

Appreciating the power of a true community (Ruby and.NET) - colin_jack
http://7enn.com/2011/07/04/appreciating-the-power-of-a-true-community/

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GFischer
I was expecting a rant, but it's an interesting perspective (though still a
bit of a rant at the end).

I'm still pretty much stuck in .NET, though whenever I do have to get outside
my comfort zone (which is often), I gain a new appreciation for the IDE, but I
have to agree that the Ruby community does sound interesting, and has a lot of
nice tools.

I'm still not convinced that I could do my job better on Ruby (enterprise
software, non-web based), but I'll definitely give it a try for web
development (as soon as I finish my MBA - I decided to follow the dark path of
more money)

------
jinushaun
Matches my sentiments exactly, although I wouldn't completely blame MS. I
blame the .NET community.

Sure, MS is a business in it to make money. They release a new version of .NET
as much to drive sales of Visual Studio as they do to improve the language and
development process; but why doesn't the .NET community just take it and run
with it? Why doesn't the community have a .NET version of gems or Rails or
MVC? Why is everyone waiting on MS to deliver the "official" version of a
particular technology?

~~~
Michiel
What is 'the community' and what do you expect from them?

Looking at some recent technologies/libraries/tools released by Microsoft,
there are alternatives to all of them, and most of them were released well
before Microsoft released theirs:

NHibernate vs. Entity Framework

Monorail vs ASP.NET MVC

NUnit (and many others) vs Microsoft Test

Autofac (and many others) vs MEF

Spark (and many others) vs Razor

OpenWrap vs NuGet

Umbraco CMS vs Orchard CMS

It's just that 80% (90%? 95%?) of .NET developers associate working on .NET
with working in Visual Studio. And whenever Microsoft comes out with their
version, there's always a 'tooling story'. LINQ to SQL is a great example: a
limited technology with great tooling and documentation, just right amount of
integration to get a lot of developers on board. Same with ASP.NET MVC, every
official video will show how easy it is too add any of the M, V or C parts
using Visual Studio.

Ultimately the tools shouldn't matter that much, but in 'the .NET community'
it matters a lot. In fact, I would say 70% of Microsoft strategy is 'get them
hooked on the tools' and the other 30% is to always have something new coming
up.

I'm fine with that, I use ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, Entity Framework, and I mix 'n
match with some of the great OSS libraries (like xUnit or Autofac). I'm
comfortable with that (even when using WebForms) and I make a good living. And
when I want to debug, I hit F5 and live is good.

Don't forget that Codeplex is a pretty good move from Microsoft to make sure
there is a healthy amount of OSS solutions available in the .NET space

If this is what works for many developers, for venders and customers and for
Microsoft, and the 'ecosystem' is thriving, AND there is STILL room for OSS...
then I don't see a problem.

There is no greater good... if this does NOT work for you, if this makes you
unhappy, there are so many alternatives outside .NET. It doesn't mean that the
.NET ecosystem should change. In fact, I don't think it ever will. The model
works too good for Microsoft to just 'hand over the keys' to the community.

Microsoft owns the platform, this is their strategy and it works.

------
djacobs
_MS don’t deserve .NET developers who want to get better, because MS aims at
developers who don’t want to get better. just developers who want to stay
where they are and have a job until they die._

Coming from the Ruby community, this is a little surprising. I know everyone
rags on Microsoft for being the man, but certainly they aim for more than the
status quo, no?

~~~
colin_jack
I'm a .NET dev now looking at Ruby etc and honestly no I don't think MS do try
to move beyond the status quo, or more correctly I guess Roy hit the nail on
the head in that the advancement is often of the "new sharepoint 2013" variety
rather than advancing practices or really useful functionality.

Some will argue things are more advanced now (ALT.NET, OSS, packagement in
NuGet/OpenWrap) but I think Roy hits the nail on the head in terms of the
speed of change in say Ruby/node.js communities as compared to .NET.

