4 ms·

Cringe, laugh or cry if you will, but LoB development has essentially moved to the web. Overall I think Microsoft's metro/winrt/client focus really abandoned t

Cringe, laugh or cry if you will, but LoB development has essentially moved to the web. Overall I think Microsoft's metro/winrt/client focus really abandoned their position of strength in the enterprise. This essentially forces existing Microsoft-friendly enterprises to switch technology stacks (WinRT is a non-trivial migration target) and at the same time gives a significant boost to HTML- the long trail of abandoned platforms should give everyone pause when considering a new one. I'll put much of the responsibility (blame?) of this on Sinofsky who essentially wanted a clean slate for WinRT to ensure apps were designed for Metro and not half-assed ports. This strategy was fairly cocky and I'll argue could have been done with more finesse to not destroy as much marketshare- right now Win8 needs every inch it can get.

avenger123 13y ago
Agree to this. Most of the enterprise applications I have worked on in the last 7 years have been web based. The default question is now, why not Web? A justification needs to be made as to why its not web based. With ASP.NET MVC I feel there is better control of large datasets so that the whole set isn't loaded at once which WebForms made so easy to do.
- _random_ 13y ago
  The inevitable sequence of questions: 1. Why not Web? 2. Why not NoSQL? 3. Why Microsoft?
  - yuiop 13y ago
    C# Large teams drive make typed languages attractive and C# does it without leaving behind a lot of the functional (like) and dynamic (like) features. C# and Office are the reasons there is still a microsoft, but those are pretty decent reasons.
  - avenger123 13y ago
    I don't want this to start into another debate. For most companies, its either Microsoft or Java stack. There isn't too much in between. And frankly its not a bad stack when money is not a factor in deciding the stack.Most companies whose core business isn't software just want to get their job done. Microsoft works well in this space and will continue to do so. Frankly, with Java being part of Oracle, I feel there is an even more push to Microsoft. Obviously this is my opinion but I don't believe I will running out of work any time soon on the Microsoft stack.
    - derefr 13y ago
      > For most companies, its either Microsoft or Java stack. There isn't too much in between. I find it odd that the "Unix stack" isn't considered a horse in this race.
      - ebiester 13y ago
        So which of them work well with Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2 drivers? Your average fortune 500 company isn't moving to PostgreSQL for the hell of it. They're running on top of unix, but it all comes down to the database. And the java and .NET drivers are the best options. Rails has oracle and DB2 options, but how many people are using them? How well are they supported? How many people are around if you run into problems? What list of consultants can you hire when an advanced problem comes up? Otherwise, you're stuck with a labyrinth of ETL jobs between the main DB and your internal app. That's not going to bode well, especially with JRuby around. The other option is writing your business logic in the JVM and doing rest calls between that and your front end. I've heard multiple discussions of this (and even seen it done a few times.) But that's not getting rid of the JVM.
hershel 13y ago
I think they had a chance with microsost lightswitch , which looked like a pretty good LoB dev environment, But it only supported windows UI. I they had supported HTML5 + windows from the start(not just recently), they might have kept some users using windows UI. Now everybody is doing html5. There are even good tools for LoB(like alpha five) on html5 , so lightswitch has little advantage.
_random_ 13y ago
Which makes me think lately: why do I even need Microsoft's stack for HTML5 as an employee? I bet that by choosing Scala instead of C# I would gain both in terms of salary and in terms of re-usability of skill across different platforms. And JavaScript/HTML5... well I guess these are just crappy times and we have to bite the bullet of using outdated crappy languages for client-side...

avenger123 13y ago

Agree to this. Most of the enterprise applications I have worked on in the last 7 years have been web based. The default question is now, why not Web? A justification needs to be made as to why its not web based. With ASP.NET MVC I feel there is better control of large datasets so that the whole set isn't loaded at once which WebForms made so easy to do.

_random_ 13y ago
The inevitable sequence of questions: 1. Why not Web? 2. Why not NoSQL? 3. Why Microsoft?
- yuiop 13y ago
  C# Large teams drive make typed languages attractive and C# does it without leaving behind a lot of the functional (like) and dynamic (like) features. C# and Office are the reasons there is still a microsoft, but those are pretty decent reasons.
- avenger123 13y ago
  I don't want this to start into another debate. For most companies, its either Microsoft or Java stack. There isn't too much in between. And frankly its not a bad stack when money is not a factor in deciding the stack.Most companies whose core business isn't software just want to get their job done. Microsoft works well in this space and will continue to do so. Frankly, with Java being part of Oracle, I feel there is an even more push to Microsoft. Obviously this is my opinion but I don't believe I will running out of work any time soon on the Microsoft stack.
  - derefr 13y ago
    > For most companies, its either Microsoft or Java stack. There isn't too much in between. I find it odd that the "Unix stack" isn't considered a horse in this race.
    - ebiester 13y ago
      So which of them work well with Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2 drivers? Your average fortune 500 company isn't moving to PostgreSQL for the hell of it. They're running on top of unix, but it all comes down to the database. And the java and .NET drivers are the best options. Rails has oracle and DB2 options, but how many people are using them? How well are they supported? How many people are around if you run into problems? What list of consultants can you hire when an advanced problem comes up? Otherwise, you're stuck with a labyrinth of ETL jobs between the main DB and your internal app. That's not going to bode well, especially with JRuby around. The other option is writing your business logic in the JVM and doing rest calls between that and your front end. I've heard multiple discussions of this (and even seen it done a few times.) But that's not getting rid of the JVM.

hershel 13y ago

I think they had a chance with microsost lightswitch , which looked like a pretty good LoB dev environment, But it only supported windows UI. I they had supported HTML5 + windows from the start(not just recently), they might have kept some users using windows UI. Now everybody is doing html5. There are even good tools for LoB(like alpha five) on html5 , so lightswitch has little advantage.

_random_ 13y ago

Which makes me think lately: why do I even need Microsoft's stack for HTML5 as an employee? I bet that by choosing Scala instead of C# I would gain both in terms of salary and in terms of re-usability of skill across different platforms. And JavaScript/HTML5... well I guess these are just crappy times and we have to bite the bullet of using outdated crappy languages for client-side...