6 ms·

The Long Road Home - From Microsoft to Linux

56 points by febits 15y ago

A post about my thoughts and experiences as a software developer, leading up to my use of Linux and building my first non-Microsoft based Web application.

einhverfr 15y ago
I was reading the article and the list of three letter acronyms such as WPF, WWF, WCF, and realizing we should just group these together under the name Windows Technology Frameworks or WTF..... On the other hand, the article brought back a lot of thoughts on projects gone right and wrong. Very insightful and informative. In the end though, I have learned one thing that was reinforced by this article: if it ain't fun, it ain't worth it. Let's face it: that which inspires us is fun. And when we are inspired, even the largest problems are overcome, but when we lack that inspiration and the fun that comes with it, it's not only drag, but little problems become impossible to solve.
- febits 15y ago
  I think that's right - it has to be fun. There might be not-so-fun parts in every project - but overall, it has to be fun. Thanks for positive feedback.
- ryanpetrich 15y ago
  WebKit uses the WTF acronym for its Web Template Framework.
k_bx 15y ago
Man looked at PHP after C# and was happy with that. I feel suspicious.
- ale55andro 15y ago
  Not very suspicious if you look at how .NET evolved and continues to evolve. They have had massive changes in their offerings which is a good thing but frustrating if your a dev strongly invested in what they offer. Often you have to rewrite your code with each new offering they push. Then ASP.NET Webforms slow death in favor of MVC, another major rewrite again. Along with the rewrites you are giving up a huge investment you've made in webforms ( their previous offering). From asp.net 1.0 to 2.0 required a rewrite to take advantage of 2.0 featureset. From linq2sql to EF where linq2sql was dropped in favor of EF and we still have no proper assurance. winforms 1.0 to 2.0 then wpf. Moving to wpf as you may guess requires a major rewrite. Then the rumors that wpf is dead. SL is the next best thing. Now they say SL is dead but your skillset will carry over to building metro style apps. Perhaps he can avoid all this frustration now!
  - throwaway64 15y ago
    Im sure they are going to drop metro too, shortly after all their customers hate it even more than vista.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Why are you doing rewrites? I still have 16bit MASM code in use. Why would you rewrite an ASP.NET webforms app because MVC is out? I guarantee you that you'll want to rewrite your website for some completely unrelated reason before ASP.NET isn't supported -- I mean they did just ship a new version in the past year. I think junior devs feel like everytime something new comes out they have to rewrite everything to use it. After you've been around the block for a while you realize that you can pick and choose technologies and maintainance plans. Once you realize that, you suddenly see a lot of this is just hot air.
    - ale55andro 15y ago
      the reason to rewrite depends on the project your involved in and what features you want to make use of moving forwad. A simple example when .net 2.0 came out, simply upgrading to the latest version of the framework didn't give your older apps all the benefits of latest features included in 2.0 (new controls, master pages, provider model support out of the box etc) ; A rewrite was inevitable. When MVC was introduced everybody in the .net community felt it was their sacred mission to promote it over webforms. If you wanted to stay current skillwise and evovle with the community you either rewrote if this was even feasible or used MVC for the next project ( for most this really meant a new investment in learning and also not being able to reuse a vast array of controls and component that were already written for webforms and available, instead we were reinvesting our efforts in rewriting in such a way that this was consumable from an MVC paradigm). I agree with you that a lot of this is just hot air, but not if you are seriously invested as in someone writing tooling for webforms for instance and your business depended on it, your customer base dimishes quickly and you have to quickly adapt and rewrite. This is the same for winforms/wpf/silverlight. People seriously invest in these technologies after going through a lot convincing top management and what not because MS promised at some point that they are committed to seeing this through. Consider having a product developed in silverlight. Now MS is saying they are backing html5 but fear not, you can still rewrite it for metro because sadly IE10 on metro will not support plugins. This is their own plugin on their own operating system. Not supported! Which is not the same thing because SL atleast worked on the mac cross platform. Your metro app wont. So, html5? even still your developing a metro app so forget cross platform or perhaps you can reuse a lot of the code base but some effort is still required and we're really hoping for the best. In the end we are rewriting again.
pimeys 15y ago
This article brought back lots of memories. I also used to work in chemistry, started doing programming (because I somehow knew how to do it in the first place) and I worked in Microsoft business for years. I didn't want to be a programmer and I was looking for alternative job options all the time. Then I met a friend who showed me a bit of Haskell, SICP stuff and I also started doing projects with Rails. Now, years later, I love every day being in the business. I'm learning new stuff every day, like Arch Linux, Vim, Git, EventMachine, Xmonad, the list goes on... It might not be the same for everybody, but open source world was a cure for me to start loving my profession. I'm really thankful for that.
skrebbel 15y ago
Funny - I went exactly the other way, from PHP to Ruby to C#. The .NET environment is amazing. Its open source community is really picking up speed lately, the framework docs are top-notch, and, most importantly: C# is a great modern language with excellent editor support - a unique combination (possibly barring F#). Java has good editor support (IntelliJ, Netbeans) but, well, it's Java. Ruby and Python are nice, but can never get the support for maintainability and refactoring that a statically typed language can. After my Ruby years, I never want to have to guess what I can do with an object passed to some method I'm maintaining anymore. And then I didn't even mention all the framework magic circling Ruby, making it even more difficult to understand what the code you're looking at does. The ability to type "varname." and get a list of what I can do with it is so powerful. I can use a (well designed) open source library that I just NuGet'ed in, without ever even looking at its docs. Can you write PHP without alt-tabbing to the manual all the time? Can you do it with Ruby? I'd even choose Java over Ruby for that if I had no other option; I'm no Microsoft evangelist. I'd probably do Scala if the editor support became better (which I hope it does), but C# comes pretty damn close to what I'd want to use Scala for anyway (closures, LINQ, properties, extension methods, even currying is no problem).
- SWengineer 15y ago
  If you want decent Scala support with IDE code completion try IntelliJ community ed with scala plugin. Eclipse is okish but Scala plugin rather slow
- pimeys 15y ago
  > The ability to type "varname." and get a list of what I can do with it is so powerful. I can use a (well designed) open source library that I just NuGet'ed in, without ever even looking at its docs. Can you write PHP without alt-tabbing to the manual all the time? Can you do it with Ruby? I usually don't need any documentation with Ruby. I remember how the libraries I use work. But I'm that kind of guy, who first reads the source from Github and then start programming the thing by my own. I hated with Microsoft libraries, that I had to use reflector to see inside the library, when it didn't work like it should've been. Now I'll hit the fork button if the library contains a bug and I need a fast fix right now.
mgkimsal 15y ago
The "community" observation is interesting, but I'm curious how much of it is a function of time. I started with PHP in 1996. While the community was not as large as it is today, it felt... a bit more alive. People were discovering this 'underground' tech, and to use PHP on a project was slightly rebellious, when you were supposed to be using Perl or ASP or maybe even ColdFusion or Java. But the community changes as more people who are using the tech get involved. More people end up using the tech not by choice, but by mandate. Current infrastructure is LAMP, so new hires have to use LAMP, etc. PHP is no longer a rebellious underground choice - it's a/the standard. Similarly, I was doing VB stuff in 1993. Rather revolutionary in many ways, and it felt like a whole new world. People were jumping ship from other platforms to be more productive in VB. I don't think it was ever 'underground' like PHP was, but certainly an active, vibrant community of people who wanted to be using that tech. Fast forward to the mid 2000s - Rails becomes the new hotness, and people jump all over MVC. The people who are joining these communities in the beginning are there by choice. Lots of progress and rapid iterations are possible because of the passion and focus. A couple years from now, loads of people will be doing maintenance Rails projects, and the community of Rails people will be less active and less passionate about things than they are today. Many of the 'best and brightest' are moving on to node.js and other new hotness. The cynic in me will point out that the newer members of the community coming in later will be stuck maintaining "first drafts" of attempts at Rails projects, that won't have benefitted from updates. I say this as someone who was shown a Rails 1.1 project in 2010 that had been started 3 years earlier, but never upgraded. I'm sure that's not the only one. But... this is also the nature of tech communities. People come and go, but the people 'going' are often 'going' to the new-fangled stuff, and leaving behind a mixed-bag that the maintenance generation has to deal with. This skews the 2nd generation's view of the tech (not always, but some). I know people who left PHP for Rails, complaining about all the stuff PHP couldn't do. But they also left behind piles of poorly written PHP - there's nothing in PHP forcing you to write bad code, they just didn't have the discipline which something like Rails seems to force. Long story long... the .NET community seems at a cross-roads, and the MS corporate involvement in the tech decisions isn't a spanner-in-the-works that most other tech communities have to contend with. Other tech - PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc - tend to live and die outside the directives of one particular company. But the 'top down' community comment was spot on - it's hard to 'force' community on a group, and I suspect the reason most of the .NET users don't behave like other communities the OP compared to is that most of those .NET users don't want to be there. Not saying they hate .NET, but they just don't have the passion for tech that motivates the visible community members in other tribes.

56 points by febits 15y ago

A post about my thoughts and experiences as a software developer, leading up to my use of Linux and building my first non-Microsoft based Web application.

einhverfr 15y ago

I was reading the article and the list of three letter acronyms such as WPF, WWF, WCF, and realizing we should just group these together under the name Windows Technology Frameworks or WTF..... On the other hand, the article brought back a lot of thoughts on projects gone right and wrong. Very insightful and informative. In the end though, I have learned one thing that was reinforced by this article: if it ain't fun, it ain't worth it. Let's face it: that which inspires us is fun. And when we are inspired, even the largest problems are overcome, but when we lack that inspiration and the fun that comes with it, it's not only drag, but little problems become impossible to solve.

febits 15y ago
I think that's right - it has to be fun. There might be not-so-fun parts in every project - but overall, it has to be fun. Thanks for positive feedback.
ryanpetrich 15y ago
WebKit uses the WTF acronym for its Web Template Framework.

k_bx 15y ago

Man looked at PHP after C# and was happy with that. I feel suspicious.

ale55andro 15y ago
Not very suspicious if you look at how .NET evolved and continues to evolve. They have had massive changes in their offerings which is a good thing but frustrating if your a dev strongly invested in what they offer. Often you have to rewrite your code with each new offering they push. Then ASP.NET Webforms slow death in favor of MVC, another major rewrite again. Along with the rewrites you are giving up a huge investment you've made in webforms ( their previous offering). From asp.net 1.0 to 2.0 required a rewrite to take advantage of 2.0 featureset. From linq2sql to EF where linq2sql was dropped in favor of EF and we still have no proper assurance. winforms 1.0 to 2.0 then wpf. Moving to wpf as you may guess requires a major rewrite. Then the rumors that wpf is dead. SL is the next best thing. Now they say SL is dead but your skillset will carry over to building metro style apps. Perhaps he can avoid all this frustration now!
- throwaway64 15y ago
  Im sure they are going to drop metro too, shortly after all their customers hate it even more than vista.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Why are you doing rewrites? I still have 16bit MASM code in use. Why would you rewrite an ASP.NET webforms app because MVC is out? I guarantee you that you'll want to rewrite your website for some completely unrelated reason before ASP.NET isn't supported -- I mean they did just ship a new version in the past year. I think junior devs feel like everytime something new comes out they have to rewrite everything to use it. After you've been around the block for a while you realize that you can pick and choose technologies and maintainance plans. Once you realize that, you suddenly see a lot of this is just hot air.
  - ale55andro 15y ago
    the reason to rewrite depends on the project your involved in and what features you want to make use of moving forwad. A simple example when .net 2.0 came out, simply upgrading to the latest version of the framework didn't give your older apps all the benefits of latest features included in 2.0 (new controls, master pages, provider model support out of the box etc) ; A rewrite was inevitable. When MVC was introduced everybody in the .net community felt it was their sacred mission to promote it over webforms. If you wanted to stay current skillwise and evovle with the community you either rewrote if this was even feasible or used MVC for the next project ( for most this really meant a new investment in learning and also not being able to reuse a vast array of controls and component that were already written for webforms and available, instead we were reinvesting our efforts in rewriting in such a way that this was consumable from an MVC paradigm). I agree with you that a lot of this is just hot air, but not if you are seriously invested as in someone writing tooling for webforms for instance and your business depended on it, your customer base dimishes quickly and you have to quickly adapt and rewrite. This is the same for winforms/wpf/silverlight. People seriously invest in these technologies after going through a lot convincing top management and what not because MS promised at some point that they are committed to seeing this through. Consider having a product developed in silverlight. Now MS is saying they are backing html5 but fear not, you can still rewrite it for metro because sadly IE10 on metro will not support plugins. This is their own plugin on their own operating system. Not supported! Which is not the same thing because SL atleast worked on the mac cross platform. Your metro app wont. So, html5? even still your developing a metro app so forget cross platform or perhaps you can reuse a lot of the code base but some effort is still required and we're really hoping for the best. In the end we are rewriting again.

pimeys 15y ago

This article brought back lots of memories. I also used to work in chemistry, started doing programming (because I somehow knew how to do it in the first place) and I worked in Microsoft business for years. I didn't want to be a programmer and I was looking for alternative job options all the time. Then I met a friend who showed me a bit of Haskell, SICP stuff and I also started doing projects with Rails. Now, years later, I love every day being in the business. I'm learning new stuff every day, like Arch Linux, Vim, Git, EventMachine, Xmonad, the list goes on... It might not be the same for everybody, but open source world was a cure for me to start loving my profession. I'm really thankful for that.

skrebbel 15y ago

Funny - I went exactly the other way, from PHP to Ruby to C#. The .NET environment is amazing. Its open source community is really picking up speed lately, the framework docs are top-notch, and, most importantly: C# is a great modern language with excellent editor support - a unique combination (possibly barring F#). Java has good editor support (IntelliJ, Netbeans) but, well, it's Java. Ruby and Python are nice, but can never get the support for maintainability and refactoring that a statically typed language can. After my Ruby years, I never want to have to guess what I can do with an object passed to some method I'm maintaining anymore. And then I didn't even mention all the framework magic circling Ruby, making it even more difficult to understand what the code you're looking at does. The ability to type "varname." and get a list of what I can do with it is so powerful. I can use a (well designed) open source library that I just NuGet'ed in, without ever even looking at its docs. Can you write PHP without alt-tabbing to the manual all the time? Can you do it with Ruby? I'd even choose Java over Ruby for that if I had no other option; I'm no Microsoft evangelist. I'd probably do Scala if the editor support became better (which I hope it does), but C# comes pretty damn close to what I'd want to use Scala for anyway (closures, LINQ, properties, extension methods, even currying is no problem).

SWengineer 15y ago
If you want decent Scala support with IDE code completion try IntelliJ community ed with scala plugin. Eclipse is okish but Scala plugin rather slow
pimeys 15y ago
> The ability to type "varname." and get a list of what I can do with it is so powerful. I can use a (well designed) open source library that I just NuGet'ed in, without ever even looking at its docs. Can you write PHP without alt-tabbing to the manual all the time? Can you do it with Ruby? I usually don't need any documentation with Ruby. I remember how the libraries I use work. But I'm that kind of guy, who first reads the source from Github and then start programming the thing by my own. I hated with Microsoft libraries, that I had to use reflector to see inside the library, when it didn't work like it should've been. Now I'll hit the fork button if the library contains a bug and I need a fast fix right now.

mgkimsal 15y ago

The "community" observation is interesting, but I'm curious how much of it is a function of time. I started with PHP in 1996. While the community was not as large as it is today, it felt... a bit more alive. People were discovering this 'underground' tech, and to use PHP on a project was slightly rebellious, when you were supposed to be using Perl or ASP or maybe even ColdFusion or Java. But the community changes as more people who are using the tech get involved. More people end up using the tech not by choice, but by mandate. Current infrastructure is LAMP, so new hires have to use LAMP, etc. PHP is no longer a rebellious underground choice - it's a/the standard. Similarly, I was doing VB stuff in 1993. Rather revolutionary in many ways, and it felt like a whole new world. People were jumping ship from other platforms to be more productive in VB. I don't think it was ever 'underground' like PHP was, but certainly an active, vibrant community of people who wanted to be using that tech. Fast forward to the mid 2000s - Rails becomes the new hotness, and people jump all over MVC. The people who are joining these communities in the beginning are there by choice. Lots of progress and rapid iterations are possible because of the passion and focus. A couple years from now, loads of people will be doing maintenance Rails projects, and the community of Rails people will be less active and less passionate about things than they are today. Many of the 'best and brightest' are moving on to node.js and other new hotness. The cynic in me will point out that the newer members of the community coming in later will be stuck maintaining "first drafts" of attempts at Rails projects, that won't have benefitted from updates. I say this as someone who was shown a Rails 1.1 project in 2010 that had been started 3 years earlier, but never upgraded. I'm sure that's not the only one. But... this is also the nature of tech communities. People come and go, but the people 'going' are often 'going' to the new-fangled stuff, and leaving behind a mixed-bag that the maintenance generation has to deal with. This skews the 2nd generation's view of the tech (not always, but some). I know people who left PHP for Rails, complaining about all the stuff PHP couldn't do. But they also left behind piles of poorly written PHP - there's nothing in PHP forcing you to write bad code, they just didn't have the discipline which something like Rails seems to force. Long story long... the .NET community seems at a cross-roads, and the MS corporate involvement in the tech decisions isn't a spanner-in-the-works that most other tech communities have to contend with. Other tech - PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc - tend to live and die outside the directives of one particular company. But the 'top down' community comment was spot on - it's hard to 'force' community on a group, and I suspect the reason most of the .NET users don't behave like other communities the OP compared to is that most of those .NET users don't want to be there. Not saying they hate .NET, but they just don't have the passion for tech that motivates the visible community members in other tribes.