6 ms·

I started doing C# development last year, coming from mostly a Unix/Perl platform, and I'm really glad about the timing because that's when Microsoft got seriou

I started doing C# development last year, coming from mostly a Unix/Perl platform, and I'm really glad about the timing because that's when Microsoft got serious about open development. I started doing web apps using ASP.NET MVC3, and this year MVC4 was released as an open-source project[1]. It seems that a bunch of 'young turks' have reached higher management positions in most of the key software development products within Microsoft and they're all pushing for this kind of open source approach. [1] http://aspnet.codeplex.com/ http://aspnet.codeplex.com/

skrebbel 14y ago
Roughly the same story here. At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I feel that while most tech BigCos (e.g. Google, Apple) have become more evil over time, MS has actually become less evil, to the point that using their tech (and some major tech at that) is relatively free of any lock-in risk. TypeScript seems very much in line with this trend, and I love it. This is exactly what I wanted - JavaScript but with decent safety and IDE support. And no more than that. I really hope that non-MS-geeks will embrace it and that Eclipse plugins and JetBrains tools and the likes will follow. That said, ASP.NET MVC is a misguided and overrated Rails ripoff, IMHO. Where's all that great refactoring support if everything is made `dynamic` and stringly typed? What's up with matching parameters to method argument names? (I mean, change an argument name and your code breaks? wtf?) Since when does Microsoft tech favour magic over clarity?
- euroclydon 14y ago
  How would you otherwise map GET and POST parameters to method parameters? Have you heard fo model binders? With them you can accept a class as a parameter.
- meanguy 14y ago
  Um, you know how Rails binds, right? Also: MVC2 runs under NET 3.5 which doesn't even have the dynamic keyword. (I don't use dynamic in MVC3 or MVC4 either...) The "stringly typed" (magic string) stuff was always avoidable. Regardless, see the [CallerMemberName] annotation and others which solves it back to INotifyPropertyChanged. Now that the backlog of Microsoft tools have shipped, the scaffolding makes a bit more sense. The MVC team released multiple versions (open sourced!) instead of waiting for VS11. Which actually lines up with your core argument.
- Mpdreamz 14y ago
  Magic strings can be avoided by always using a viewmodel ,using the lamda overloads on HtmlHelper (@Html.*) also T4MVC is a godsend strongly typing routes, url lookups, viewnames, filenames. Most of these have been around since MVC 1.0. Hope these pointers will keep you magic string free :)
  - highace 14y ago
    Adding T4MVC is the first thing I do on a new project. It makes pretty much all the magic strings disappear.
- btilly 14y ago
  Given where MS started, "less evil" is damning with faint praise. The people in charge include people who were part of everything that was wrong with the company all along. As long as I have a reasonable alternative, I will never choose to trust Microsoft. Then again I'm biased. Their desire to sell insecure software to the US government when that was against the law lead them to deliberately destroy the life of a friend of mine who they were afraid was going to turn whistleblower to such an extent that he died and left behind a widow and small kids. (Example incident. At one point he got hired at another company, and his manager to be received a call from Microsoft whose whole point was, "How much do we have to pay you to fire him before he starts?" Microsoft knew how to be evil.) I'm not forgetting Ed Curry. Nor do I have any desire to forgive Microsoft. As long as people associated with the worst of their excesses remain involved and in control - people like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer - I will always make the non-Microsoft choice.
  - meanguy 14y ago
    I hadn't heard this story before, but time isn't kind to this particular conspiracy. The moment of clarity: Mr. Curry wanted to sue Microsoft but "couldn't find a lawyer willing to take on the case" -- in 1998. EVERYBODY was suing Microsoft in 1998, including multiple governments. If you couldn't find someone to sue them that year, I'm afraid you don't have much credibility. And this made my head hurt: "All computer security systems begin with the Intel processor itself," Curry said. "I helped Intel develop their processor, so I know how they work and how vulnerable they can be if left exposed." ... "In fact," he added, "Microsoft NT 4.0 is the least secure of all the NT versions... Processors on Windows NT Version 4.0 are insecure because they have been designed to automatically open the processor up to accept commands on start-up."
    - btilly 14y ago
      I love how everyone is an instant expert on the Internet, even if they have only heard of the issue minutes before. I'm not a random internet conspiracist. I'm an established member of this community reporting what happened to someone that I considered a friend at the time that it happened. Here is the story as I remember it. The private lawsuit that Ed Curry had standing to bring was a complex contract violation between himself and Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft was not carrying through with their obligations left Ed Curry with very poor personal finances. Therefore any lawyer who took the case on would be doing so on contingency. No matter how many other lawsuits may have been filed, it is not a particularly easy matter to find a lawyer who is willing to spend years in a private lawsuit against pockets as deep as Microsoft's in the hope that someday, maybe, you'll get a big enough settlement to justify it. So what were Ed Curry's other options? Well he was aware that Microsoft was breaking the law in a rather egregious way. Windows NT 3.5.0 service pack 3 had a C2 certification. Ed knew this, he is the person who had done that security evaluation. (Which he did on the very contract that Microsoft was breaking the terms on.) However Microsoft was advertising that Windows NT 4.0 had a C2 clearance. And was selling that into government departments whose regulations required that clearance. Ed Curry was aware of the false advertising, and the lack of clearance, and was furthermore aware that major design decisions, such as putting third party graphics drivers into ring 0, made the attack surface against Windows NT 4.0 sufficiently large that it could not qualify for C2 certification. (Historical note, Windows NT 4.0 never got that certification. But many years later, on service pack 6, they got a British certification that they claimed was equivalent.) But what could he do about that? Microsoft was clearly breaking the law. But as a private individual, Ed did not have standing to sue Microsoft for the false advertising. He's not the wronged party, you need someone like the attorney general to sue. But Microsoft was politically connected, and getting those people interested is difficult. What Ed decided to do - in retrospect it was clearly a mistake - was to go public with Microsoft's lawbreaking in the hope that he could get the attention of someone sufficiently highly placed to force Microsoft to follow the law. That's when Microsoft went nuclear. They paid every one of his clients to go elsewhere. After his company went bankrupt, when he got a job they paid that company to preemptively fire him. After several months of this, he died of a heart attack. Incidentally you may wonder why Microsoft broke their contract with him in the first place. The reason was simple. They came to him with NT 4.0, and said that they wanted C2 clearance. He came back and said that it would never pass, and explained why. They told him to lie so that they could get the certification. When he refused to lie, they decided that they would punish him for failing to cooperate, and decided to not live up to their side of the agreement, safe in the knowledge that he was not going to have a reasonable chance of successfully suing them for it. That's what happened, and I don't much care whether you happen to believe it. I was there, you weren't, and people who are active on HN will make up their own minds about me.
- ajuc 14y ago
  Corporate ethic law: How evil a company is is directly proportional to the percentage of marketshare it has.
- nkohari 14y ago
  Trust me when I say that if you use .NET, you're always going to be stuck with Microsoft. Mono, the only other somewhat viable implementation of the CLR, just doesn't really cut it in practice -- at least for ASP.NET.
  - skrebbel 14y ago
    hmm, mind sharing why? My limited Mono experience was that getting a simple ASP.NET application running on a Linux VPS was, without prior Mono experience, one hours' work. I was pretty impressed by this.
    - meanguy 14y ago
      After losing the support of Novell they refocused (see xamarin.com). They really did an amazing job with what they had, though. That said, Mono benchmarked about 4x slower on my web apps. For me, better to use two Windows instances rather than deal with the ongoing Mono compatibility drama across 8 Linux machines.
    - nkohari 14y ago
      As meanguy pointed out, the Mono team lost Novell's backing -- arguably, they never had it in the first place. Xamarin is now focused entirely on mobile, to the detriment of the core CLR implementation and web. Not that I blame them in the least. I've been a huge fan of Miguel for years, and they're doing great things in the mobile space. I just can't in good conscience invest heavily in Mono knowing that it's essentially at a dead end -- particularly when other much more attractive web technologies have been released since .NET's inception. The reality is that Microsoft never really wanted to build a cross-platform CLR. They wanted a great Java-like runtime that only works on Windows. If that matches up with your goals, then by all means use .NET, but be prepared for a tough slog later on if you want to escape Windows.
      - cek 14y ago
        Mono is now backed by Xamarin. They got something like 12M in VC funding this summer and appear to be on fire. From what I've seen, the future of cross platform .NET looks great.
- DougWebb 14y ago
  I'm hardly a fanboy, I'm just lucky that MS' web stack became usable at the time I changed to a job where I needed to start using it. I don't think I could have transitioned from where I was to ASP.NET or the older stacks. I actually miss Apache/mod_perl which I found much simpler and more powerful, and I regret that I didn't get the chance to use Mojolicious professionally. But MVC3/4 haven't been so bad. I like the naming-convention-based approach because Rails and other frameworks use it, and I like having the ability to override it as-needed with attributes or route definitions. I like the dynamic type, given that I'm a die-hard Perl programmer, but I honestly haven't needed to use it in MVC so I'm not sure what you're referring too... maybe just the ViewBag object? I always used typed models for my views, and when I pass info through ViewBag I pull typed objects out of it at the top of my view so I have strongly typed variables in the rest of the view. I don't think Microsoft tech has ever favored clarity...it's usually too java-esqe ivory-tower architeched enterprisey for my tastes. MVC is like that too, but the worst bits seem to be the ones inherited from ASP.NET. The new stuff is somewhat better, and you can now at least go look at the code to figure out how it works.
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
  > That said, ASP.NET MVC is a misguided and overrated Rails ripoff, IMHO. I completely disagree. ASP MVC may be inspired by rails, and C# inspired by java, and MS may be loathe to admit ether of those sources of inspiration. however, ASP MVC on C# is great. Maybe because MS stole from the best. IMHO.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

skrebbel 14y ago

Roughly the same story here. At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I feel that while most tech BigCos (e.g. Google, Apple) have become more evil over time, MS has actually become less evil, to the point that using their tech (and some major tech at that) is relatively free of any lock-in risk. TypeScript seems very much in line with this trend, and I love it. This is exactly what I wanted - JavaScript but with decent safety and IDE support. And no more than that. I really hope that non-MS-geeks will embrace it and that Eclipse plugins and JetBrains tools and the likes will follow. That said, ASP.NET MVC is a misguided and overrated Rails ripoff, IMHO. Where's all that great refactoring support if everything is made `dynamic` and stringly typed? What's up with matching parameters to method argument names? (I mean, change an argument name and your code breaks? wtf?) Since when does Microsoft tech favour magic over clarity?

euroclydon 14y ago
How would you otherwise map GET and POST parameters to method parameters? Have you heard fo model binders? With them you can accept a class as a parameter.
meanguy 14y ago
Um, you know how Rails binds, right? Also: MVC2 runs under NET 3.5 which doesn't even have the dynamic keyword. (I don't use dynamic in MVC3 or MVC4 either...) The "stringly typed" (magic string) stuff was always avoidable. Regardless, see the [CallerMemberName] annotation and others which solves it back to INotifyPropertyChanged. Now that the backlog of Microsoft tools have shipped, the scaffolding makes a bit more sense. The MVC team released multiple versions (open sourced!) instead of waiting for VS11. Which actually lines up with your core argument.
Mpdreamz 14y ago
Magic strings can be avoided by always using a viewmodel ,using the lamda overloads on HtmlHelper (@Html.*) also T4MVC is a godsend strongly typing routes, url lookups, viewnames, filenames. Most of these have been around since MVC 1.0. Hope these pointers will keep you magic string free :)
- highace 14y ago
  Adding T4MVC is the first thing I do on a new project. It makes pretty much all the magic strings disappear.
btilly 14y ago
Given where MS started, "less evil" is damning with faint praise. The people in charge include people who were part of everything that was wrong with the company all along. As long as I have a reasonable alternative, I will never choose to trust Microsoft. Then again I'm biased. Their desire to sell insecure software to the US government when that was against the law lead them to deliberately destroy the life of a friend of mine who they were afraid was going to turn whistleblower to such an extent that he died and left behind a widow and small kids. (Example incident. At one point he got hired at another company, and his manager to be received a call from Microsoft whose whole point was, "How much do we have to pay you to fire him before he starts?" Microsoft knew how to be evil.) I'm not forgetting Ed Curry. Nor do I have any desire to forgive Microsoft. As long as people associated with the worst of their excesses remain involved and in control - people like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer - I will always make the non-Microsoft choice.
- meanguy 14y ago
  I hadn't heard this story before, but time isn't kind to this particular conspiracy. The moment of clarity: Mr. Curry wanted to sue Microsoft but "couldn't find a lawyer willing to take on the case" -- in 1998. EVERYBODY was suing Microsoft in 1998, including multiple governments. If you couldn't find someone to sue them that year, I'm afraid you don't have much credibility. And this made my head hurt: "All computer security systems begin with the Intel processor itself," Curry said. "I helped Intel develop their processor, so I know how they work and how vulnerable they can be if left exposed." ... "In fact," he added, "Microsoft NT 4.0 is the least secure of all the NT versions... Processors on Windows NT Version 4.0 are insecure because they have been designed to automatically open the processor up to accept commands on start-up."
  - btilly 14y ago
    I love how everyone is an instant expert on the Internet, even if they have only heard of the issue minutes before. I'm not a random internet conspiracist. I'm an established member of this community reporting what happened to someone that I considered a friend at the time that it happened. Here is the story as I remember it. The private lawsuit that Ed Curry had standing to bring was a complex contract violation between himself and Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft was not carrying through with their obligations left Ed Curry with very poor personal finances. Therefore any lawyer who took the case on would be doing so on contingency. No matter how many other lawsuits may have been filed, it is not a particularly easy matter to find a lawyer who is willing to spend years in a private lawsuit against pockets as deep as Microsoft's in the hope that someday, maybe, you'll get a big enough settlement to justify it. So what were Ed Curry's other options? Well he was aware that Microsoft was breaking the law in a rather egregious way. Windows NT 3.5.0 service pack 3 had a C2 certification. Ed knew this, he is the person who had done that security evaluation. (Which he did on the very contract that Microsoft was breaking the terms on.) However Microsoft was advertising that Windows NT 4.0 had a C2 clearance. And was selling that into government departments whose regulations required that clearance. Ed Curry was aware of the false advertising, and the lack of clearance, and was furthermore aware that major design decisions, such as putting third party graphics drivers into ring 0, made the attack surface against Windows NT 4.0 sufficiently large that it could not qualify for C2 certification. (Historical note, Windows NT 4.0 never got that certification. But many years later, on service pack 6, they got a British certification that they claimed was equivalent.) But what could he do about that? Microsoft was clearly breaking the law. But as a private individual, Ed did not have standing to sue Microsoft for the false advertising. He's not the wronged party, you need someone like the attorney general to sue. But Microsoft was politically connected, and getting those people interested is difficult. What Ed decided to do - in retrospect it was clearly a mistake - was to go public with Microsoft's lawbreaking in the hope that he could get the attention of someone sufficiently highly placed to force Microsoft to follow the law. That's when Microsoft went nuclear. They paid every one of his clients to go elsewhere. After his company went bankrupt, when he got a job they paid that company to preemptively fire him. After several months of this, he died of a heart attack. Incidentally you may wonder why Microsoft broke their contract with him in the first place. The reason was simple. They came to him with NT 4.0, and said that they wanted C2 clearance. He came back and said that it would never pass, and explained why. They told him to lie so that they could get the certification. When he refused to lie, they decided that they would punish him for failing to cooperate, and decided to not live up to their side of the agreement, safe in the knowledge that he was not going to have a reasonable chance of successfully suing them for it. That's what happened, and I don't much care whether you happen to believe it. I was there, you weren't, and people who are active on HN will make up their own minds about me.
ajuc 14y ago
Corporate ethic law: How evil a company is is directly proportional to the percentage of marketshare it has.
nkohari 14y ago
Trust me when I say that if you use .NET, you're always going to be stuck with Microsoft. Mono, the only other somewhat viable implementation of the CLR, just doesn't really cut it in practice -- at least for ASP.NET.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  hmm, mind sharing why? My limited Mono experience was that getting a simple ASP.NET application running on a Linux VPS was, without prior Mono experience, one hours' work. I was pretty impressed by this.
  - meanguy 14y ago
    After losing the support of Novell they refocused (see xamarin.com). They really did an amazing job with what they had, though. That said, Mono benchmarked about 4x slower on my web apps. For me, better to use two Windows instances rather than deal with the ongoing Mono compatibility drama across 8 Linux machines.
  - nkohari 14y ago
    As meanguy pointed out, the Mono team lost Novell's backing -- arguably, they never had it in the first place. Xamarin is now focused entirely on mobile, to the detriment of the core CLR implementation and web. Not that I blame them in the least. I've been a huge fan of Miguel for years, and they're doing great things in the mobile space. I just can't in good conscience invest heavily in Mono knowing that it's essentially at a dead end -- particularly when other much more attractive web technologies have been released since .NET's inception. The reality is that Microsoft never really wanted to build a cross-platform CLR. They wanted a great Java-like runtime that only works on Windows. If that matches up with your goals, then by all means use .NET, but be prepared for a tough slog later on if you want to escape Windows.
    - cek 14y ago
      Mono is now backed by Xamarin. They got something like 12M in VC funding this summer and appear to be on fire. From what I've seen, the future of cross platform .NET looks great.
DougWebb 14y ago
I'm hardly a fanboy, I'm just lucky that MS' web stack became usable at the time I changed to a job where I needed to start using it. I don't think I could have transitioned from where I was to ASP.NET or the older stacks. I actually miss Apache/mod_perl which I found much simpler and more powerful, and I regret that I didn't get the chance to use Mojolicious professionally. But MVC3/4 haven't been so bad. I like the naming-convention-based approach because Rails and other frameworks use it, and I like having the ability to override it as-needed with attributes or route definitions. I like the dynamic type, given that I'm a die-hard Perl programmer, but I honestly haven't needed to use it in MVC so I'm not sure what you're referring too... maybe just the ViewBag object? I always used typed models for my views, and when I pass info through ViewBag I pull typed objects out of it at the top of my view so I have strongly typed variables in the rest of the view. I don't think Microsoft tech has ever favored clarity...it's usually too java-esqe ivory-tower architeched enterprisey for my tastes. MVC is like that too, but the worst bits seem to be the ones inherited from ASP.NET. The new stuff is somewhat better, and you can now at least go look at the code to figure out how it works.
SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
> That said, ASP.NET MVC is a misguided and overrated Rails ripoff, IMHO. I completely disagree. ASP MVC may be inspired by rails, and C# inspired by java, and MS may be loathe to admit ether of those sources of inspiration. however, ASP MVC on C# is great. Maybe because MS stole from the best. IMHO.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]