13 ms·

Phil Haack quit Microsoft for GitHub

181 points by misterbwong 15y ago

ttrashh 15y ago
Big loss for Microsoft.
- grhino 15y ago
  It could be a net gain for Microsoft if the Windows developer community begins to embrace github. As long as the most talented in the community don't leave the Windows platform, it could lead to a more vibrant and productive Windows developer community.
  - mwgriffith 15y ago
    Unfortunately, its been my experience that the Windows developer community rarely embraces anything outside of Microsoft. I hope your right though.
    - lucisferre 15y ago
      imo Microsoft has a lot to do with that
    - misterbwong 15y ago
      I've had similar experiences. Hopefully Phil Haack's move out of MS doesn't affect its future moves in support of OSS.
      - haacked 15y ago
        There's a lot of good stuff coming in that respect. As long as ScottGu carries the torch, things are good there. :)
        apg 15y ago
        Wait... Isn't scottgu running/going to run the Azure Platform? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-reorg-scott-guthrie-to-head-new-azure-application-platform-team/9324 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-reorg-scott-gu...
        shanselman 15y ago
        We all moved with him. All of IIS and ASP.NET works for ScottGu. In fact, all Angle Brackets are under ScottGu, myself included. Our org chart: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Writer/ASP.NET-Visual-Studi.5-Developer-Preview_BB14/image_3c912355-6b35-4e9d-b8d5-a86dd5cf2de4.png http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Wr...
        jf 15y ago
        My hope is that, while he's carrying the torch, Scott Guthrie (and team!) can blaze a trail for others to follow.
    - MartinCron 15y ago
      Maybe it's rare, but it's growing. I've used Git/Github on my last few C# projects, and HG/Kiln before that.
    - michaelherndon 15y ago
      I've been using git & git-svn for all my c# projects and for committing to Lucene.Net. The msys version of git has come a long ways. I also prefer using github when possible. Some of us do branch out and embrace outside Microsoft technologies. Its possible to sway the windows developer community to branch out and hopefully more people in the community will take initiative to sway others to do so.
- mythz 15y ago
  I think it's a win for MS for many of the reasons that @Haacked lists on this blog post. IMO MS is too much driven by profits and control to realize expanding the .NET OSS community will be a NET win for their .NET platform and surrounding tooling / aspirations.
phatboyslim 15y ago
For anyone curious about any background on Phil Haack. Here are his notable accomplishments. - MS Lead on ASP.net MVC framework vers. 1 through 3 (current) - Lead on the NuGet package manager framework for Visual Studio - This Developer's Life Podcast with Scott Hanselman
- hkarthik 15y ago
  I think This Developer's Life is hosted by Rob Conery.
  - drmohundro 15y ago
    Both Scott Hanselman and Rob Conery collaborate on This Developer's Life.
    - haacked 15y ago
      Yep, I had nothing to do with TDL. Wish I could claim it, but I can't. I mean, I guess I could and lie about it, but no. Won't do that. Not yet anyways. :)
      - shanselman 15y ago
        You are an accomplished ballroom dancer, though.
        jongalloway2 15y ago
        He's not that good. Doesn't lead and won't follow. Dead weight most of the time, although pretty good with the dips.
        phatboyslim 15y ago
        Honest mistake guys, I've listened to almost every episode and had no idea. All the jokes about the Hawaiian shirts and I've been thinking of the wrong person.
- 15y ago
untog 15y ago
This is great news for .NET devs- the Windows GitHub client (and VS integration) is not great. This is awful news for .NET devs- ASP.NET MVC is the best thing that's happened to ASP.NET since it began. Losing the lead guy on that project is worrying.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  It's a bit distressing that a lot of the most interesting .NET things (such as mono[touch,droid] and asp.net MVC) are either black sheep or 3rd party projects. .NET is a solid technology, but I fear it may end up having a limited lifespan due to being so heavily tied to windows, especially as the next generation of systems (tablets, non-traditional PCs, etc.) starts taking over the market.
  - sofuture 15y ago
    I've been a staunch .Net defender for a long time, but have almost entirely thrown in the towel at this point. MVC is awesome, C# is awesome, F# is awesome... but, unfortunately Mono just doesn't cut it (Boehm GC? Really? s-gen is a nightmare too, before you counter with that) and Windows isn't a realistic option for a lot of people.
    - lusr 15y ago
      Can you explain what your concerns are with Mono? I haven't used it but as .NET developer hoping to deploy some apps on Mono to cut costs I'd like to understand your criticism better. Are your concerns regarding performance, and within which area? Is it poor memory management and what consequences do you have in mind?
      - sofuture 15y ago
        We went guns-blazing from .Net on physical Windows servers to Linux/Mono/EC2. Mono performance is okay -- we still run a lot of C# utility stuff on Linux with it, no problem (build on windows, push to s3, servers self-deploy). Forget about web stuff though. Mono fastcgi is not production ready (lots of little things, the interplay of nginx and Mono's fastcgi server 'lost' some routes, particularly scriptmethods). Mod_mono is better... until you start getting OutOfMemoryExceptions. My understanding of the problem is that the Boehm GC is non-compacting, and thus, unless you (somehow) craft your application memory use patterns perfectly, will run out of memory if you churn through enough allocations. From the mono ASP.NET FAQ: Why does the memory consumed by the Mono process keep growing? Mono currently uses a conservative, non-moving, non-compacting garbage collector. This means that the heap is not compacted when memory is released. This means that applications can produce memory allocation patterns that will effectively make the process grow, just like C, C++, Perl, Python applications would. It is hence important to not get into patterns that would create these holes, for example such a hole could be created if you create a block of size SIZE, release it, and then create two blocks of size SIZE/2+1. ASP.NET in Mono is particularly vulnerable to this kind of memory problems because it is easy for developers to define APIs that transfer large blobs of data like entire image files, these would allocate a lot of memory that can easily be fragmented. A simple solution is to try to write your software in a way that large data blocks are not allocated, but instead your application handles them in blocks (like writing a "copy" command). So the new GC, S-Gen is available, but for us at least, ~6 months ago it was really buggy. Some of our code would inexplicably cause mono crashes in the allocator. We couldn't run our apps with it, at all. So ultimately we were left with restarting our webserver process every 30 minutes or so, or we could switch back to Windows web servers. Mono was decently performant, but going back to Windows we had a slight but noticable performance increase. Don't get me wrong, Mono is awesome for a lot of things, and it kicks fuckin' ass to run my C# on Linux. But the ASP.NET side of things is just not mature enough. It's possible I'm just a bad programmer and if I'd taken the time to re-architect our allocation patterns to play nice with Boehm this story would have a happier ending, but alas :) P.S. None of this stuff is fresh in my mind right now, so shoot me an email you have more questions or run into any specific situations or whatnot.
jroseattle 15y ago
Phil did a great job both before and after his MS career. He will do well at GitHub as well. He's one of the good guys in the C# world, and both GitHub and Microsoft will benefit from this.
- traskjd 15y ago
  I'm sure you mean both before and during his MS career. His post MS career is about 12 hours old :-) But I'm sure he'll do well with it.
  - jroseattle 15y ago
    Yes, and duly noted.
- kkowalczyk 15y ago
  Now I have to ask: who are the bad guys in C# world?
  - jroseattle 15y ago
    Phil is good in the sense of being very community-oriented, among other attributes. It's not that others are "bad", just that Phil is a great ambassador for C# developers in the world-at-large.
  - josephcooney 15y ago
    I am.
  - hkarthik 15y ago
    If the good guys are Haack, Hanselman, and Conery, then the bad guys are nearly everyone else.
    - jongalloway2 15y ago
      I'm straight up evil.
sofuture 15y ago
For the record, there are a lot of big .NET projects on Github already: https://github.com/mono https://github.com/mono https://github.com/nhibernate https://github.com/nhibernate https://github.com/ravendb https://github.com/ravendb Good to see more momentum in that direction, though of course!
- mythz 15y ago
  I'm just going to leave this here: https://github.com/ServiceStack https://github.com/ServiceStack Because there's a lot of C# in there as well :) - Web Service Framework (+ many Example/Starter Projects) - Json Jsv Csv Text Serailizers (+ Benchmarks) - Redis Client - Redis Web Services + Redis Admin UI - Orm - Logging Framework - Caching API with Memcached, Redis, InMemory & FileSystem providers
- nathanwdavis 15y ago
  ...and https://github.com/fsharp https://github.com/fsharp (the compiler, core lib extensions, IDE bindings, etc) Also, MS contributions toward libuv (part of node.js project)
TomOfTTB 15y ago
This is a good thing for Microsoft. Microsoft needs to become more outwardly focused and influential softies leaving the fold and pushing from the outside will do that. Right now the two good things Microsoft has going for it is MVC and C#. Both of which were inspired or heavily influenced by outside forces (MVC by Castle and C# 4 was influenced heavily by Python). Phil Haack moving to Github will hopefully push Microsoft to embrace open collaboration systems a little better and because he's outside of Microsoft he won't have to deal with "you might kill off VS Team Foundation" hindrances. All this in turn MIGHT give Microsoft a chance at becoming relevant again in the developer space (and please don't say "a lot of people use Microsoft" because I'm one of those people and I know a lot of those people and they're all looking at their future with worried eyes)
- HnNoPassMailer 15y ago
  Personally I find C# to be very nice to work with. It has a lot of static and dynamic goodness, and the .NET libraries provide a lot of stuff to create high quality code. However, software patents and closed sourceness put me off and drove me to dart and Java. Too bad Microsoft is becoming a patent troll. You may have the coolest stuff, but if you start to sue me/my clients (indirectly) it's over soon.
- runjake 15y ago
  > All this in turn MIGHT give Microsoft a chance at becoming relevant again in the developer space (and please don't say "a lot of people use Microsoft" because I'm one of those people and I know a lot of those people and they're all looking at their future with worried eyes) If you read the blog post of this very submission, it cites C# as #4 and climbing on the TIOBE language index. I know and work with a bunch of .NET developers, also, and I can't name one that's looking at the future with worried eyes. In what way are they irrelevant in the developer space? In my particular case, I tend to shy away from Microsoft development because the stack isn't really free, top to bottom and it seemed like MS was following trends instead of leading them (MVC was an obvious response and I see a lot of Railisms in it).
  - TomOfTTB 15y ago
dmitriy_ko 15y ago
I wish I had such a cool last name!
- noblethrasher 15y ago
  His kid has an even cooler name: http://haacked.com/archive/2007/06/06/introducing-cody-yokoyama-haack.aspx http://haacked.com/archive/2007/06/06/introducing-cody-yokoy...
- cowpewter 15y ago
  I'm descended from Haacks... I wonder if we're somehow distantly related. It's not a last name you see very frequently.
bigpun 15y ago
Very cowardly move IMO
ijoyce 15y ago
Step 1: Get respected member of MS community. Step 2: Use said community connection to move people from codeplex to github. Step 3: Profit.
- jbigelow76 15y ago
  Doesn't sound like a bad outcome to me, I'll take GitHub over Codeplex any day (my own .NET code is on GH too)
  - ijoyce 15y ago
    I'm more than ok with it as well.
  - jf 15y ago
    > (my own .NET code is on GH too) Where?
    - jbigelow76 15y ago
      Sorry not an OSS project (at least not yet). I've got one work project on GH and one "nights and weekends startup" project both in private repositories. But I like the workflow of using git for my source control versus something like TFS. Although I admit I initially picked it up just because I wanted to learn something new, I used GH instead of a local git repository because my side project has another collaborator. EDIT: my beef with Codeplex is that I just don't find it very usable when I'm researching something. Purely as a repository for things like NuGet packages it's probably fine.
redstripe 15y ago
When I went looking for a git win32 binaries a while ago the attitude was basically "lolz get a mac/linux box". Which is why I use hg instead of git. It's great to see an open source community, that isn't engulfed in the sanfrancisco linux/mac mono culture bubble, reaching out to Win developers for the benfit of everyone.
- davej 15y ago
  There are WIN32 binaries linked to from the official GIT site. I mainly use mac but I have had to use the windows binaries a few times in the last few months and everything works fine.
- MartinCron 15y ago
  Which is why I use hg instead of git. I totally see where you're coming from, and I personally think hg is great. I just don't want your comment to scare windows developers off. For the record: running git on windows is great.
  - eropple 15y ago
    Disagree. It's gotten better, but the tooling is awkward, the commonly used UI (TortoiseGit) is wonky, and not being a "native citizen" on the OS isn't acceptable--MSYS is a mess to have around on a Windows machine and even the "minimal subset" that you can install with Git is more than I consider acceptable. (I realize that entirely too much of Git is UNIX-based plumbing, but that's their problem.) I gave Git another shot when Bitbucket started to support it (I won't use GitHub, as it happens), but it didn't shake out for the above reasons. I like being able to open stuff up on any of my machines and the lack of care I perceive in Git on Windows drives me to stay with hg a lot more than it would otherwise.
    - notatoad 15y ago
      git GUIs on windows are all pretty weak, but the git command line and git bash work perfectly well. my experience with git GUIs in general (regardless of the OS) is that you should just give up and use the CLI.
pasbesoin 15y ago
He missed the obvious: "Gitterati" (double "t" as an homage to its inspiration; feel free to reduce to "Giterati" ;-).
bradwestness 15y ago
I really hope this leads to better Git tools for Windows developers. I've attempted to host several C# projects on GitHub in the past, but I always end up giving up and using either CodePlex or BitBucket because it's so much easier to get up and running with HG and SVN. Edit: Git tools, not GitHub tools.
- visoft 15y ago
  There's already a wonderful tool that you can use... Git Bash :)
- scq 15y ago
  Try TortoiseGit. It's like TortoiseSVN, but for Git.
  - bradwestness 15y ago
    Yes, but you still have to install MSysGit or whatever, which is a ridiculously huge download just to do version control requests. Plus, running the commands to generate public and private keys and all that junk is super counter-intuitive, and the default steps recommended on GitHub won't work on my work machine, as Cygwin can't write to the location it wants to create the key files, and once I got to that point, I just decided to use HG.
    - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
      msysgit is like 18mb download, you sure you didn't download the full source tree? You don't need to use SSH either, Github (and bitbucket) supports https.
jconley 15y ago
Awesome to see a hugely popular and powerful development platform getting noticed by Github. It's great technology that deserves more love and positive mindshare in the open source world. The last startup where I was CTO was largely based on the Microsoft .NET stack and we loved almost every ounce of it as a technology. Until, of course, we tried to hire startup and open-source minded engineers in the Microsoft-hate land of Silicon Valley. That's practically impossible. StackOverflow and (hopefully) now Github will ideally do a lot of good in the next few years to break the stigma against C#. It seems like the C# community at large contains Enterprise-oriented folks, who only like to consume open source and not give back. They just want to get their projects done and make a profit. I wish we could see more altruistic entities and startups embrace the technology. @haacked - fix it! Github seems like an ideal platform for change in this regard. Oh, yeah, that startup was acquired and they threw away all our back end tech for no other reason than it was Microsoft based. It's not all bad, though, I do love my shiny Macbook Pro. ;) Feature requests: - CodePlex migration tool (I have a project there...) - Github client for Windows - Github VS integration
- lusr 15y ago
  Have you tried GitExtensions? It has a Github plugin. Together with the Git Source Control Provider extension in VS, I've had no problems with Github integration (that being said I'm leaving Github for Bitbucket since Github's arbitrary limits on the number of private repositories pisses me off... for $7/mo at Github I'm getting way less than I do with Bitbucket's free plan).
daviding 15y ago
Phil is smart, and MVC3 helped .NET enormously but I think people are getting carried away that the guy is some sort of paid ambassador for Microsoft and .NET at Github. I imagine that he'll do whatever it takes to make Github better with the skill-set and experience he has, but that doesn't mean he has to have some mandate from Microsoft on what to change. Maybe he's just a good engineer and Github hires those? Let's give it a few months at least. Perhaps he'll work on a whole bunch of non-Microsoft stacks now? Getting Open Source within Microsoft and the Microsoft communities is probably more an issue with culture rather than tooling - a hire won't 'fix' that. It would take many counter-culture things (and years) to change I think. Phil working at Github rather than wanting to work at Microsoft is the interesting aspect, and I can't see why that would be 'good' for Microsoft. Congrats to Phil and Github!
hello_moto 15y ago
Let's see how long until Phil Haack enjoys the non-MS tools :) The experience so far from ex-Softie seems to suggest that people will eventually leave MS ecosystems once they're outside the company. The evolution is as follow: Cheering for MS -> Hired by MS -> Trying to change the culture -> work for a while -> leave MS -> "Hello New Tech!" PS: This isn't about good or bad.
- ronnier 15y ago
  Formerly developed at all MS shops, now at Amazon mostly doing Java with a Linux workstation. Oh words can't describe how I miss Visual Studio and responsiveness of Windows 7.
  - hello_moto 15y ago
    I used VS.NET 2005 back in 2007 and been doing Java + Eclipse + Maven in both Windows 7, OSX, and Linux (Ubuntu) since 2008 until today. I also play with Ruby (and Rails as well) on my free time. Somehow I like my current setup. Maven 2/3 is the biggest killer tool for me (aside from CLI and Eclipse). Ruby tools like gems, capistrano, rake are all awesome for me. Eclipse has been awesome so far for me. Tons of plugins (I use checkstyle, findbugs, m2clipse, subclipse). Eclipse also comes with JUnit runner (and Git out of the box in the recent version) while VS.NET used to be lacking unless you get the top of the line (even then, you'd have to learn a lot to know how to use the VS.NET Test aspect I believe). Everything I can do with VS.NET I can do with Eclipse. But then again I may not be very well versed in VS.NET in the past. I've always installed Console2, Vim, and Cygwin in all of my Windows machines. I don't know how you use Java at Amazon and to be honest, sometime it depends on the project and the culture as well. I tend to force my team to always clean up our scripts/builds to make the overall development experience enjoyable.
kennethologist 15y ago
This is great! Hopefully some good things will come out of this in regards to integrating Github into VS.NET. Right now I use Mecurial but would be nice to give Git a try. All the best to Haack!
vyrotek 15y ago
Well Phil, you'll be missed. I've been following MVC since the beginning years ago and love the direction things are going with it. I only just recently had the opportunity to jump into the world of Git. I'm sure you'll do some much needed good out there as the "Windows Badass".

181 points by misterbwong 15y ago

ttrashh 15y ago

Big loss for Microsoft.

grhino 15y ago
It could be a net gain for Microsoft if the Windows developer community begins to embrace github. As long as the most talented in the community don't leave the Windows platform, it could lead to a more vibrant and productive Windows developer community.
- mwgriffith 15y ago
  Unfortunately, its been my experience that the Windows developer community rarely embraces anything outside of Microsoft. I hope your right though.
  - lucisferre 15y ago
    imo Microsoft has a lot to do with that
  - misterbwong 15y ago
    I've had similar experiences. Hopefully Phil Haack's move out of MS doesn't affect its future moves in support of OSS.
    - haacked 15y ago
      There's a lot of good stuff coming in that respect. As long as ScottGu carries the torch, things are good there. :)
      - apg 15y ago
        Wait... Isn't scottgu running/going to run the Azure Platform? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-reorg-scott-guthrie-to-head-new-azure-application-platform-team/9324 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-reorg-scott-gu...
        shanselman 15y ago
        We all moved with him. All of IIS and ASP.NET works for ScottGu. In fact, all Angle Brackets are under ScottGu, myself included. Our org chart: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Writer/ASP.NET-Visual-Studi.5-Developer-Preview_BB14/image_3c912355-6b35-4e9d-b8d5-a86dd5cf2de4.png http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Wr...
      - jf 15y ago
        My hope is that, while he's carrying the torch, Scott Guthrie (and team!) can blaze a trail for others to follow.
  - MartinCron 15y ago
    Maybe it's rare, but it's growing. I've used Git/Github on my last few C# projects, and HG/Kiln before that.
  - michaelherndon 15y ago
    I've been using git & git-svn for all my c# projects and for committing to Lucene.Net. The msys version of git has come a long ways. I also prefer using github when possible. Some of us do branch out and embrace outside Microsoft technologies. Its possible to sway the windows developer community to branch out and hopefully more people in the community will take initiative to sway others to do so.
mythz 15y ago
I think it's a win for MS for many of the reasons that @Haacked lists on this blog post. IMO MS is too much driven by profits and control to realize expanding the .NET OSS community will be a NET win for their .NET platform and surrounding tooling / aspirations.

phatboyslim 15y ago

For anyone curious about any background on Phil Haack. Here are his notable accomplishments. - MS Lead on ASP.net MVC framework vers. 1 through 3 (current) - Lead on the NuGet package manager framework for Visual Studio - This Developer's Life Podcast with Scott Hanselman

hkarthik 15y ago
I think This Developer's Life is hosted by Rob Conery.
- drmohundro 15y ago
  Both Scott Hanselman and Rob Conery collaborate on This Developer's Life.
  - haacked 15y ago
    Yep, I had nothing to do with TDL. Wish I could claim it, but I can't. I mean, I guess I could and lie about it, but no. Won't do that. Not yet anyways. :)
    - shanselman 15y ago
      You are an accomplished ballroom dancer, though.
      - jongalloway2 15y ago
        He's not that good. Doesn't lead and won't follow. Dead weight most of the time, although pretty good with the dips.
      - phatboyslim 15y ago
        Honest mistake guys, I've listened to almost every episode and had no idea. All the jokes about the Hawaiian shirts and I've been thinking of the wrong person.
15y ago

untog 15y ago

This is great news for .NET devs- the Windows GitHub client (and VS integration) is not great. This is awful news for .NET devs- ASP.NET MVC is the best thing that's happened to ASP.NET since it began. Losing the lead guy on that project is worrying.

InclinedPlane 15y ago
It's a bit distressing that a lot of the most interesting .NET things (such as mono[touch,droid] and asp.net MVC) are either black sheep or 3rd party projects. .NET is a solid technology, but I fear it may end up having a limited lifespan due to being so heavily tied to windows, especially as the next generation of systems (tablets, non-traditional PCs, etc.) starts taking over the market.
- sofuture 15y ago
  I've been a staunch .Net defender for a long time, but have almost entirely thrown in the towel at this point. MVC is awesome, C# is awesome, F# is awesome... but, unfortunately Mono just doesn't cut it (Boehm GC? Really? s-gen is a nightmare too, before you counter with that) and Windows isn't a realistic option for a lot of people.
  - lusr 15y ago
    Can you explain what your concerns are with Mono? I haven't used it but as .NET developer hoping to deploy some apps on Mono to cut costs I'd like to understand your criticism better. Are your concerns regarding performance, and within which area? Is it poor memory management and what consequences do you have in mind?
    - sofuture 15y ago
      We went guns-blazing from .Net on physical Windows servers to Linux/Mono/EC2. Mono performance is okay -- we still run a lot of C# utility stuff on Linux with it, no problem (build on windows, push to s3, servers self-deploy). Forget about web stuff though. Mono fastcgi is not production ready (lots of little things, the interplay of nginx and Mono's fastcgi server 'lost' some routes, particularly scriptmethods). Mod_mono is better... until you start getting OutOfMemoryExceptions. My understanding of the problem is that the Boehm GC is non-compacting, and thus, unless you (somehow) craft your application memory use patterns perfectly, will run out of memory if you churn through enough allocations. From the mono ASP.NET FAQ: Why does the memory consumed by the Mono process keep growing? Mono currently uses a conservative, non-moving, non-compacting garbage collector. This means that the heap is not compacted when memory is released. This means that applications can produce memory allocation patterns that will effectively make the process grow, just like C, C++, Perl, Python applications would. It is hence important to not get into patterns that would create these holes, for example such a hole could be created if you create a block of size SIZE, release it, and then create two blocks of size SIZE/2+1. ASP.NET in Mono is particularly vulnerable to this kind of memory problems because it is easy for developers to define APIs that transfer large blobs of data like entire image files, these would allocate a lot of memory that can easily be fragmented. A simple solution is to try to write your software in a way that large data blocks are not allocated, but instead your application handles them in blocks (like writing a "copy" command). So the new GC, S-Gen is available, but for us at least, ~6 months ago it was really buggy. Some of our code would inexplicably cause mono crashes in the allocator. We couldn't run our apps with it, at all. So ultimately we were left with restarting our webserver process every 30 minutes or so, or we could switch back to Windows web servers. Mono was decently performant, but going back to Windows we had a slight but noticable performance increase. Don't get me wrong, Mono is awesome for a lot of things, and it kicks fuckin' ass to run my C# on Linux. But the ASP.NET side of things is just not mature enough. It's possible I'm just a bad programmer and if I'd taken the time to re-architect our allocation patterns to play nice with Boehm this story would have a happier ending, but alas :) P.S. None of this stuff is fresh in my mind right now, so shoot me an email you have more questions or run into any specific situations or whatnot.

jroseattle 15y ago

Phil did a great job both before and after his MS career. He will do well at GitHub as well. He's one of the good guys in the C# world, and both GitHub and Microsoft will benefit from this.

traskjd 15y ago
I'm sure you mean both before and during his MS career. His post MS career is about 12 hours old :-) But I'm sure he'll do well with it.
- jroseattle 15y ago
  Yes, and duly noted.
kkowalczyk 15y ago
Now I have to ask: who are the bad guys in C# world?
- jroseattle 15y ago
  Phil is good in the sense of being very community-oriented, among other attributes. It's not that others are "bad", just that Phil is a great ambassador for C# developers in the world-at-large.
- josephcooney 15y ago
  I am.
- hkarthik 15y ago
  If the good guys are Haack, Hanselman, and Conery, then the bad guys are nearly everyone else.
  - jongalloway2 15y ago
    I'm straight up evil.

sofuture 15y ago

For the record, there are a lot of big .NET projects on Github already: https://github.com/mono https://github.com/mono https://github.com/nhibernate https://github.com/nhibernate https://github.com/ravendb https://github.com/ravendb Good to see more momentum in that direction, though of course!

mythz 15y ago
I'm just going to leave this here: https://github.com/ServiceStack https://github.com/ServiceStack Because there's a lot of C# in there as well :) - Web Service Framework (+ many Example/Starter Projects) - Json Jsv Csv Text Serailizers (+ Benchmarks) - Redis Client - Redis Web Services + Redis Admin UI - Orm - Logging Framework - Caching API with Memcached, Redis, InMemory & FileSystem providers
nathanwdavis 15y ago
...and https://github.com/fsharp https://github.com/fsharp (the compiler, core lib extensions, IDE bindings, etc) Also, MS contributions toward libuv (part of node.js project)

TomOfTTB 15y ago

This is a good thing for Microsoft. Microsoft needs to become more outwardly focused and influential softies leaving the fold and pushing from the outside will do that. Right now the two good things Microsoft has going for it is MVC and C#. Both of which were inspired or heavily influenced by outside forces (MVC by Castle and C# 4 was influenced heavily by Python). Phil Haack moving to Github will hopefully push Microsoft to embrace open collaboration systems a little better and because he's outside of Microsoft he won't have to deal with "you might kill off VS Team Foundation" hindrances. All this in turn MIGHT give Microsoft a chance at becoming relevant again in the developer space (and please don't say "a lot of people use Microsoft" because I'm one of those people and I know a lot of those people and they're all looking at their future with worried eyes)

HnNoPassMailer 15y ago
Personally I find C# to be very nice to work with. It has a lot of static and dynamic goodness, and the .NET libraries provide a lot of stuff to create high quality code. However, software patents and closed sourceness put me off and drove me to dart and Java. Too bad Microsoft is becoming a patent troll. You may have the coolest stuff, but if you start to sue me/my clients (indirectly) it's over soon.
runjake 15y ago
> All this in turn MIGHT give Microsoft a chance at becoming relevant again in the developer space (and please don't say "a lot of people use Microsoft" because I'm one of those people and I know a lot of those people and they're all looking at their future with worried eyes) If you read the blog post of this very submission, it cites C# as #4 and climbing on the TIOBE language index. I know and work with a bunch of .NET developers, also, and I can't name one that's looking at the future with worried eyes. In what way are they irrelevant in the developer space? In my particular case, I tend to shy away from Microsoft development because the stack isn't really free, top to bottom and it seemed like MS was following trends instead of leading them (MVC was an obvious response and I see a lot of Railisms in it).
- TomOfTTB 15y ago

dmitriy_ko 15y ago

I wish I had such a cool last name!

noblethrasher 15y ago
His kid has an even cooler name: http://haacked.com/archive/2007/06/06/introducing-cody-yokoyama-haack.aspx http://haacked.com/archive/2007/06/06/introducing-cody-yokoy...
cowpewter 15y ago
I'm descended from Haacks... I wonder if we're somehow distantly related. It's not a last name you see very frequently.

bigpun 15y ago

Very cowardly move IMO

ijoyce 15y ago

Step 1: Get respected member of MS community. Step 2: Use said community connection to move people from codeplex to github. Step 3: Profit.

jbigelow76 15y ago
Doesn't sound like a bad outcome to me, I'll take GitHub over Codeplex any day (my own .NET code is on GH too)
- ijoyce 15y ago
  I'm more than ok with it as well.
- jf 15y ago
  > (my own .NET code is on GH too) Where?
  - jbigelow76 15y ago
    Sorry not an OSS project (at least not yet). I've got one work project on GH and one "nights and weekends startup" project both in private repositories. But I like the workflow of using git for my source control versus something like TFS. Although I admit I initially picked it up just because I wanted to learn something new, I used GH instead of a local git repository because my side project has another collaborator. EDIT: my beef with Codeplex is that I just don't find it very usable when I'm researching something. Purely as a repository for things like NuGet packages it's probably fine.

redstripe 15y ago

When I went looking for a git win32 binaries a while ago the attitude was basically "lolz get a mac/linux box". Which is why I use hg instead of git. It's great to see an open source community, that isn't engulfed in the sanfrancisco linux/mac mono culture bubble, reaching out to Win developers for the benfit of everyone.

davej 15y ago
There are WIN32 binaries linked to from the official GIT site. I mainly use mac but I have had to use the windows binaries a few times in the last few months and everything works fine.
MartinCron 15y ago
Which is why I use hg instead of git. I totally see where you're coming from, and I personally think hg is great. I just don't want your comment to scare windows developers off. For the record: running git on windows is great.
- eropple 15y ago
  Disagree. It's gotten better, but the tooling is awkward, the commonly used UI (TortoiseGit) is wonky, and not being a "native citizen" on the OS isn't acceptable--MSYS is a mess to have around on a Windows machine and even the "minimal subset" that you can install with Git is more than I consider acceptable. (I realize that entirely too much of Git is UNIX-based plumbing, but that's their problem.) I gave Git another shot when Bitbucket started to support it (I won't use GitHub, as it happens), but it didn't shake out for the above reasons. I like being able to open stuff up on any of my machines and the lack of care I perceive in Git on Windows drives me to stay with hg a lot more than it would otherwise.
  - notatoad 15y ago
    git GUIs on windows are all pretty weak, but the git command line and git bash work perfectly well. my experience with git GUIs in general (regardless of the OS) is that you should just give up and use the CLI.

pasbesoin 15y ago

He missed the obvious: "Gitterati" (double "t" as an homage to its inspiration; feel free to reduce to "Giterati" ;-).

bradwestness 15y ago

I really hope this leads to better Git tools for Windows developers. I've attempted to host several C# projects on GitHub in the past, but I always end up giving up and using either CodePlex or BitBucket because it's so much easier to get up and running with HG and SVN. Edit: Git tools, not GitHub tools.

visoft 15y ago
There's already a wonderful tool that you can use... Git Bash :)
scq 15y ago
Try TortoiseGit. It's like TortoiseSVN, but for Git.
- bradwestness 15y ago
  Yes, but you still have to install MSysGit or whatever, which is a ridiculously huge download just to do version control requests. Plus, running the commands to generate public and private keys and all that junk is super counter-intuitive, and the default steps recommended on GitHub won't work on my work machine, as Cygwin can't write to the location it wants to create the key files, and once I got to that point, I just decided to use HG.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    msysgit is like 18mb download, you sure you didn't download the full source tree? You don't need to use SSH either, Github (and bitbucket) supports https.

jconley 15y ago

Awesome to see a hugely popular and powerful development platform getting noticed by Github. It's great technology that deserves more love and positive mindshare in the open source world. The last startup where I was CTO was largely based on the Microsoft .NET stack and we loved almost every ounce of it as a technology. Until, of course, we tried to hire startup and open-source minded engineers in the Microsoft-hate land of Silicon Valley. That's practically impossible. StackOverflow and (hopefully) now Github will ideally do a lot of good in the next few years to break the stigma against C#. It seems like the C# community at large contains Enterprise-oriented folks, who only like to consume open source and not give back. They just want to get their projects done and make a profit. I wish we could see more altruistic entities and startups embrace the technology. @haacked - fix it! Github seems like an ideal platform for change in this regard. Oh, yeah, that startup was acquired and they threw away all our back end tech for no other reason than it was Microsoft based. It's not all bad, though, I do love my shiny Macbook Pro. ;) Feature requests: - CodePlex migration tool (I have a project there...) - Github client for Windows - Github VS integration

lusr 15y ago
Have you tried GitExtensions? It has a Github plugin. Together with the Git Source Control Provider extension in VS, I've had no problems with Github integration (that being said I'm leaving Github for Bitbucket since Github's arbitrary limits on the number of private repositories pisses me off... for $7/mo at Github I'm getting way less than I do with Bitbucket's free plan).

daviding 15y ago

Phil is smart, and MVC3 helped .NET enormously but I think people are getting carried away that the guy is some sort of paid ambassador for Microsoft and .NET at Github. I imagine that he'll do whatever it takes to make Github better with the skill-set and experience he has, but that doesn't mean he has to have some mandate from Microsoft on what to change. Maybe he's just a good engineer and Github hires those? Let's give it a few months at least. Perhaps he'll work on a whole bunch of non-Microsoft stacks now? Getting Open Source within Microsoft and the Microsoft communities is probably more an issue with culture rather than tooling - a hire won't 'fix' that. It would take many counter-culture things (and years) to change I think. Phil working at Github rather than wanting to work at Microsoft is the interesting aspect, and I can't see why that would be 'good' for Microsoft. Congrats to Phil and Github!

hello_moto 15y ago

Let's see how long until Phil Haack enjoys the non-MS tools :) The experience so far from ex-Softie seems to suggest that people will eventually leave MS ecosystems once they're outside the company. The evolution is as follow: Cheering for MS -> Hired by MS -> Trying to change the culture -> work for a while -> leave MS -> "Hello New Tech!" PS: This isn't about good or bad.

ronnier 15y ago
Formerly developed at all MS shops, now at Amazon mostly doing Java with a Linux workstation. Oh words can't describe how I miss Visual Studio and responsiveness of Windows 7.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  I used VS.NET 2005 back in 2007 and been doing Java + Eclipse + Maven in both Windows 7, OSX, and Linux (Ubuntu) since 2008 until today. I also play with Ruby (and Rails as well) on my free time. Somehow I like my current setup. Maven 2/3 is the biggest killer tool for me (aside from CLI and Eclipse). Ruby tools like gems, capistrano, rake are all awesome for me. Eclipse has been awesome so far for me. Tons of plugins (I use checkstyle, findbugs, m2clipse, subclipse). Eclipse also comes with JUnit runner (and Git out of the box in the recent version) while VS.NET used to be lacking unless you get the top of the line (even then, you'd have to learn a lot to know how to use the VS.NET Test aspect I believe). Everything I can do with VS.NET I can do with Eclipse. But then again I may not be very well versed in VS.NET in the past. I've always installed Console2, Vim, and Cygwin in all of my Windows machines. I don't know how you use Java at Amazon and to be honest, sometime it depends on the project and the culture as well. I tend to force my team to always clean up our scripts/builds to make the overall development experience enjoyable.

kennethologist 15y ago

This is great! Hopefully some good things will come out of this in regards to integrating Github into VS.NET. Right now I use Mecurial but would be nice to give Git a try. All the best to Haack!

vyrotek 15y ago

Well Phil, you'll be missed. I've been following MVC since the beginning years ago and love the direction things are going with it. I only just recently had the opportunity to jump into the world of Git. I'm sure you'll do some much needed good out there as the "Windows Badass".