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A .NET developer recently was telling me the .NET community tends to be very insular, a lot of interesting ideas are ignored unless Microsoft makes them first-c

A .NET developer recently was telling me the .NET community tends to be very insular, a lot of interesting ideas are ignored unless Microsoft makes them first-class citizens of the ecosystem. That's unfortunate IMO.

flatline 12y ago
This is always how it has been with Microsoft. They control the developer toolchain 100%. They have gone out of their way in years past to burn other development tools (they pretty much shut Delphi out of the market with a last-minute change in one of their specs, back in the day - was it COM?) The advantage of this is that you get some really nice APIs - the gulf between the .NET and Java core library architectures is huge - but the drawbacks are too many to name: forced obsolescence every few years, continual new experimental technologies forced on developers using the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish paradigm, and you really don't have the time or energy to try to work outside this model. You are either in the community or out of it. This is showing signs of change with the opening of the .NET toolchain, but I'll be curious to see if there is a point at which some of it actually starts to be community driven. Miguel de Icaza cannot shoulder the entire movement by himself;)
WDCDev 12y ago
That depends on the type of developer you are speaking with. Most enterprise developers working for medium to large companies feel this way. Contractors are a different story. They embrace open source as much as the Java community. Disclaimer: .Net developer learning python/django for a rather large-scale cloud implementation.
jammycakes 12y ago
That's the most common criticism of the Microsoft ecosystem by far. It's not just being insular, it's that huge swathes of the .NET community insist on being spoon-fed by Microsoft. The attitude is that if something isn't included out of the box with Visual Studio, you've no business whatsoever paying the slightest bit of attention to it. You see it in spades in the Silverlight community. They're all blaming Microsoft for the decline of Silverlight, even though it's largely due to factors outside Microsoft's control.
- pnathan 12y ago
  This is my experience of the .NET world: spoon-fed is, oddly, preferred. I don't get it, myself.

flatline 12y ago

This is always how it has been with Microsoft. They control the developer toolchain 100%. They have gone out of their way in years past to burn other development tools (they pretty much shut Delphi out of the market with a last-minute change in one of their specs, back in the day - was it COM?) The advantage of this is that you get some really nice APIs - the gulf between the .NET and Java core library architectures is huge - but the drawbacks are too many to name: forced obsolescence every few years, continual new experimental technologies forced on developers using the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish paradigm, and you really don't have the time or energy to try to work outside this model. You are either in the community or out of it. This is showing signs of change with the opening of the .NET toolchain, but I'll be curious to see if there is a point at which some of it actually starts to be community driven. Miguel de Icaza cannot shoulder the entire movement by himself;)

WDCDev 12y ago

That depends on the type of developer you are speaking with. Most enterprise developers working for medium to large companies feel this way. Contractors are a different story. They embrace open source as much as the Java community. Disclaimer: .Net developer learning python/django for a rather large-scale cloud implementation.

jammycakes 12y ago

That's the most common criticism of the Microsoft ecosystem by far. It's not just being insular, it's that huge swathes of the .NET community insist on being spoon-fed by Microsoft. The attitude is that if something isn't included out of the box with Visual Studio, you've no business whatsoever paying the slightest bit of attention to it. You see it in spades in the Silverlight community. They're all blaming Microsoft for the decline of Silverlight, even though it's largely due to factors outside Microsoft's control.

pnathan 12y ago
This is my experience of the .NET world: spoon-fed is, oddly, preferred. I don't get it, myself.