Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Monday, September 17, 2018

What is Microsoft Doing?

Maybe I'm just old.
Maybe I'm just cranky.
Maybe I'm not that good.

Dealing with Microsoft, to me though, is getting old.  I love C# and many aspects of their web development stack, but I'm tired of all the false starts from Microsoft...


  • Webmatrix->Now kinda "Web Pages" in .net Core
  • MVC vanilla or Core...will vanilla be supported?
  • Web Forms...complicated and code bloat for sure, but instead of abandoning, now when the browsers are finally getting to the point where standard HTML5 is pretty much supported, Microsoft should have enhanced and slimmed down web forms and did them right.
  • Continual configuration nightmares.  Once you figure out a config setting, no big deal, but if you aren't into the art of writing / modifying config files all the time, needing an obscure setting can be pain.
  • Powershell and Unix envy.  Having it is fine, but abandoning GUI tools for it is lame.  I can just use Linux at that point and I would have a more stable OS...
  • IIS...This whole push for Core...is Microsoft going to fix IIS or just get c# to run everywhere?  To me this will translate into MS devs abandoning IIS and using open sourced C#...without attracting to much of the cross stream from the Linux dev crowd to adopt the other direction.  Dumb.  Plus again, if I want to program on Linux, I can already do that.  
  • Visual Studio seems to me to be collapsing on it's own weight.  Creating a simple web project now produces like 500 files with 10 folders and all sorts of again config bull sh*t.  Just to say hello world.  I get tired of the seemingly .5-1.5 gig bi-weekly updates to Visual Studio as well.  Come on guys, get your stuff straight.
  • Entity framework...ambitious idea, I got it to work, but not without it's quirks.  Slow as balls though for high scale apps unless you get in and start tweaking the frack out of things. 
  • Azure...I actually use Azure for home projects, but for professional development I, at least right now, could care little about it.  No way the enterprise stuff I work on is ever going into "the cloud".  So I get worried when I see the latest round of Microsoft Certs all seeming to contain Azure test questions.  I have no problem with Microsoft having a set of Microsoft Azure certs, I mean by all means of course.  But to FORCE Azure knowledge everywhere in order to remain certified pisses me off.
I don't know.  Programming to me seems like a lot of fads for smart people.  Web development is taking data from a user and / or displaying data in a meaningful way with security.  You can make that as complicated or as simple as you want.  It seems like just when web development was becoming fun again (HTML5 stabilizing, not having to write as much separate client code for browser exceptions, lot's of client side frameworks to do animations and such with) my dev stack, Microsoft, exploded.  

Kind of a bummer.  Especially with so many things C# / .Net do right.  Again maybe I'm just getting old and suck, but it seems like with the Microsoft stack lately I struggle with my tools rather than providing solutions.  That bugs me.  I'm looking for something lighter.  I'm not 18 any more where I enjoy jumping over hoop after hoop to get something to work, especially when in the past it seems things were much simpler and easier to get things done.  

I know Waaa right?

I really liked the MVC / SQLite in wal mode on IIS stack.  Though I only used it a few times it worked for me and I was productive in writing quick little web apps.  .Net Core MVC less so. I guess I will explore Core web pages and see if they are light.  I'm also looking at doing somethings in the ancient LAMP stack,maybe just to give me some perspective and possibly provide some backup skills in case Microsoft goes off the deep end.  I'll probably pick up Node again as well.  Ruby?  Naah...Python?  Maybe.