Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Microsoft is Losing Me

Firstly, Microsoft has been good to me.  My semi-mastery of Microsoft tools for web development has spawned nearly a 20 year career.  So I am by far not a Microsoft hater.  Yet some recent things that Microsoft is doing has me scratching my head.

  • ASP.Net Core - The idea of having one framework that will run nearly anywhere is a noble one.  But is this really a problem that your average enterprise development team was asking to be solved?  Most (I'm guessing) that use Microsoft Visual Studio for development are solidly in the Microsoft ecosystem.  The idea of running MVC on non-Microsoft servers appeals to what...one percent of the Microsoft ecosystem users?  Plus if I can use free tools to develop open source MVC say, why would I be paying 1000's per year per developer seat for Visual Studio? So I can tweak JSON config files and run things from the command line out of penis envy for Linux users?  Dude I like GUI's.  Seems I'm one of the few.  Maybe that makes me a weak programmer but I grow tired of coda obscura for config files and other command line crap.  Give me a limited set of options in a GUI window that is well documented so I can pick what I need and move on to solving problems not pulling my hair out with being gifted with additional ones from Microsoft.
  • Along similar lines, what is up with XAML?  I knew Silverlight would fail just like few are picking up XAML.  Again, why the GUI hatred all of a sudden?  Weird.
  • Constantly changing things.  We have been jumping through hoops from Microsoft for years.  First ASP.  Then ASP.Net Webforms.  Then MVC.  Now MVC core with helper tags quasi bringing back webform like functionality  (but without the GUI support...sigh).  As we jump through the hoops we leave a scattering of legacy applications behind us.  The bleeding edge buzz word flinging developers build and move on leaving their head aches to others while they pursue fame and glory.  Us rank and file dudes have all these apps to support.  It is starting to get old.  If you wrote a PHP app 20 years ago it would (with minimal tweaking) work fine now.  LAMP stack is still widely used.  Can we say that for Classic ASP aps? Not really, though some decent sites are still powered by it.  What about .net 1 apps?  1.1, 2.0?  MVC 1?  .ASMX web services? Now core?  What happens when Microsoft jukes in a new direction?  Should we constantly be upgrading our apps to feed the beast?
I really like MVC and Sqlite.  For me it is a sweet spot for development.  But I think I'm going to become a real programmer and start branching out to Ubuntu running Node.js.  I bet I can build and app and not touch it for 10 years and it will run fine on the latest version of Node and Ubuntu just fine (though would be ugly as HTML / JS / CSS evolves, but it would still work!).  

Microsoft, you are losing me.

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