4 ms·

“it’s almost impossible for a framework to get traction with Microsoft developers if it isn’t explicitly supported by Microsoft.” That sentence struck a chord

“it’s almost impossible for a framework to get traction with Microsoft developers if it isn’t explicitly supported by Microsoft.” That sentence struck a chord with me. I work in an MS shop and it always saddens me that a lot of my colleagues will always go with MS stuff. For a long time it was TFS over git, now a lot of them want Azure vs. AWS mainly because it’s MS. This attitude makes very skeptical about the recent open source efforts in the .NET world. I have a lot of doubts that any open source project that’s not from MS can be successful in this world.

brightball 7y ago
My last experience at an MS shop identified what I believe to be the (intentional) reason. Microsoft has certifications for everything. The more people with Microsoft certifications you have the more they will give you discounts on their tech stack. This self-feeding beast creates businesses that become incentivized to hire people with MS certs to get more discounts on MS tech. Developers are encouraged to gain these certs and maintain experience in that MS ecosystem as well, which invests them in all things Microsoft. When you factor in the vendor approval process where everything under a single umbrella has been approved (usually, MS, AWS, Google) then as a developer, you know you'll have access to those tools when you go to another similar job. In much the same way that people are happy to invest in learning open source tools rather than internal company libraries, because the experience is portable outside of that single job.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Nobody at my company has any certifications so that can’t be the reason. I think MS just has created a very comfortable and convenient world where it’s really easy to use Visual Studio and MS tools. Once you leave that world you have to deal with more setup work upfront. It’s really not a big deal once you are used to it but it’s a muscle that needs to be exercised and tends to atrophy when you use Visual Studio. And there is always the fact that nobody ever got fired for using MS. I remember when my team started using git, every time there was a problem we were asked why we weren’t using TFS where things “just” work. You need a certain amount of stubbornness to use tools against the mainstream opinion.
PaulHoule 7y ago
Your examples point out how hit-and-miss Microsoft is. When it comes to TFS vs Git, even Microsoft will choose Git. (e.g. it is the only version control designed from the start to handle a major operating system kernel) When it comes to Azure vs AWS I see them as evenly matched. If you make a decision based on your gut it won't hurt you. (If you picked IBM cloud because you liked IBM, however...) Some Microsoft products are pretty good but often Microsoft drops the ball. For instance, the foundation of ASP.NET is absolutely great. However, they introduced some controls that looked a lot like "Web Components" that ran (mostly) on the server side. These dealt with all the usual annoyances about HTML forms, and could have been a real productivity booster. The fatal trouble these had was that they used a state management mechanism that wasn't compatible with the "MVC" web framework approach which is mostly a matter that forms don't live in isolation. After processing the form, the server can decide to render any of a number of possible output pages: for instance you might render the same form if the form failed validation, but deliver one of several forms depending on what the user filled out (think tax paperwork) Microsoft might have been able to make the existing system work in an MVC framework, or made something similar from the ground up to work with MVC, or other moderate decisions. Instead they came up with ASP.NET MVC which wasn't trying to be a market leading product, but instead is a cut-rate version of Ruby-on-Rails that cut you off from much of what was cool about ASP.NET. Microsoft had the chance to make a system that was really worth paying for, but they blew it.
- jdsully 7y ago
  > When it comes to TFS vs Git, even Microsoft will choose Git. (e.g. it is the only version control designed from the start to handle a major operating system kernel) Microsoft used an internal fork of perforce for most of Windows' history. Substantial changes were needed for git to handle the windows codebase. I don't know of any major project that used TFS internally, Source Depot was the primary source management. Linux is quite small compared to many internal Microsoft code bases.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    From what I understand MS never had a problem using tools that weren’t the ones they give to their developers. They used perforce while selling SourceSafe for example. I don’t think they used Winforms or WPF much either except in maybe a few projects. I always wondered what would have happened if they had made the UI libraries Office uses available to third party devs or beefed up MFC so Office could be written with it.
JamesBarney 7y ago
I'm probably one of the devs you've described. I've always worked at Microsoft shops and I love it. A couple of advantages to the homogeneity. I can jump on any project and be productive on day one because not only am I familiar with but I am an expert on 95% of the stack. I can very easily hire people who can be productive from day one because they've used 95% of the stack. I can have much a broader skillset than is possible in other ecosystems. In other ecosystems, I might be knowledgable in three different databases, three different orms, three different web frameworks, 3 different cloud hosting providers. In the Microsoft ecosystem, I can be knowledgeable in writing a mobile app, a high-performance desktop app, and a web app all at the same time in the same language. The knowledge base is amazing. Everything that is canon Microsoft has an enormous amount of stack overflow questions and blog posts about it. And specifically, blog posts about the interacting parts. There are a thousand blog posts on a sql server/EF core/with asp.net/azure app. But less on similar combinations in more heterogeneous ecosystems. The tooling is fantastic. The IDE was built for a very specific stack so it has a lot more functionality than equivalent IDEs. The disadvantage is you don't get to pick best of breed products. But I think this is overrated. Outside of some very specific use cases, people can write great apps in any number of languages on any number of stacks. Picking Sql Server vs PostGres vs Mongo or Ef Core vs NHibernate vs Dapper isn't going to make a huge difference on whether your app sinks or swims.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I used to be like that but over the last few years I found the Microsoft world more and more uninteresting and intellectually stifling . Maybe using git and node was the turning point where I saw how simple things can be with the right tools vs what Microsoft offered.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    Was it just that you found the Microsoft world boring or was there something specific about node that was a game-changer?
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
scarface74 7y ago
There is a certain amount of seamless integration that you get when you go all in on a platform. I find the Java platform to be an unholy mess compared to the .Net ecosystem. TFS has supported git for ages and while I kind of fell into developing in .Net on AWS and have no complaints, logically it would have made more sense to be on Azure.

brightball 7y ago

My last experience at an MS shop identified what I believe to be the (intentional) reason. Microsoft has certifications for everything. The more people with Microsoft certifications you have the more they will give you discounts on their tech stack. This self-feeding beast creates businesses that become incentivized to hire people with MS certs to get more discounts on MS tech. Developers are encouraged to gain these certs and maintain experience in that MS ecosystem as well, which invests them in all things Microsoft. When you factor in the vendor approval process where everything under a single umbrella has been approved (usually, MS, AWS, Google) then as a developer, you know you'll have access to those tools when you go to another similar job. In much the same way that people are happy to invest in learning open source tools rather than internal company libraries, because the experience is portable outside of that single job.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Nobody at my company has any certifications so that can’t be the reason. I think MS just has created a very comfortable and convenient world where it’s really easy to use Visual Studio and MS tools. Once you leave that world you have to deal with more setup work upfront. It’s really not a big deal once you are used to it but it’s a muscle that needs to be exercised and tends to atrophy when you use Visual Studio. And there is always the fact that nobody ever got fired for using MS. I remember when my team started using git, every time there was a problem we were asked why we weren’t using TFS where things “just” work. You need a certain amount of stubbornness to use tools against the mainstream opinion.

PaulHoule 7y ago

Your examples point out how hit-and-miss Microsoft is. When it comes to TFS vs Git, even Microsoft will choose Git. (e.g. it is the only version control designed from the start to handle a major operating system kernel) When it comes to Azure vs AWS I see them as evenly matched. If you make a decision based on your gut it won't hurt you. (If you picked IBM cloud because you liked IBM, however...) Some Microsoft products are pretty good but often Microsoft drops the ball. For instance, the foundation of ASP.NET is absolutely great. However, they introduced some controls that looked a lot like "Web Components" that ran (mostly) on the server side. These dealt with all the usual annoyances about HTML forms, and could have been a real productivity booster. The fatal trouble these had was that they used a state management mechanism that wasn't compatible with the "MVC" web framework approach which is mostly a matter that forms don't live in isolation. After processing the form, the server can decide to render any of a number of possible output pages: for instance you might render the same form if the form failed validation, but deliver one of several forms depending on what the user filled out (think tax paperwork) Microsoft might have been able to make the existing system work in an MVC framework, or made something similar from the ground up to work with MVC, or other moderate decisions. Instead they came up with ASP.NET MVC which wasn't trying to be a market leading product, but instead is a cut-rate version of Ruby-on-Rails that cut you off from much of what was cool about ASP.NET. Microsoft had the chance to make a system that was really worth paying for, but they blew it.

jdsully 7y ago
> When it comes to TFS vs Git, even Microsoft will choose Git. (e.g. it is the only version control designed from the start to handle a major operating system kernel) Microsoft used an internal fork of perforce for most of Windows' history. Substantial changes were needed for git to handle the windows codebase. I don't know of any major project that used TFS internally, Source Depot was the primary source management. Linux is quite small compared to many internal Microsoft code bases.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  From what I understand MS never had a problem using tools that weren’t the ones they give to their developers. They used perforce while selling SourceSafe for example. I don’t think they used Winforms or WPF much either except in maybe a few projects. I always wondered what would have happened if they had made the UI libraries Office uses available to third party devs or beefed up MFC so Office could be written with it.

JamesBarney 7y ago

I'm probably one of the devs you've described. I've always worked at Microsoft shops and I love it. A couple of advantages to the homogeneity. I can jump on any project and be productive on day one because not only am I familiar with but I am an expert on 95% of the stack. I can very easily hire people who can be productive from day one because they've used 95% of the stack. I can have much a broader skillset than is possible in other ecosystems. In other ecosystems, I might be knowledgable in three different databases, three different orms, three different web frameworks, 3 different cloud hosting providers. In the Microsoft ecosystem, I can be knowledgeable in writing a mobile app, a high-performance desktop app, and a web app all at the same time in the same language. The knowledge base is amazing. Everything that is canon Microsoft has an enormous amount of stack overflow questions and blog posts about it. And specifically, blog posts about the interacting parts. There are a thousand blog posts on a sql server/EF core/with asp.net/azure app. But less on similar combinations in more heterogeneous ecosystems. The tooling is fantastic. The IDE was built for a very specific stack so it has a lot more functionality than equivalent IDEs. The disadvantage is you don't get to pick best of breed products. But I think this is overrated. Outside of some very specific use cases, people can write great apps in any number of languages on any number of stacks. Picking Sql Server vs PostGres vs Mongo or Ef Core vs NHibernate vs Dapper isn't going to make a huge difference on whether your app sinks or swims.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I used to be like that but over the last few years I found the Microsoft world more and more uninteresting and intellectually stifling . Maybe using git and node was the turning point where I saw how simple things can be with the right tools vs what Microsoft offered.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  Was it just that you found the Microsoft world boring or was there something specific about node that was a game-changer?
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

There is a certain amount of seamless integration that you get when you go all in on a platform. I find the Java platform to be an unholy mess compared to the .Net ecosystem. TFS has supported git for ages and while I kind of fell into developing in .Net on AWS and have no complaints, logically it would have made more sense to be on Azure.