9 ms·

I think the history of the internal politics at Microsoft in regards to .NET and also the external industry trends is fascinating. The common thinking is that

by jasode 8y ago

I think the history of the internal politics at Microsoft in regards to .NET and also the external industry trends is fascinating. The common thinking is that C# & .NET was a ripoff of Sun Java because of the "write once run anywhere" threat. That's sort of true but missing some nuance. I'm not a MS insider but here's my understanding of what happened. We have to separate the C# language from the CLR runtime. In the 1990s, Microsoft was already researching how to enhance and extend the COM interoperability model. (Otherwise known as "how do we get multiple programming languages to talk to each other?") Based on some old interviews with Don Box[1], instead of this work being productized and released as "COM+ version 3" or whatever, it morphed into the CLR. This was a natural evolution that would have happened even without Sun's JVM threat. C# the language, on the other hand, was a more direct response to Java the language since Microsoft's J++ (Java clone) was abandoned because of Sun's lawsuit. As for .NET, it's interesting that Microsoft always had this large internal group of programmers (mostly Windows kernel and Office teams) that didn't fully buy into the .NET vision. On the other hand, Bill Gates himself was a big believer in it. My pet theory is that since Bill Gates programmed in BASIC in the 1970s and not in low-level C/C++/assembly, he had a natural affinity for the vision of high-level C# & .NET being pervasive throughout Windows. Even with Bill's support, there was always an ongoing internal tension between the C++ vs the NET framework camps. (On a related note, it seems like Apple's internal programmers are more happily embracing Swift over Objective-C to a greater degree than Microsoft's internal adoption of C# over C++.) Two major forces outside of Microsoft's control curtailed .NET's planned world dominance: (1) the rise of Javascript in the browser which negated .NET Silverlight, and also Java applets and Flash. (2) the rise of Apple iOS and Android. .NET is still very popular but it definitely did not fulfill the more ambitious dreams that Bill Gates had for it. (On a related note, I also wrote an old comment about the decline of .NET's WPF and its limited adoption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14098832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14098832) [1] Was MS Technical Fellow and author of 1998 COM book: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-COM-Don-Box/dp/0201634465 https://www.amazon.com/Essential-COM-Don-Box/dp/0201634465

pjmlp 8y ago
The whole Longhorn/Vista debacle, with .NET components being rewritten in COM for Vista, followed up by the increasing the COM usage in Windows 7 and then bringing up WinRT as .NET replacement under Synofsky's leadership is another example of those political internal wars.
- stupidcar 8y ago
  Yeah, I think this was a far bigger contributor to the failure of .NET to achieve dominance. Silverlight was only ever a slightly weird sideline intended to compete with Flash, which became DOA the moment the iPhone launched and Jobs killed Flash overnight by saying the iPhone would never support it. Microsoft's biggest internal teams turning against .NET during Longhorn created a schism that the company has never resolved. I often wonder what might have happened if they'd had the requisite leadership to force the change through organisation-wide, and MS had spent the last 15 years with a single, rational dev story.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Yep, they were forced to sort out the mess introduced with WinRT, UAP, UWP, by making UWP .NET Standard 2.0 compliant, and now making Forms, WPF and EF 6 runnable on top of .NET Core 3.0. However given the last Office related announcements, it appears that the reorganization did little to sort out those political issues.
    - mariusmg 8y ago
      Next stop, making UWP crossplatform :)) Regarding the political issues, the Silverlight/WinRT clusterfuck also helped with WindowsPhone downfall. Release 1.0 and next major update offered a API incompatible with 1.0, what a clusterfuck....
      - merb 8y ago
        > Next stop, making UWP crossplatform :)) they do not need. they have xaml over xamarin.forms, which supports all major platforms (including desktopn and mobile) it still says that its in preview however the only things that did not work well is when you need some kind of file interaction with the os, you need to create native views for all your OSs (i.e. NSFilePicker, OpenFileDialog, etc..) since there is no Xamarin.Forms widget for that. besides that it is already really mature.
bitwize 8y ago
Microsoft developed .NET (internal codename COOL) to get back at Sun for suing them over Java compliance. Microsoft wanted to do embrace-extend-extinguish with the Java runtime and Sun would have none of it, so Microsoft took their ball and were like "Fine! We'll develop our OWN managed runtime and it'll be more better-er than yours is! Neener neener!" And Bill certainly did program in low level assembly. The last Microsoft code he wrote himself was in the ROM of the Tandy 100 portable computer.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  The Ext-VOS design document as provided by Don Syme, alongside other blog entries, tells another story.
- Someguywhatever 8y ago
  I think it is better-er than Java and the JVM and they have stewarded their language much better than Java, and now Java borrows heavily from C#. I think they will win in the long run if they haven't "won" already.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Considering the language and runtime in themselves, I agree. But they sort of missed the point of Java, which was that it was cross-platform, and a single Java package could be expected to run on a variety of hardware and OS loadouts with no changes (except maybe in configuration). Microsoft, at the time, wanted .NET to be closely tied to Windows, and though the base libraries were submitted to ECMA, to get anything useful you had to have Windows and Microsoft's Windows-only libraries. (There was Mono, but it was not compatible with Microsoft's stuff and few on the Linux side wanted to touch it.) Things are changing, obviously, with .NET Core. We'll see if Microsoft or someone else solves for cross-platform GUI and other end-user concerns, where .NET has historically been strongest.
nicoburns 8y ago
IMO .NET being closed source until recently was also a big factor in it's lack of world dominance. Why choose a proprietary language when there are several comparable opwn ones to choose from.
jorgeleo 8y ago
"Two major forces outside of Microsoft's control curtailed .NET's planned world dominance: (1) the rise of Javascript in the browser which negated .NET Silverlight, and also Java applets and Flash. (2) the rise of Apple iOS and Android." I agree with those 2 forces: 1) the raise of javascript: Now is starting to develop an answer to this in Blazor (https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor) 2) iOS and Android: both are here to stay, so Xamarin is the answer. I have been using Xamarin for iOS and all though still lack of some maturity, in its actual form is very viable.
- hackerfromthefu 8y ago
  Shameless plug - do you want a system built with either Blazor or UNO. I'm a .NET developer with the perfect experience to leverage this system. I've been doing full stack and front end on various platforms for 20 years, and .NET for 15 years (version 1) and thus can leverage UNO to provide rapid and quality development. I've already done advanced XAML in Silverlight and WPF with MVVMLight and PRISM application architectures based on TDD/CI/CD, animations, transforms, control templates, control building, designing products. I'm also good with Blend and do the roundtrip Blend designer to Visual Studio developer workflow, or do both parts myself to design a full front end UX, UI, and code, and well as the rest of the full stack. I've also done a lot of Razor MVC and modern web front end and I can't wait to get into Blazor as well - it seems about the dream platform for my style of development. If you're interested to build a system or product built on UNO or Blazor with me, get in touch!
thrower123 8y ago
My hypotheses is that C# would never have become as popular as it became if Java hadn't had the long stall between 1.6 and 7[1]. That long, long pause provided a window, and under the stewardship of the vampires at Oracle there is not the kind of direction to push things forward that C# has had. [1] Four and a half years! Nowadays it seems like Angular and React are pushing major versions every four and a half minutes.
- wvenable 8y ago
  I'm not sure Java would have changed at all if it wasn't for C#. From the start, Java was never particularly quick to get new features or break any sort of compatibility.
ridruejo 8y ago
J++ I completely forgot about that! It brings back memories :)
jjordan 8y ago
> .NET is still very popular but it definitely did not fulfill the more ambitious dreams that Bill Gates had for it. Remember when Microsoft was adding '.NET' to practically all of their product names for a time? That was fun...
gambler 8y ago
>.NET is still very popular but it definitely did not fulfill the more ambitious dreams that Bill Gates had for it. There is still time. It just recently got open-sourced, got a compiler written in itself and got a run-time unbundled form all the legacy crap. Those things held C#/.NET back. I feel this is a good time to adopt it for people who want to have reasonable performance, static typing and a mix of OOP/functional paradigms. My two notes on C#: 1. It is possible to write reasonably "functional" applications in .NET. The only problem I had with that is lack of built-in copy-on-write data types and prevalent nullity. 2. LINQPad is the best damn scripting environment I ever worked with.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Part of me, though, worries that the ship has sailed. For a while .NET was probably completely fine from Microsoft's perspective, because the platform was (AFAICT) dominant in their target market of enterprise apps. Then big data became a thing, and basically the entire core ecosystem was written in Java. I think it's becoming a bit of a wedge issue - Java has everything that .NET has, but .NET does not have its own equivalent of, for example, the Hadoop ecosystem.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    You can do "big data" entirely in .NET. You can use Hadoop "Streaming" with .NET easily enough and still take advantage of the "Hadoop ecosystem". Orleans is not exactly Hadoop, but it's close enough that conversions between are relatively straight-forward, and Orleans is useful for a number of other work distribution patterns beyond map/reduce. Beyond that, the map/reduce pattern is one of the easiest abstractions to reimplement yourself from scratch if you get the itch. I believe Hadoop is relatively over-rated from that standpoint, and arguably IMO another case of Java developers over-ceremonializing what should be a simple, lovely abstraction/design pattern into a weird spaghetti mess of configuration and ritual.
  - svick 8y ago
    > Java has everything that .NET has C# certainly has many features that Java, the language, does not. It gets better if you consider Kotlin instead, but it's not clear to me if that language has a chance of becoming on par with Java, popularity-wise.
ot 8y ago
> Bill Gates programmed in BASIC in the 1970s and not in low-level C/C++/assembly He didn't program in BASIC, he programmed a BASIC interpreter in 8080 assembly.
- jasode 8y ago
  Thank you for the clarification. Yes that makes sense. I'm probably mixing it up with an interview where one of MS ex-employees (Joel Spolsky?) mentioned Bill's affinity for BASIC which is why early MS Word has WordBASIC (not Lisp or Pascal) as its first macro language. It later became VBA Visual Basic for Applications. This philosophy and influence continued all the way into the CLR languages VB.NET and C#. Bill was never a C/C++ guy like his employees who were working on Windows & Office codebases.
  - mattl 8y ago
    Excel BASIC, I believe. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  True. But he definitely had a love for BASIC.
iainmerrick 8y ago
It does seem like all these .NET projects are reactions to rival technologies. C# is a Java clone, C# generics are an (arguably improved) Java generics clone, .NET Micro is J2ME, Silverlight is Flash, etc. What are some examples of where C# / .NET paved the way and others followed? Maybe popularizing async/await? I’m definitely not claiming MS as a whole is always a follower. It seems like Direct3D led the way for the whole industry, for example.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  How come C# generics are a copy of Java when they were invented first and the only reason they didn't make it to 1.0 was not to delay the release schedule? Java annotations are based on .NET atributes, and initially had a clusmy implementation requiring an annotations processing tool until they finally got integrated into javac. LINQ paved the way to more FP acceptance among enterprise developers. Check "confessions of a language salesman" from Erik Meyer. Also .NET always had AOT/JIT from the very beginning, whereas AOT was tabu at Sun and only commercial JDKs always had it as option.
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    Hang on, Wikipedia says Generic Java was 1998, generics were adopted in J2SE 5.0 in 2004, and C# 2.0 wasn’t released until 2005. Am I missing something? I’m sure there was cross-fertilization both ways but it seems like Java generics came first. LINQ is a good one though, that’s definitely a .NET innovation.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Yes you are missing the remaining part of the sentence "the only reason they didn't make it to 1.0 was not to delay the release schedule". Don Syme of F# fame was leading generics research since 1999, while they were designing the CLR, but it was clear they would have to delay 1.0 if they wanted to included them, so they just went ahead without them for 1.0 release. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/03/15/netc-generics-history-some-photos-from-feb-1999/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/03/15/netc-gener... https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/19/some-history-2001-gc-research-project-draft-from-the-msr-cambridge-team/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/19/some-histo... https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/26/some-more-netc-generics-research-project-history/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/26/some-more-... Additionally C#, like Java, also had CMU, ML, Ada, Eiffel, Sather, BETA, C++ and Modula-3 as possible sources of inspiration for generics.
cm2187 8y ago
I think the game changer (one way or another) will be webassembly, which will level the playing field in term of portability. Then the popularity of the different languages being ported to wasm will be based on their own merits.

by jasode 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago

The whole Longhorn/Vista debacle, with .NET components being rewritten in COM for Vista, followed up by the increasing the COM usage in Windows 7 and then bringing up WinRT as .NET replacement under Synofsky's leadership is another example of those political internal wars.

stupidcar 8y ago
Yeah, I think this was a far bigger contributor to the failure of .NET to achieve dominance. Silverlight was only ever a slightly weird sideline intended to compete with Flash, which became DOA the moment the iPhone launched and Jobs killed Flash overnight by saying the iPhone would never support it. Microsoft's biggest internal teams turning against .NET during Longhorn created a schism that the company has never resolved. I often wonder what might have happened if they'd had the requisite leadership to force the change through organisation-wide, and MS had spent the last 15 years with a single, rational dev story.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Yep, they were forced to sort out the mess introduced with WinRT, UAP, UWP, by making UWP .NET Standard 2.0 compliant, and now making Forms, WPF and EF 6 runnable on top of .NET Core 3.0. However given the last Office related announcements, it appears that the reorganization did little to sort out those political issues.
  - mariusmg 8y ago
    Next stop, making UWP crossplatform :)) Regarding the political issues, the Silverlight/WinRT clusterfuck also helped with WindowsPhone downfall. Release 1.0 and next major update offered a API incompatible with 1.0, what a clusterfuck....
    - merb 8y ago
      > Next stop, making UWP crossplatform :)) they do not need. they have xaml over xamarin.forms, which supports all major platforms (including desktopn and mobile) it still says that its in preview however the only things that did not work well is when you need some kind of file interaction with the os, you need to create native views for all your OSs (i.e. NSFilePicker, OpenFileDialog, etc..) since there is no Xamarin.Forms widget for that. besides that it is already really mature.

bitwize 8y ago

Microsoft developed .NET (internal codename COOL) to get back at Sun for suing them over Java compliance. Microsoft wanted to do embrace-extend-extinguish with the Java runtime and Sun would have none of it, so Microsoft took their ball and were like "Fine! We'll develop our OWN managed runtime and it'll be more better-er than yours is! Neener neener!" And Bill certainly did program in low level assembly. The last Microsoft code he wrote himself was in the ROM of the Tandy 100 portable computer.

pjmlp 8y ago
The Ext-VOS design document as provided by Don Syme, alongside other blog entries, tells another story.
Someguywhatever 8y ago
I think it is better-er than Java and the JVM and they have stewarded their language much better than Java, and now Java borrows heavily from C#. I think they will win in the long run if they haven't "won" already.
- bitwize 8y ago
  Considering the language and runtime in themselves, I agree. But they sort of missed the point of Java, which was that it was cross-platform, and a single Java package could be expected to run on a variety of hardware and OS loadouts with no changes (except maybe in configuration). Microsoft, at the time, wanted .NET to be closely tied to Windows, and though the base libraries were submitted to ECMA, to get anything useful you had to have Windows and Microsoft's Windows-only libraries. (There was Mono, but it was not compatible with Microsoft's stuff and few on the Linux side wanted to touch it.) Things are changing, obviously, with .NET Core. We'll see if Microsoft or someone else solves for cross-platform GUI and other end-user concerns, where .NET has historically been strongest.

nicoburns 8y ago

IMO .NET being closed source until recently was also a big factor in it's lack of world dominance. Why choose a proprietary language when there are several comparable opwn ones to choose from.

jorgeleo 8y ago

"Two major forces outside of Microsoft's control curtailed .NET's planned world dominance: (1) the rise of Javascript in the browser which negated .NET Silverlight, and also Java applets and Flash. (2) the rise of Apple iOS and Android." I agree with those 2 forces: 1) the raise of javascript: Now is starting to develop an answer to this in Blazor (https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor) 2) iOS and Android: both are here to stay, so Xamarin is the answer. I have been using Xamarin for iOS and all though still lack of some maturity, in its actual form is very viable.

hackerfromthefu 8y ago
Shameless plug - do you want a system built with either Blazor or UNO. I'm a .NET developer with the perfect experience to leverage this system. I've been doing full stack and front end on various platforms for 20 years, and .NET for 15 years (version 1) and thus can leverage UNO to provide rapid and quality development. I've already done advanced XAML in Silverlight and WPF with MVVMLight and PRISM application architectures based on TDD/CI/CD, animations, transforms, control templates, control building, designing products. I'm also good with Blend and do the roundtrip Blend designer to Visual Studio developer workflow, or do both parts myself to design a full front end UX, UI, and code, and well as the rest of the full stack. I've also done a lot of Razor MVC and modern web front end and I can't wait to get into Blazor as well - it seems about the dream platform for my style of development. If you're interested to build a system or product built on UNO or Blazor with me, get in touch!

thrower123 8y ago

My hypotheses is that C# would never have become as popular as it became if Java hadn't had the long stall between 1.6 and 7[1]. That long, long pause provided a window, and under the stewardship of the vampires at Oracle there is not the kind of direction to push things forward that C# has had. [1] Four and a half years! Nowadays it seems like Angular and React are pushing major versions every four and a half minutes.

wvenable 8y ago
I'm not sure Java would have changed at all if it wasn't for C#. From the start, Java was never particularly quick to get new features or break any sort of compatibility.

ridruejo 8y ago

J++ I completely forgot about that! It brings back memories :)

jjordan 8y ago

> .NET is still very popular but it definitely did not fulfill the more ambitious dreams that Bill Gates had for it. Remember when Microsoft was adding '.NET' to practically all of their product names for a time? That was fun...

gambler 8y ago

>.NET is still very popular but it definitely did not fulfill the more ambitious dreams that Bill Gates had for it. There is still time. It just recently got open-sourced, got a compiler written in itself and got a run-time unbundled form all the legacy crap. Those things held C#/.NET back. I feel this is a good time to adopt it for people who want to have reasonable performance, static typing and a mix of OOP/functional paradigms. My two notes on C#: 1. It is possible to write reasonably "functional" applications in .NET. The only problem I had with that is lack of built-in copy-on-write data types and prevalent nullity. 2. LINQPad is the best damn scripting environment I ever worked with.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Part of me, though, worries that the ship has sailed. For a while .NET was probably completely fine from Microsoft's perspective, because the platform was (AFAICT) dominant in their target market of enterprise apps. Then big data became a thing, and basically the entire core ecosystem was written in Java. I think it's becoming a bit of a wedge issue - Java has everything that .NET has, but .NET does not have its own equivalent of, for example, the Hadoop ecosystem.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  You can do "big data" entirely in .NET. You can use Hadoop "Streaming" with .NET easily enough and still take advantage of the "Hadoop ecosystem". Orleans is not exactly Hadoop, but it's close enough that conversions between are relatively straight-forward, and Orleans is useful for a number of other work distribution patterns beyond map/reduce. Beyond that, the map/reduce pattern is one of the easiest abstractions to reimplement yourself from scratch if you get the itch. I believe Hadoop is relatively over-rated from that standpoint, and arguably IMO another case of Java developers over-ceremonializing what should be a simple, lovely abstraction/design pattern into a weird spaghetti mess of configuration and ritual.
- svick 8y ago
  > Java has everything that .NET has C# certainly has many features that Java, the language, does not. It gets better if you consider Kotlin instead, but it's not clear to me if that language has a chance of becoming on par with Java, popularity-wise.

ot 8y ago

> Bill Gates programmed in BASIC in the 1970s and not in low-level C/C++/assembly He didn't program in BASIC, he programmed a BASIC interpreter in 8080 assembly.

jasode 8y ago
Thank you for the clarification. Yes that makes sense. I'm probably mixing it up with an interview where one of MS ex-employees (Joel Spolsky?) mentioned Bill's affinity for BASIC which is why early MS Word has WordBASIC (not Lisp or Pascal) as its first macro language. It later became VBA Visual Basic for Applications. This philosophy and influence continued all the way into the CLR languages VB.NET and C#. Bill was never a C/C++ guy like his employees who were working on Windows & Office codebases.
- mattl 8y ago
  Excel BASIC, I believe. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
maxxxxx 8y ago
True. But he definitely had a love for BASIC.

iainmerrick 8y ago

It does seem like all these .NET projects are reactions to rival technologies. C# is a Java clone, C# generics are an (arguably improved) Java generics clone, .NET Micro is J2ME, Silverlight is Flash, etc. What are some examples of where C# / .NET paved the way and others followed? Maybe popularizing async/await? I’m definitely not claiming MS as a whole is always a follower. It seems like Direct3D led the way for the whole industry, for example.

pjmlp 8y ago
How come C# generics are a copy of Java when they were invented first and the only reason they didn't make it to 1.0 was not to delay the release schedule? Java annotations are based on .NET atributes, and initially had a clusmy implementation requiring an annotations processing tool until they finally got integrated into javac. LINQ paved the way to more FP acceptance among enterprise developers. Check "confessions of a language salesman" from Erik Meyer. Also .NET always had AOT/JIT from the very beginning, whereas AOT was tabu at Sun and only commercial JDKs always had it as option.
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  Hang on, Wikipedia says Generic Java was 1998, generics were adopted in J2SE 5.0 in 2004, and C# 2.0 wasn’t released until 2005. Am I missing something? I’m sure there was cross-fertilization both ways but it seems like Java generics came first. LINQ is a good one though, that’s definitely a .NET innovation.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Yes you are missing the remaining part of the sentence "the only reason they didn't make it to 1.0 was not to delay the release schedule". Don Syme of F# fame was leading generics research since 1999, while they were designing the CLR, but it was clear they would have to delay 1.0 if they wanted to included them, so they just went ahead without them for 1.0 release. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/03/15/netc-generics-history-some-photos-from-feb-1999/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/03/15/netc-gener... https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/19/some-history-2001-gc-research-project-draft-from-the-msr-cambridge-team/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/19/some-histo... https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/26/some-more-netc-generics-research-project-history/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/26/some-more-... Additionally C#, like Java, also had CMU, ML, Ada, Eiffel, Sather, BETA, C++ and Modula-3 as possible sources of inspiration for generics.

cm2187 8y ago

I think the game changer (one way or another) will be webassembly, which will level the playing field in term of portability. Then the popularity of the different languages being ported to wasm will be based on their own merits.