Interesting perception on the current .NET community

http://danhounshell.com/blogs/dan/archive/2008/03/24/what-is-wrong-with-the-asp-net-community.aspx

in many ways i agree with that observation...but I doubt that MS will change the way it currently runs the community.

Well the first thing that caught me is this chap seems to think the .NET community is all about working on ASP.NET alone ;-)

It is not. .NET is much larger than that, and his passage in reality (though it may not seem apparent to himself) refers to the entire .NET developer community. I do not find myself fitting well into his generalisations because I do not steer the community by building my own frameworks or products, nor do I ever come close to being a 9-6 developer who just does the "job" and goes home to sleep. It almost seems like, if you are not building your own leet product that the community lauds, you belong to the bottom slacker group. Of course, that is probably not his deliberate intention.

There is some truth though, that Microsoft is not really doing well to consolidate the good work already out there. Why reinvent the wheel with a new Test framework to kill nUnit? Now we have two frameworks to learn. Probably could not buy over RedGate, so we end up with Team Edition for Database Profressionals. Is that all bad? Not really, since it appears that developers (and management) have an easier time buying something offered directly by Microsoft than evaluating what is lacking and purchasing the 3rd-party components/tools to raise the effectiveness of their development teams. I sure had an easier team getting my team to practise TDD and database versioning since Test projects and Database projects are directly featured inside Visual Studio now. But at the same time, I feel "bad" for the 3rd-party creators who essentially got shafted for their work and effort.

nice point, but at the same time you question, why does it have to be that way? i mean, why is a community-driven utility or solution treated differently than a Microsoft-developed solution in the Microsoft developer circles? clearly, some paradigms or mindset has to change right there...

cruizer:

nice point, but at the same time you question, why does it have to be that way? i mean, why is a community-driven utility or solution treated differently than a Microsoft-developed solution in the Microsoft developer circles? clearly, some paradigms or mindset has to change right there...

icelava:

since it appears that developers (and management) have an easier time buying something offered directly by Microsoft than evaluating what is lacking and purchasing the 3rd-party components/tools to raise the effectiveness of their development teams.

so how come Java developers (and their managers) seem to have an easier time trusting community-developed solutions and tools than their Microsoft-oriented counterparts?

remember, stuff like Hibernate and JBoss didn't come from the PHB types...they came from the developers, and only eventually did their managers get convinced...

cruizer:

so how come Java developers (and their managers) seem to have an easier time trusting community-developed solutions and tools than their Microsoft-oriented counterparts?

I cannot tell for sure without first-hand experience. Never worked as a Java developer before.

From what I can see, Java is quite a splintered community, with various groups championing "competing" frameworks, operating on a variety of base operating systems/JVMs. If anything, it appears there are perhaps too many frameworks. Teams have to go out on their own to make decisions on which frameworks to adopt for their practices. Of course, this certainly happens with the .NET community too (just look at AJAX), but we have the "luxury" of lazily listening to somebody "authoritative" on how we should be developing applications.

Drag this icon from the pane, drop it on the interface designer, set a few properties, and volia, rich control functionality in a few seconds. And I did not even have to write a line of code.....

So how does a pampered community look beyond the provisions of Microsoft to see what else they can do to improve themselves, when they don't even perceive the need for improvement? When the onus is on Microsoft tools to offer "productivity gains"?

the problem with some Microsoft technologies is that they're geared towards RAD. I call this "demo driven development." It's great for demos and tech events, but when applied to real-world software development, maintainability eventually plummets how much do you really like typed datasets, for example? and i recall how laughable the first data access application block (DAAB) looked like -- all static methods!!!

and apparently, for many, Microsoft's word is canon and cannot be contradicted. so they just accept that as the "best practice" and eventually bang themselves against the wall.

Agreed perception. I never felt comfortable right from Day 1 of becoming a professional .NET developer, by looking at the methods Microsoft is teaching the public.