4 ms·

@BrandonWatson Is Listening

16 points by AndrewWarner 17y ago

BrandonWatson 17y ago
Just to kick off the discussion here, if you are a developer who is building on a platform other than .NET, I would love to know why. Tell me anything. I'm an entrepreneur on loan to MSFT and very much trying to build our outreach to the non-MSFT developer crowd, and listen to and learn about their needs so we can build better products.
- MichaelApproved 17y ago
  I'm an MSFT coder and love the mission you're on. We need more coders working with .net or the language will die off.
  - BrandonWatson 17y ago
    It drives me nuts that I have to download Eclipse to write Python code (instead of using Visual Studio). I am on a mission, and my execs have made it clear to me that they are willing to invest in what I am doing, which is awesome. Phase one, start building some trust with the community, and that starts with listening to them. Since I am in the product group (and not our evangelism group), I have direct product and strategy responsibilty. It's a cool role, and I am looking forward to spending more time doing what I love, which is working with devs and hopefully finding ways to make them more productive.
    - mikeryan 17y ago
      But you don't have to download Eclipse to write Python code. That's one of the things about open-source style projects. (granted that PyDev with Eclipse is the number one choice) But look at this list http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584 Many of the top ten are just simple text editors (maybe with dedicated plugins) This flexibility of choice is a huge distinction of most non-MS products. Even if you choose Eclipse, it makes for a single dedicated IDE for most open source languages and platforms out there. When I swtiched from Java to RoR dev I simply loaded the RadRails plugin (since switch to TextMate) and instantly knew my way around the IDE. Even for a company the size of Microsoft, building in that much support for alternatives will likely never match Eclipse in the IDE space.
    - Tichy 17y ago
      Isn't there a Python.net or something? Is your gripe that Python should be supported by Visual Studio? Why did nobody write a Python plugin for VS yet? I suppose if you believe in it, you could do it in your spare time, or the 20% time (I know that's Google, but surely Microsoft has copied that model?). I think a lot of people who use Python don't even like "fat" IDEs like VS, though.
      - BrandonWatson 17y ago
        Yes, we have IronPython (and IronRuby), and no it's not supported in VS. Don't get me started... =)
- Tichy 17y ago
  I don't use .NET because it would tie me to a proprietary platform that costs money and is not much fun to use. Why would I do that, if suitable free alternatives are available?
- req2 17y ago
  My memory may have soured the process, but I'll mention the experience I had when I tried Visual C# Express. I opted for local documentation, but everything returned 'resource not found'. In program online documentation, as I recall, led to a lot of 404s or redirects. I tried starting a demo project using SQLite, and spent more time finding the right tab with the right synonym for 'dependency' to add the SQLite plugin's directory. Trial and error wasn't terribly informative when doing that. I decide to give the website another chance, and download some sample program packs; this involved navigating past the incorrect pages Express initially pointed me to, and then downloading a zip containing files Express didn't want to open without converting. It wasn't a fun process, and the projects I opened were written by monkeys, or interns, or interning monkeys, because the method names were inconsistently named and inconsistently spelled. I went back to the less effortful Django and Rails tutorials, which introduce everything you need, and tell you enough to know where to look when you want to try a plugin.
MichaelApproved 17y ago
Frameworks, popular open source programs and prebuilt social api code. .Net is great for building things from the ground and enterprise setups but when it comes to hooking into any social site MS just doesn't stack up. Even their sponsored Facebook framework was abandoned. They invested hundreds of millions into Facebook but couldn't keep the simple framework up-to-date for their developers. No kid is going to say "Hey, I'd love to build an enterprise level reporting program with .net" Instead they're going to want to build cool plug-ins for popular open source programs. The next generation of programmers are growing up on PHP.
- BrandonWatson 17y ago
  You mention the Facebook code library. What else could we do for you and this community? As for the "cool plug-ins" bit, what is driving that decision, in your opinion? Desire for notoriety?
  - tdonia 17y ago
    Desire for experience. while there are those developers brazen enough to think their first project will change the world, personally i knew my jr. high coding skills weren't exactly enterprise level. i was more interested in playing with different platforms and exploring their limits / figuring out what works. back then i was playing with ASP (haneng & 4guysfromrolla tutorials) and PHP. ASP seemed more expensive (have to pay for a windows server) and there weren't nearly as many places i could use the code (unless i wanted to do something with a DSN or ActiveX / some other piece of windows infrastructure a kid has little incentive to learn) so eventually i stopped paying attention of ASP. now, years later, seeing what the .NET professional developers at my office fill their days with - i'm glad i didn't learn more of it, lest i'd be doing what they do. no sane person should ever be confronted with DotNetNuke.
- johns 17y ago
  Part of the problem was that until recent years, you couldn't get free dev tools for the MS platform, pretty much stifling the hobbyist developer from using .NET. Those are the people that tend to start and contribute to open source projects like the Facebook library. Now that there are free tools there's been an up swell in open source activity on projects like those and I think it will continue to get better.
generalk 17y ago
I don't use .NET because -- honestly -- I'm not quite sure what .NET means. Does it mean the Visual Studio IDE and tools? I'm not a fan of those. They're good at what they do, but I prefer tools like TextMate, Emacs, or Vim. Does it mean VB.NET or C#, the two languages I immediately associate with the term .NET? Does it mean the CLR and any/all languages built on it? Either way, I'm a web developer, and it takes me all of two seconds to do: rails -d mysql project_name script/server and setting that up took about fifteen minutes of compiling and installing things for free. I could switch to IronRuby, but I don't see the upside. Does it mean the ASP.NET web stack? I (and my company) deploy to *nix servers, and switching to Windows servers isn't in the cards. The biggest problem, in my case, is I don't care about .NET -- the term to me implies "the Microsoft way", a catchall term for using MS technologies, which I'm not interested in. I can become interested in an IDE that runs on my platform of choice, and I can become interested in a language runtime that's faster than, say, MRI; but only if these things don't also imply switching to an all-MS stack. (edit: formatting)
- callmeed 17y ago
  I wish I could upvote this 10x. I have no idea what .NET means today other than the little insight I get when listening to the Stack Overflow podcast (which isn't much). Not only do I not know what .NET means, I wouldn't know where to start learning or what the requirements are ... Where is the .NET equivalent of these types of resources? (I really want to know): http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/1/6/ubuntu-intrepid-ruby-on-rails http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/1/6/ubuntu-intrepid-ruby-... http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/9/3/ubuntu-hardy-using-mod_wsgi-to-serve-your-application http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/9/3/ubuntu-hardy-using-mo... http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts http://railscasts.com/ http://railscasts.com/ http://blog.disqus.net/2007/03/11/a-django-primer/ http://blog.disqus.net/2007/03/11/a-django-primer/ Furthermore: - Can I spin up a $20/month .NET-compatible VPS? - Can I easily tie my .NET apps into cloud services like S3 (I can tie S3 file attachment into my Rails models in minutes)? I don't ask these questions to be flippant–I honestly don't know the answer because I never bothered to search it out.
  - BrandonWatson 17y ago
Keyframe 17y ago
-- honestly -- I don't use .NET because: * I am cheap, there are free stuff that are excellent and free * I don't trust Windows as a server environment - 1) because of inherited public perception of it 2) lack of experience * I have a perception of mono as poor .NET clone most probable reason is no. 1

16 points by AndrewWarner 17y ago

Just to kick off the discussion here, if you are a developer who is building on a platform other than .NET, I would love to know why. Tell me anything. I'm an entrepreneur on loan to MSFT and very much trying to build our outreach to the non-MSFT developer crowd, and listen to and learn about their needs so we can build better products.

MichaelApproved 17y ago
I'm an MSFT coder and love the mission you're on. We need more coders working with .net or the language will die off.
- BrandonWatson 17y ago
  It drives me nuts that I have to download Eclipse to write Python code (instead of using Visual Studio). I am on a mission, and my execs have made it clear to me that they are willing to invest in what I am doing, which is awesome. Phase one, start building some trust with the community, and that starts with listening to them. Since I am in the product group (and not our evangelism group), I have direct product and strategy responsibilty. It's a cool role, and I am looking forward to spending more time doing what I love, which is working with devs and hopefully finding ways to make them more productive.
  - mikeryan 17y ago
    But you don't have to download Eclipse to write Python code. That's one of the things about open-source style projects. (granted that PyDev with Eclipse is the number one choice) But look at this list http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584 Many of the top ten are just simple text editors (maybe with dedicated plugins) This flexibility of choice is a huge distinction of most non-MS products. Even if you choose Eclipse, it makes for a single dedicated IDE for most open source languages and platforms out there. When I swtiched from Java to RoR dev I simply loaded the RadRails plugin (since switch to TextMate) and instantly knew my way around the IDE. Even for a company the size of Microsoft, building in that much support for alternatives will likely never match Eclipse in the IDE space.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    Isn't there a Python.net or something? Is your gripe that Python should be supported by Visual Studio? Why did nobody write a Python plugin for VS yet? I suppose if you believe in it, you could do it in your spare time, or the 20% time (I know that's Google, but surely Microsoft has copied that model?). I think a lot of people who use Python don't even like "fat" IDEs like VS, though.
    - BrandonWatson 17y ago
      Yes, we have IronPython (and IronRuby), and no it's not supported in VS. Don't get me started... =)
Tichy 17y ago
I don't use .NET because it would tie me to a proprietary platform that costs money and is not much fun to use. Why would I do that, if suitable free alternatives are available?
req2 17y ago
My memory may have soured the process, but I'll mention the experience I had when I tried Visual C# Express. I opted for local documentation, but everything returned 'resource not found'. In program online documentation, as I recall, led to a lot of 404s or redirects. I tried starting a demo project using SQLite, and spent more time finding the right tab with the right synonym for 'dependency' to add the SQLite plugin's directory. Trial and error wasn't terribly informative when doing that. I decide to give the website another chance, and download some sample program packs; this involved navigating past the incorrect pages Express initially pointed me to, and then downloading a zip containing files Express didn't want to open without converting. It wasn't a fun process, and the projects I opened were written by monkeys, or interns, or interning monkeys, because the method names were inconsistently named and inconsistently spelled. I went back to the less effortful Django and Rails tutorials, which introduce everything you need, and tell you enough to know where to look when you want to try a plugin.

MichaelApproved 17y ago

Frameworks, popular open source programs and prebuilt social api code. .Net is great for building things from the ground and enterprise setups but when it comes to hooking into any social site MS just doesn't stack up. Even their sponsored Facebook framework was abandoned. They invested hundreds of millions into Facebook but couldn't keep the simple framework up-to-date for their developers. No kid is going to say "Hey, I'd love to build an enterprise level reporting program with .net" Instead they're going to want to build cool plug-ins for popular open source programs. The next generation of programmers are growing up on PHP.

BrandonWatson 17y ago
You mention the Facebook code library. What else could we do for you and this community? As for the "cool plug-ins" bit, what is driving that decision, in your opinion? Desire for notoriety?
- tdonia 17y ago
  Desire for experience. while there are those developers brazen enough to think their first project will change the world, personally i knew my jr. high coding skills weren't exactly enterprise level. i was more interested in playing with different platforms and exploring their limits / figuring out what works. back then i was playing with ASP (haneng & 4guysfromrolla tutorials) and PHP. ASP seemed more expensive (have to pay for a windows server) and there weren't nearly as many places i could use the code (unless i wanted to do something with a DSN or ActiveX / some other piece of windows infrastructure a kid has little incentive to learn) so eventually i stopped paying attention of ASP. now, years later, seeing what the .NET professional developers at my office fill their days with - i'm glad i didn't learn more of it, lest i'd be doing what they do. no sane person should ever be confronted with DotNetNuke.
johns 17y ago
Part of the problem was that until recent years, you couldn't get free dev tools for the MS platform, pretty much stifling the hobbyist developer from using .NET. Those are the people that tend to start and contribute to open source projects like the Facebook library. Now that there are free tools there's been an up swell in open source activity on projects like those and I think it will continue to get better.

generalk 17y ago

I don't use .NET because -- honestly -- I'm not quite sure what .NET means. Does it mean the Visual Studio IDE and tools? I'm not a fan of those. They're good at what they do, but I prefer tools like TextMate, Emacs, or Vim. Does it mean VB.NET or C#, the two languages I immediately associate with the term .NET? Does it mean the CLR and any/all languages built on it? Either way, I'm a web developer, and it takes me all of two seconds to do: rails -d mysql project_name script/server and setting that up took about fifteen minutes of compiling and installing things for free. I could switch to IronRuby, but I don't see the upside. Does it mean the ASP.NET web stack? I (and my company) deploy to *nix servers, and switching to Windows servers isn't in the cards. The biggest problem, in my case, is I don't care about .NET -- the term to me implies "the Microsoft way", a catchall term for using MS technologies, which I'm not interested in. I can become interested in an IDE that runs on my platform of choice, and I can become interested in a language runtime that's faster than, say, MRI; but only if these things don't also imply switching to an all-MS stack. (edit: formatting)

callmeed 17y ago
I wish I could upvote this 10x. I have no idea what .NET means today other than the little insight I get when listening to the Stack Overflow podcast (which isn't much). Not only do I not know what .NET means, I wouldn't know where to start learning or what the requirements are ... Where is the .NET equivalent of these types of resources? (I really want to know): http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/1/6/ubuntu-intrepid-ruby-on-rails http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/1/6/ubuntu-intrepid-ruby-... http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/9/3/ubuntu-hardy-using-mod_wsgi-to-serve-your-application http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/9/3/ubuntu-hardy-using-mo... http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts http://railscasts.com/ http://railscasts.com/ http://blog.disqus.net/2007/03/11/a-django-primer/ http://blog.disqus.net/2007/03/11/a-django-primer/ Furthermore: - Can I spin up a $20/month .NET-compatible VPS? - Can I easily tie my .NET apps into cloud services like S3 (I can tie S3 file attachment into my Rails models in minutes)? I don't ask these questions to be flippant–I honestly don't know the answer because I never bothered to search it out.
- BrandonWatson 17y ago

Keyframe 17y ago

-- honestly -- I don't use .NET because: * I am cheap, there are free stuff that are excellent and free * I don't trust Windows as a server environment - 1) because of inherited public perception of it 2) lack of experience * I have a perception of mono as poor .NET clone most probable reason is no. 1