be a religious thing. Or I am probably very stupid, like all the other "M$ slaves",...
alaithea 16y ago
The short time I spent in .NET development felt incredibly disenfranchising, when the answer to bugs found was always a denial that the bug existed or "that will be fixed in the next release."
rodh257 16y ago
There always seems to be some sort of article that is negative towards such and such programming language/framework on hacker news, I wonder why that is? eg, Java is dead Django sucks Leaving .NET
rasyadi 16y ago
Seems like this is the trend nowadays around the world. Corporate developers with experience in .NET/Java start doing Python/Ruby or other open source stuffs. Some of them start learning iOS or Android platform just to start their own starup.
WesleyJohnson 16y ago
Perhaps off topic, but I've never understood the draw of Microsoft's implementation of MVC. I've watched a few video tutorials and stepped through several articles and my initial impressions are that it seems like you're mixing a lot of code in with the presentation layer, almost like going back to classic ASP. We use WinForms at work, and did so at my previous job as well. Perhaps I defend them because that's what I'm used to and they pay the bills, but I would argue that their not just for inexperienced guys fresh out of school that don't understand how the "magic" works. Sure, you can get far with them without really pulling back the curtain, but use them long enough and delve deep enough and you get a pretty decent understanding. Or maybe I'm the living proof of "you don't know, what you don't know".
PandaWood 16y ago
This just seems to be another case of Ruby Racism http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/ruby-racism/ http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/ruby-racism/

355 points by chrislloyd 16y ago

There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much happened. He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own "blessed" framework. Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are not using the system for the love of hacking. No. These people want to learn marketable skills and get/keep jobs. Whatever MS pushes out is what the market will buy, and hire for. What do you think killed Borland? Certainly not the lack of excellent quality products. Rather, their incompatibility with Microsoft. Even if your engineering is superior to Microsoft's, you can't afford to break rank, since the market will not follow your lead. I went to a D.C. area meeting of early .NET adopters, a group of hardcore MS-specialists working for gur'ment. One of the organizers had a fat .NET book on the table, which he slapped with his palm three times and said: "Gentlemen, this is where the money is at". You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier. .NET is nice and you can do pretty things with it, but corporate platforms are first and foremost careers and cash-cows for people. The broke mofos are out there hacking on GHC and SBCL.

arethuza 16y ago
I presume GHC is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and not Guarded Horn Clauses?
- mahmud 16y ago
  Yes.
jacquesm 16y ago
Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually. It sucks, but it is the reality of the business environment, web side stuff that is abstracted through some HTTP interface you can build in whatever you please but good luck trying to sneak your locally hosted rails app past the Microsoft only mentality prevalent in plenty of businesses.
- lelele 16y ago
  Customers will not worry about "alien" technologies, unless you sell the latter as such. This is a basic sales principle. Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. Clojure is just a Jar, isn't it? Then you are just using a Java library, aren't you? Prototypes usually end up in production, don't they? Then develop such prototypes in an agile language and just make them follow their destiny. What are you doing around Hacker News, if you aren't able to hack the system? EDIT: However, you should also understand when your language of choice just doesn't fit a gray-suited environment, and indeed I think Ruby doesn't. Python does.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. That would be lying though, and it could get you in to a whole pile of hot water. Such 'technical tricks' may work a few times but eventually you'll have a real problem.
    - gaius 16y ago
      It's a matter of semantics. "A Java application" is perfectly honest. Just like when someone says "a native application" it says nothing about if it was actually written in OCaml.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        Until the time that HR hires a person to collaborate on your project with 'java' experience and it turns out you wrote your code in clojure. Stuff like that tends to have consequences, especially when there are contracts and liabilities involved.
        gaius 16y ago
        We used to say that Tcl/Tk was a C library with a very complex configuration file ;-)
shin_lao 16y ago
Why making money with programming makes you feel dirty?
- sp332 16y ago
  If I already have a full-time job, and I just want to hack around as a hobby in my spare time, I don't want the language features and runtime to be tied up in the same (probably more) red tape and politicking I have to deal with at my day job. I just want to relax and hack, and if there's money involved, that's a lot less likely to be enjoyable.
  - bruceboughton 16y ago
    The reality is that any reasonably complex endeavour will suffer from this, OSS languages included.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
    Then make it enjoyable: the last bit of code I hacked was "for profit" but I told the guy who wanted it to just pay me with a bottle of Patron. He gets the code he wants, I get drunk on good tequila. What's not to love :-)
    - mahmud 16y ago
      How well do you code? I know of a few startups that will happily send you to AA.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
        Ha! Thanks, that made my morning :-) Seriously though, he was willing to pay me, but I wasn't comfortable taking money for something I had zero experience with (this was my first time using a Web API). And I could tell he didn't want to feel like he was ripping me off by getting my work (all 45 minutes of it) for free, so we met in the middle and both parties were happy.
- 16y ago
jrockway 16y ago
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.
- jeffreyg 16y ago
  And there's too much money in consulting for the government as a low-level programmer.
- jewbacca 16y ago
  > 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 very odd place for them to be. Microsoft has absolutely no official relationship with Haskell, but it is the closest thing Haskell has to a patron. I suppose bits of their work are trickling down into C#/LINQ (and VB) at as fast a pace as the ecosystem can absorb it, and it would be unthinkable, inappropriate, and probably disastrous in sociologically interesting ways, for Microsoft to try to push direct Haskell on conservative enterprise. I suppose "they" view it as an obscure research tool, by and for the top talent they retain, granted apparent freedom in their research, to keep a strategic reserve of deep magic. It's more likely that "they" don't think of Haskell at all. ----- Also, while I don't think this strange relationship could be credibly attributed to any calculation of PR or prestige, I'll admit that noticing a sizeable chunk of the best stuff I've read in the field is written by known Microsoft employees has done as much to salve my personal opinion of the brand as their fall from threatening malevolence. It would be interesting to see what it would look like for Microsoft to officially recognize Haskell. [0] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonmar/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/emeijer/
  - wrs 16y ago
bbsabelli 16y ago
It sounds like he is annoyed at the community that surrounds asp.net MVC development. There was no mention of money, but not all broke mofos chose to not use asp.net for their web app. I also believe that asp.net would be completely dead for web development without stackoverflow.com. A shame, because C# with Visual Studio is a very nice environment. Lonely (i.e. no community), but nice.
- fiveo 16y ago
  I thought it wasn't that long time ago MS released Powershell and the latest MSBuild? These are necessities to automate some tasks in software development. Have you seen your build.proj file lately? Is it as nice as ANT or Maven? Depending on what your practice style is, Java seems to be far ahead in terms of being agile (excuse me for the buzzword). Of course PHP/Python/Ruby are even better.
  - regularfry 16y ago
    There's also Rake.net.
blub 16y ago
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.
- cubicle67 16y ago
  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 class (by a very large margin) to an embarrassing copy of Visual Studio, but not quite as good and a hell of a lot more expensive. Kylix was a bold move though, and could have been something good (it wasn't). For anyone interested, Lazarus is still going; it's a cross platform open source ide heavily inspired by Delphi (version <= 7) http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/
  - malkia 16y ago
    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 :)
    - cubicle67 16y ago
      Yes, Turbo Pascal was one of the most underrated languages ever. Blisteringly fast to run and way faster than C to compile. Clean simple language, native strings (yay!), no need to worry about memory management, pointers etc. Built some pretty good stuff with Delphi, and I think sometimes that there's many cases where Delphi 7 is still one of the most productive desktop development packages of all time, even when compared to the latest Visual Studio. and to those who doubt me - well, I like my rose tinted glasses, and I'm keeping them on :P
d4nt 16y ago
I agree, but would add this. Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done. Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them. What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to keep everything loose and open. I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of it's direction. I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.
- smiler 16y ago
  This. Right now, as a .NET developer myself, it is impossible to keep up with all the new frameworks that Microsoft are releasing.
  - nkohari 16y ago
    Hint: you don't need to. Use what works for you.
    - phaedrus 16y ago
      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.
gbowyer 16y ago
"You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier." Thats the quote of the day !
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  Many feel the same way about the 'my shit doesn't smell' attitude coming from 37Signals, the _creators_ of RoR, not just a random user like in this case.
palish 16y ago
Speaking of SBCL, I really wish someone would make SBCL stable on Windows. Please. (Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Don't even worry about 64-bit right now, just get 32-bit fully functional and stable.)
- mahmud 16y ago
  OT, but here: http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-win32-threads/ http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-...

samstokes 16y ago

Great paragraph at the end of the article: (emphasis mine) To those who want to be part of a vibrant community of passionate developers crafting new and innovative solutions, start hanging out with people who *aren’t tied to a particular language or framework*. Get to your local user groups. All of them. Get a github account and start forking the hell out of everything!

liamk 16y ago

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.

PonyGumbo 16y ago
I do. Personally, I love it.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
DrJokepu 16y ago
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 problem without having to use the same language throughout the whole project. (I also do a lot of Common Lisp fun coding as well so I'm not exactly a Microsoft fanboy, just to provide some context).
- bad_user 16y ago
  Some examples would be nice.
heretoo 16y ago
<hand-waving> My impression is that .NET just isn't that much for-fun, mainly because the community isn't based in the hobby arena. A decent package repository might help this (I guess there is one, but I don't know it) -- something like PyPi for python, rubygems for ruby (is this correct? [not a ruby programmer - yet!]), cliki for common lisp (okay, asdf isn't so nice), etc. My impression is that .NET development, at least in the web arena, is quite backwards. Another observation to add to my first, is that .NET developers (at least where I work), aren't working on their own projects in anything else, so aren't benefiting from the way of working that RoR (CRUD, HTML templates, gems, etc) seems to have. </hand-waving>

acabal 16y ago

A sizeable chunk of .NET development happens in the corporate/enterprise world. That sort of environment isn't interested in collaboration, open source, etc.--they're interested in the guaranteed support the MS stack provides, and the idiot-proof web basics provided by ASP/webforms/MVC. If shit hits the fan in the .NET stack for a big enough corporate project, someone in the office can phone/email MS and get support for their problem. If a bug is found in the stack itself, it won't languish unsolved in bug trackers for years, like many OSS bugs do. MS will probably fix it in their next cycle, and the corporate devs won't have to waste their time figuring out the nuts and bolts of the stack to fix the bugs themselves, like in OSS. So I think it's this requirement for enterprise support that keeps MS from accepting OSS patches and locking everyone in--it would be too much work to track, validate, and test 3rd party patches when they can just fix it themselves with their own devs and keep going to sleep on their piles of money surrounded by many beautiful women. Unfortunately this sort of view isn't very compatible with the indie developer ideal, or the ideals the author holds--which might one of the many reasons why you see so much Rails/PHP development in the non-enterprise space.

berntb 16y ago
>> If a bug is found in the stack itself, it won't languish unsolved in bug trackers for years, like many OSS bugs do. Oh, please... Over the years, I've personally fixed bugs. And sent in fixes. (Stop complaining -- I promise to send tests too, next time!) If I run into one that I am unable to grok in a reasonable time, there are always job boards and money. Bugs -- not to be confused with full sized features -- are generally not that big a problem in even non-popular open source. You don't have to decompile the damn code!! And you can get bugs fixed without waiting for a new release, next year... maybe.
- acabal 16y ago
  >>Over the years, I've personally fixed bugs. And sent in fixes. (Stop complaining -- I promise to send tests too, next time!) >>If I run into one that I am unable to grok in a reasonable time, there are always job boards and money. That's fine for a smaller shop, or even a medium-sized shop. But when you enter a true corporate behemoth type company, you don't have the option of posting an ad on the 37signals job board and hoping a dev cowboy will show up the very next morning and fix your problem. There's HR hoops to jump through, budgets to watch, schedules to keep, managers and colleagues to keep appeased--that's the kind of red-tape stuff that makes hiring anyone, even a short-term freelancer, enough of a PITA to not bother. And as a corporate dev, you have better things to do than waste time hunting, fixing, merging, and patching a piece of software that should really only be a black-box cog in your greater machine.

ihumanable 16y ago

I can't agree more with the observations on MVC. It's really a symptom of .Net and Microsoft locking in the vast majority of inexperienced users with overly abstract components. Developers fresh out of college who were taught .Net in school and get a job in it become experts at Partial PostBacks and Code Behinds and binding data to the latest whiz-bang GridDataAwesomeControlForTheWin. The problem I've seen time and again is that they have no idea how this is implemented. Ask a green .Net developer about the ViewState lifecycle and see if they know how that really works. I don't mean to disparage all .Net developers or to try and say that being a .Net developer precludes you from ever understanding how these things work. I am trying to say that for a lot of people for whom coding is their 9-5 way to make money, they will never look behind that curtain to better understand their craft. They will believe that Microsoft invented Model View Controller, they will only get exposed to technology at the pace Microsoft cares to expose them to it, and that's a shame. There are probably a lot of 9-5ers who could have that switch flipped and go from code monkey to craftsmen, but they are stuck doing WebForms and have never really got bitten by the curiosity bug in the face of the stale joyless Microsoft platform. Other platforms can be just as dangerous, even RoR has a preponderance of gems that solve common problems in web development that there are probably RoR web devs that have never thought about have you would implement authentication on the web, just slap :acts_as_authenticator_unicorns_rule on the model. It just seems to be a much more pernicious problem in the .Net community and one that grew up out of trying to hide Web Programming and make it Windows Programming rendered in HTML.

dangrossman 16y ago
There are colleges teaching .NET? I'd never heard of that.
- jtdowney 16y ago
  It isn't the first thing they teach you at Purdue but a sizable chunk of CS and CIT students learn C#/.NET
  - arethuza 16y ago

jswinghammer 16y ago

I have noticed the lack of community as well but I suppose the choice of using .Net has more to do with your goals. My company's product uses .Net and I chose that because I know it best. I didn't really have time to learn something new when I was trying to get a product to market. It's a very marketable skill I suppose in certain companies but I've noticed that few companies I see talked about around here use it much. I mostly see interest in Ruby, PHP, and Python skills. If you want to start an open source project then .Net probably isn't your best choice. I haven't met any .Net developers who work on open source .Net projects. They work on projects in C or Python on their own but almost never C#. The C# open source projects that I've used in the past like Lucene .Net are just straight ports from Java. Lucene is a little frustrating because it doesn't take advantage of many C# features so it feels like programming Java when you're interacting with it.

djhworld 16y ago

A lot of enterprise software development suffers from the implementation of boilerplate code and custom in-house frameworks, I think a lot of businesses enjoy and value the level of control they can have over their own development eco-system rather than relying on third party libraries.

braddunbar 16y ago

I can't up-vote this enough. I started out as a .net developer. I didn't know anything else so I thought that's all there was. I was very wrong. I'm trying to get out as fast as possible, but applying for a job as a python developer with 4 years of asp.net experience isn't easy.

megamark16 16y ago
I was in the same boat as you a few years ago. I had worked on .NET for a few years, mostly webforms, because that's just what was available when I got started. I started tinkering around with Python because I needed a load testing tool and found an open source one written in python but it needed some tweaking to work with the viewstate. Anyway, I started learning Python and Django, built a few little sites and webapps just to try it out (ok, I was hoping one of them might take off...they didn't) and eventually a Python dev shop here in town found me on DjangoPeople.net, looked at some of my Django work, and asked me to come in for an interview. Now I'm hacking Python (almost) full time, plus side gigs and personal projects, and I couldn't be happier to only have to look at .NET once in a while.
PandaWood 16y ago
Maybe there's something to be said for those too lazy to get involved or to try and make a difference. Dave suggested he did get involved, he turned up to usergroups, created new GitHub projects in C#, what did you do? I'm hanging around because while I don't seem to need the extreme, passionate, awesome, 5-million committer projects to keep me happy, I still contribute something. http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/dotnet-zombies_dave-is-leaving-the-hoard/ http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/dotnet-zombies...

nopal 16y ago

"Third party vendor support forums are swamped with questions like 'I put a GridView onto my CallBack control and now I get a ViewState is corrupt error'. The real answer to this question is not the one supplied: 'this is fixed in the next version'. The real answer is of course 'STOP USING SO MANY ILL-CONCEIVED ABSTRACTIONS AND LEARN FROM YOUR PEERS HOW THE #@$#@% WEB WORKS!'." I've found this to be the case, too, to a surprising degree. I wrote a little about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120777 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120777

MikeMacMan 16y ago

My buddy and I are starting a web project (a Q&A site for translations) and have chosen ASP.NET MVC. It doesn't abstract away the innards of the web like WebForms did. It has no more magic than RoR. Why are we using .NET instead of something like RoR or (my framework of choice) Grails? Because my buddy knows it inside and out, the tools are great, and we'd like to minimize the number of unknowns in our project. We're pragmatic. There's plenty of .NET open-source projects out there for things like dependency injection and ORM.

nopal 16y ago
Are you participating in BizSpark to get the tools?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- MikeMacMan 16y ago
  You betcha!
mgkimsal 16y ago
Sorry to hear you didn't go with Grails (my framework of choice too). Sounds like the .Net choice was based on his skills, and not yours. The domain-first approach of Grails, especially with greenfield projects, is so tempting that it'd be really hard for me not to choose it for something these days. I have chosen non-Grails tech in the last year, but it's been a tough choice in those cases. :) How's the project site coming along?
- MikeMacMan 16y ago
  Yes, choosing .NET was based on his skills, but also the fact that I'll be focusing on product design and development of the front-end. That work is mostly platform independent. I have another startup project that I'm building in Grails, and I love it, but MVC with Fluent nHibernate doesn't feel that different, lemme tell ya. We just started building the site. We have our ORM, authentication, and DI all setup. I've created some mockups using Balsamiq and we're going to try to use Rally's product to keep us focused and on track.

chrisbaglieri 16y ago

Personally, it's less the lack of community and more the lack of OSS adoption as a result of the lack of community that's a hindrance. .NET developers need to stop drinking Microsoft's Kool-Aid and explore what's out there. If nothing else, they ought to explore the major ports from the Java world (e.g. NHibernate, Spring.NET, etc.). .NET developers are effectively slaves to their tools; don't get me wrong, Visual Studio is an impressive IDE and development environment but it over-shields. It's shocking how out of their comfort zone most are with anything that does not start with the letter 'n' or end with the word 'dotnet'. I agree with the points made about economics and marketability, but, at least for me, if you want to stand out from the .NET crowd (in turn making yourself more marketable), learn something, anything, as long as it's not a first class citizen on Microsoft's stack. Become familiar with a language other than C# or (gasp!) VB.NET. Try IronPython or F#; you're still on the CLR! Learn to appreciate and leverage patterns. The Java community embraces open source, and as a result, patterns become an integral part of their vocabulary. .NET developers need to become more proficient in this realm.

huherto 16y ago
"The Java community embraces open source, and as a result, patterns become an integral part of their vocabulary." Generally good advice; but apply good judgment on using patterns. Learn when to use them and don't go overboard. We (the java community) are getting bad reputation for overusing patterns.

Rickasaurus 16y ago

"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?

thomas11 16y ago
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.
- mgkimsal 16y ago
  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'.
  - thomas11 16y ago
    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.
DrJokepu 16y ago
I disagree with that as well. You can always fork if you're not happy with the way the project is managed. If your fork is considerably better, chances are, people will pick it up, as it already happened in the past a few times (EGCS, X.Org, etc.)
bad_user 16y ago
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)

st3fan 16y ago

What do people here think of .Net as a choice of platform for startups?

PonyGumbo 16y ago
The tools are great, and there are a variety of MS programs available to get you using them at low (and sometimes zero) cost - Websitespark and Dreamspark (for students) are both good. From my perspective, the major drawback is that hosting is more expensive.
- troels 16y ago
  Not merely playing the devils advocate here, but what exactly do you mean by "the tools are great"? I have heard that numerous times about MS stuff, but I don't really get it. I find that the oss/linux/socialist camp has some excellent tools available. But maybe you mean something different by "tools" than I do.
  - regularfry 16y ago
    Visual Studio is excellent. I have my doubts about MSBuild, but the actual code-wrangling side is very good. Doubly so if you plump for ReSharper.
  - PonyGumbo 16y ago
    No hidden message - I just meant that from my perspective, the tools are really nice. I use Visual Studio 2010 with Resharper for .NET development. I use Red Gate's tools for database management. There's plenty of great FOSS stuff. I didn't intend for my message to suggest otherwise.
dschobel 16y ago
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/ 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-bizspark/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/stack-overflow-and-biz...

dingle_thunk 16y ago

People tend to think of Microsoft as much more backward than they actually are. Yes, Microsoft isn't the brighest when it comes to open-source, but they do at least try. And yes, if you're going to live in the Enterprise world, things are a little old fashioned, but that's a reflection of the market, not the vendor. Microsoft makes tonnes of neat stuff that never gains traction because people seem to have convinced themselves that MS is an enterprise-only shop... Some examples: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2010/06/01/conventions-for-code-first.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2010/06/01/conventi... http://microsoft.com/web/webmatrix http://microsoft.com/web/webmatrix http://ironruby.codeplex.com/ http://ironruby.codeplex.com/ | http://ironpython.codeplex.com/ http://ironpython.codeplex.com/ http://visitmix.com/ http://visitmix.com/ | http://edge.technet.com http://edge.technet.com http://officelabs.com http://officelabs.com | http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch http://microsoft.com/express http://microsoft.com/express | http://microsoft.com/dreamspark http://microsoft.com/dreamspark | http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.asp...

cryptoz 16y ago
I tend to think of Microsoft is backwards because of their reluctance to allow the Internet to be important. For a decade (say, '00 to '10) they basically ignored all the good things about the Internet and tried their best to keep "the old way" relevant. They're slowly getting better (see IE9, Bing and Office Live...all good, but also all very recent) but it's absurd how far behind they are on the Internet. I don't doubt that there are cool, modern projects going on at MS. But they corporate push over the last decade has definitely been: ignore the Internet.
wipt 16y ago
On the same train of thought, Barrelfish is a pretty cool project... http://www.barrelfish.org/ http://www.barrelfish.org/
mitkok 16y ago
IronRuby is dead and not because the "people seem to have convinced themselves that MS is an enterprise-only shop". Microsoft killed it.

herewego 16y ago

I work for a mid-size (read: 100+ employee) IT recruiting company and I have to tell you that this boils down to one thing and one thing only for most people that have chosen .NET: economics. If you want to be a developer and you're goal is to give your three kids a good life, drive that BMW 5 series, and own a $500k house, then you should be a .NET developer. The math is simple and I have a mountain of data that supports the reality that .NET developers get paid significantly more (20-30%) on average than any of the hot whiz-bang alternatives (Ruby, PHP, Java, etc). The average mid-level .NET developer in a dev-friendly town (san fran, boston, new york, etc) is making $80-90k, Senior $90-110k, Architects $110-130k, Director/Managers $130-160k. Those are averages that don't include bonuses. There are of course exceptions (finance industry add 20% to the above figures, start-ups subtract 10%, etc). Never underestimate the position that money holds in ones relationship with their chosen path in life. I think the authors argument is valid and is the reason why most of the developers that leave the .NET world do, but my observations indicate that most .NET/MS developers are lifers. On a side note, I actively practice development in.NET, PHP, Java, and a few other languages at my 9 to 5. I like to think that I'm fairly unbiased.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jeremymcanally 16y ago
Your numbers must be pretty outdated for Rails people (or maybe you don't recruit into well-paying gigs) if you think those figures are well above what we're making. I'd say most salaries are comparable to that. And I think you're probably right for PHP and Java. The talent pool is saturated, so there's little "demand" for that sort of employee. "Oh you want $70k? Sorry, we've got 10 candidates who will take $40k. Bye!" But outside of the markets you specify, I think the same situation exists for .NET developers. I know a good number of .NET devs who work in government contracting work and make about half what you say they should make. I know a few who work for product companies in towns other than the ones you mentioned that make about half also. It's probably different markets, business models, but let's not act like .NET is some magical cornucopia of money that will shower you with many monetary blessings if you just sell out to it (this coming from someone who worked in .NET from its beta until right after 2.x came out).

mmphosis 16y ago

It's in the best interest of Microsoft that governments and government-sized and super-sized corporations procure systems that need indefinite upgrade$. I think that it is unfair to only pick on Microsoft because watch as that aging but curiously mission critical mainframe, Oracle license, and the entire fleet of Dell, HP, Apple, or fill-in-behemoth-brand-name hardware-software-network combo is going to need upgrade$ too.

reymundolopez 16y ago

But Mono is a totally different story.

pilif 16y ago

in the very early PHP3 days (around 1998), on the official german PHP mailing list, somebody once was comparing the ASP (no .NET back then) and PHP communities. He said that if he needs help in PHP, somebody will explain the issue and solve it with them. If he needs help in ASP, he'll get back a price list. It feels like this hasn't changed over the years. While I agree that it's nice (and necessary) to be paid for your work, if the prevalent attitude is to not help unless in the form of paid consulting or a closed-source software component, a community can't grow because at that point it gets more advantageous to not share information, but sell it (and forbid the recipient from sharing it). That's one of the big points the OP was lamenting and I agree.

nlawalker 16y ago
Who is "somebody," and where do they come from? .Net has tons of community support. The MSDN boards and the blogosphere are thriving and StackOverflow is extremely .NET friendly. Microsoft sponsors MVPs and provides tons of free training content and solid (in most cases) documentation. Product teams and individual architects and developers inside and outside MS publish blogs, videos, tutorials etc. out the wazoo. Microsoft charges money for its products and development tools, but their goal is to get people using their software, and that means getting people to create software running on their platform. Supporting developers who want to write software in .NET is in their best interest.

bhjodokast 16y ago

This blog post was a waste of time to read, and it seems he should not be a developer. He can't seem to handle the job. He's also ignorant. MVC2 is out. Use it over MVC. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/03/11/asp-net-mvc-2-released.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/03/11/asp-net-mv... These types of developers should be administrators, not developers.

augustl 16y ago

This explains the unexpected presence of .Net devs on yesterdays local Ruby user group meeting!

zentechen 16y ago

asp.net mvc was a community effort and open source from the every beginning. It even packed in with jquery javascript library. It can have the same collaborative community support as any other framework. However, I suspect that the most of developers are not interested in contributing is because the learning curve it has for who coming from traditional ASP.NET background. Among those so-called developers most are contractors who are used to hack up quick and dirty web applications that aren't scalable in a few years. On the other hands, we have to give kudos to Microsoft that making things easy for people with little programming background get off the ground.

redstripe 16y ago

I would be worried about the lack of community integration in the asp.net platform if it was stagnant - but it's not. It's moving forward very rapidly. I guess he's unhappy that he can't contribute to that progress. I agree, it would be nice if MS at least reviewed contributions from the community but I imagine that is something decided by lawyers and not programmers in a company that size. Personally I prefer stability in a platform over the exciting ups and downs of open source projects. I just want to get stuff done. I want my challenges to be in the code I write and not in maintaining a patchwork machine. Finally, as a support base I find the .net community to be very good. Just look at how large and helpful the community on stackoverflow is. Communication from MS is also pretty good. You would certainly never see Scott Gu pull one of these: http://blog.wekeroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dhh-fu.jpg http://blog.wekeroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dhh-fu.j...

jasonkester 16y ago

This guy lives in a different world from me. In my world, .NET is just a really good set of class libraries and a well thought out templating system that you can use to present HTML. I realize that it advertises itself as a lot more than that, and that there are thousands of terrible ASP:whatever controls and the ability to drag and drop them in a visual designer, and a nightmare of ViewState and EverythingIsAPostBack and all that other stuff that people complain about. But I've never met anybody that uses any of it. ASP.NET MVC came out, and it didn't change the way I build my stuff in any fundamental way, because the way it expects you to work is the way that anybody who knew their stuff was working already. In the middle of ASP.NET lives a little core of "good". Find it, use it, and you'll be happy.

diego_moita 16y ago

I will never understand this. Whenever I look at a programming technology, all I see is a tool; I just can't see all the moral drama and tragedy this guy describes. Might be a religious thing. Or I am probably very stupid, like all the other "M$ slaves",...

alaithea 16y ago

The short time I spent in .NET development felt incredibly disenfranchising, when the answer to bugs found was always a denial that the bug existed or "that will be fixed in the next release."

rodh257 16y ago

There always seems to be some sort of article that is negative towards such and such programming language/framework on hacker news, I wonder why that is? eg, Java is dead Django sucks Leaving .NET

rasyadi 16y ago

Seems like this is the trend nowadays around the world. Corporate developers with experience in .NET/Java start doing Python/Ruby or other open source stuffs. Some of them start learning iOS or Android platform just to start their own starup.

WesleyJohnson 16y ago

Perhaps off topic, but I've never understood the draw of Microsoft's implementation of MVC. I've watched a few video tutorials and stepped through several articles and my initial impressions are that it seems like you're mixing a lot of code in with the presentation layer, almost like going back to classic ASP. We use WinForms at work, and did so at my previous job as well. Perhaps I defend them because that's what I'm used to and they pay the bills, but I would argue that their not just for inexperienced guys fresh out of school that don't understand how the "magic" works. Sure, you can get far with them without really pulling back the curtain, but use them long enough and delve deep enough and you get a pretty decent understanding. Or maybe I'm the living proof of "you don't know, what you don't know".

PandaWood 16y ago

This just seems to be another case of Ruby Racism http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/ruby-racism/ http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/ruby-racism/