20 ms·

Some of the things MS pulled the plug on needed it. I can’t vouch for WinRT development but the .NET 4.5 is rock solid and predictable for WinPhone & Win7/8 fr

by cl8ton 13y ago

Some of the things MS pulled the plug on needed it. I can’t vouch for WinRT development but the .NET 4.5 is rock solid and predictable for WinPhone & Win7/8 from my desk. Have you used NuGet yet with over 1100 packages? Microsoft is a public company that makes software and sells it for a profit, what is wrong with this business model? All the free open source software you use to make a product, do you then give your product away?

potatolicious 13y ago
> "Some of the things MS pulled the plug on needed it." Sure, the complaint isn't about pulling the plug on things in general, but rather how fragmented and difficult the documentation has become. If class Foo has been deprecated in favor of class Bar in a different namespace, say so on Foo's page. If class Foo is a basic utility class, it would greatly help if the documentation could point to Bar, if Bar was the supported equivalent in WinRT. Things like that. Considering how sparse the community support can be (I find .NET discussion on StackOverflow to be substantially less voluminous than, say, iOS/Cocoa dev), the reliance on first-party docs is not really optional. > "Have you used NuGet yet with over 1100 packages?" Yes. > "Microsoft is a public company that makes software and sells it for a profit, what is wrong with this business model?" You seem to be under the impression I'm railing against Microsoft. I honestly couldn't care less about Microsoft's business model. I'm strictly speaking from the perspective of an app developer - a demographic Microsoft seems to be keen to court. My experiences so far seems to indicate 3 choices: - Develop on Android/iOS, gain access to enormous volume of free (as in beer) libraries that will speed my work along and make my life easier. - Develop on WinRT (and WinPhone? my exposure on that side is limited) and home-brew a lot of core utility functionality because it doesn't exist in free (as in beer) form. - Develop on WinRT and pay astronomical licensing costs for core utility functionality, which is an easier pill to swallow if the profitability of the Windows Store is more reliable. This isn't a philosophical argument about profiting off of code, about the freedom of knowledge, or anything like that. This is a plainly pragmatic argument about developing for Microsoft's latest-and-greatest platform, and how there are very large consequences that make their platform much less attractive to developers as a consequence of both their business model as well as their approach to support and documentation.
- cl8ton 13y ago
  I agree with you on the lack of iOS & Android support in .NET so far (i'm using Xamarin to bridge this now). But I am personally confident MS will attack this market with full steam and deliver native tools to their developers sooner rather than later.

by cl8ton 13y ago

potatolicious 13y ago

> "Some of the things MS pulled the plug on needed it." Sure, the complaint isn't about pulling the plug on things in general, but rather how fragmented and difficult the documentation has become. If class Foo has been deprecated in favor of class Bar in a different namespace, say so on Foo's page. If class Foo is a basic utility class, it would greatly help if the documentation could point to Bar, if Bar was the supported equivalent in WinRT. Things like that. Considering how sparse the community support can be (I find .NET discussion on StackOverflow to be substantially less voluminous than, say, iOS/Cocoa dev), the reliance on first-party docs is not really optional. > "Have you used NuGet yet with over 1100 packages?" Yes. > "Microsoft is a public company that makes software and sells it for a profit, what is wrong with this business model?" You seem to be under the impression I'm railing against Microsoft. I honestly couldn't care less about Microsoft's business model. I'm strictly speaking from the perspective of an app developer - a demographic Microsoft seems to be keen to court. My experiences so far seems to indicate 3 choices: - Develop on Android/iOS, gain access to enormous volume of free (as in beer) libraries that will speed my work along and make my life easier. - Develop on WinRT (and WinPhone? my exposure on that side is limited) and home-brew a lot of core utility functionality because it doesn't exist in free (as in beer) form. - Develop on WinRT and pay astronomical licensing costs for core utility functionality, which is an easier pill to swallow if the profitability of the Windows Store is more reliable. This isn't a philosophical argument about profiting off of code, about the freedom of knowledge, or anything like that. This is a plainly pragmatic argument about developing for Microsoft's latest-and-greatest platform, and how there are very large consequences that make their platform much less attractive to developers as a consequence of both their business model as well as their approach to support and documentation.

cl8ton 13y ago
I agree with you on the lack of iOS & Android support in .NET so far (i'm using Xamarin to bridge this now). But I am personally confident MS will attack this market with full steam and deliver native tools to their developers sooner rather than later.