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I am not much of a Windows guy, but C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem pretty nice to me and have been supported about as long as Mac OS X. It's also my i
by chc 14y ago
I am not much of a Windows guy, but C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem pretty nice to me and have been supported about as long as Mac OS X. It's also my impression that Microsoft has introduced fewer breaking changes into .NET during that period — though again, that might just be a symptom of me being more tuned into the Apple ecosystem. Was there anything similar to what Apple did to Carbon developers a few years back, abruptly deprecating most of the framework just a few months before an OS release?
And Apple has been accused of having the opposite problem — writing APIs just for the "showcase" applications. Very often the first version of an API will be great for recreating Apple's demos, but when you need to go past that, the framework is either unhelpful or actually gets in your way. (I'd like to offer some good examples, but they're eluding me at the moment. I know I've seen a number of complaints along these lines on the Cocoa-Dev mailing list over the years.)
IMO, the reason for Apple's good relationship with developers look more like this:
• It's UNIX, which developers have always loved for fairly well-known reasons.
• Microsoft entered the last decade pretty much universally despised. Many developers would flat-out refuse to work there, despite it being a hugely successful company with generous compensation, just because association with Microsoft was so very uncool.
• Apple sold boutique computers to consumers and professionals. People who bought Apple computers were signaling "I actively seek out and pay for experiences that I like better." This meant Apple's user base has generally been disproportionately profitable for apps targeted at those markets.
• Related to the second point, Apple was the major alternative at a time when technophiles wanted to get away from Microsoft. They could have gone to Linux, but at the time Macs were just a bit more mature and "safe," particularly on laptops.
- camus 14y agoC# is the neatest thing that got out of microsoft ( with Active Directory ) , the rest is not so good , i wish the whole .net plateform was opensource and independant from MS ( yeah i know mono ,but mono is mono )
- beagle3 14y ago> C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem pretty nice to me and have been supported about as long as Mac OS X. On the back end server, that's mostly true. Microsoft has been playing the "here's a new API, we'll stop improving the old one, and make relying on it foolish" treadmill for more than 15 years: MFC, ATL, ODBC, ADO, DAO, Liquid, SilverLight, WPF, WinForms, VB6 -> VB.Net, DNA -> ASP, ... The world, up until a few years ago, was very happy to be on that treadmill. I was always baffled by it, but I can understand the fashion and buzzword driven resume IT world. Except, something changed in the last 3 years: People are no longer as happy with the Microsoft treadmill, and the cool kids started liking the stuff that does not strictly depend on a corporate sponsor for advances and obsoleting: Ruby [on Rails], Node.js, Clojure, and more. I'm working on a project that's heavily invested in WPF, a decision that seemed reasonable to the decision makers back in 2010, and it's a horrible mess. There are resource leaks that have been reported as "won't fix until next version" 3 years ago, but it was only a year ago that it became clear there never will be a next version. (I have to manually call garbage collection once every second or so, or the GUI freezes with no error or explanation. Figuring that out was a few wasted days of debugging). And WPF obsoleted WinForms; And silverlight was supposed to be a subset of WPF, except they have a weird common subset that is useful for nothing, and a lot of stuff I need was added to SilverLight, but not WPF, with the intention of adding it to the next WPF that never came. Oh, and SilverLight was abandoned too.