Microsoft's developer crusade
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
What the?
In the 90's, if you wanted to "program", and if you wanted to show other people your skill, you made a windows executable and distributed it through one of the myriad of windows shareware/freeware websites. "I want to learn to program" meant firing up Visual Basic and having a go. And Microsoft was king, because they had the best tools, and they had the platform everyone was using and targeting.
Now, almost noone makes windows executables anymore, if they want to show off their skill. People wanting to learn to program would never use Visual Basic today, it's completely off the radar. They are much more likely to learn some web framework and put up a web app to show the world, or make a phone app and put on an app store. Windows executable? That doesn't run on your iPhone or MacBook or Android.
And Microsoft has no idea on how to get the new learners back. They have nothing to offer them.
(I agree with you, but know plenty in the other camp and it took me a while to understand them).
Someonebody should document that gap, if it hasn't been done, in the same vein as The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
My point is that there's no influx of young aspiring programmers entering that world anymore. The ones that are there now got there by picking up VB or VC++ as kids, but noone is picking those up today, and MS has absolutely no idea on how to attract new developers, none of their offerings are interesting to someone new to the field.
At least on hackernews, the number of Microsoft developers seems to be quite small (a poll would be interesting though).
Disclaimer: working for Microsoft, speaking for self.
It breaks my heart to see young people with such low aspirations. Young people are here to change the world, not to be mutilated into conformity.
How will LISP help an investment bank? How do the millions of CRUD apps in startups written in Ruby, PHP or Python change the world? What about F# being made a first class member of .NET?
An enterprise app in Ruby will be as boring as the one in C#. Its to do with a risk averse attitude instead of adopting the framework of the week. A robotics program written in C# or F# can change the world. It breaks my heart to see an empty superiority complex at work here. It's akin to carpenters feeling great about their choice of tools and insulting others choices rather than showing off their allegedly wonderful creations they built with the tools. For example, take StackOverflow, written in .NET and scaling much better than other web apps by using the right tools rather than getting caught up in partisan arguments.
And why do people feel they need to hide behind throwaway nicknames before they can feel free to debate? Let me be perfectly clear I don't hunt down people who disagree with me. If there's something I avoid, it's yes-men.
Why subscribe to such black and white thinking?
I'd argue that by doing so, you have an even better chance at affecting change than you would trying to do a startup, since startups tend to have a very low rate of success.
Of course they can, but if your focus is on earning a paycheck, it'll be much harder to make a difference because you may be unwilling to take the necessary risks.
If there is one thing I miss from my youth (apart from hair, perfect eyesight and the ability to fall without breaking bones) is my ability to throw everything up and start from scratch. I wouldn't trade that for my family, of course, and that is the whole point.
In any case, this really has nothing to do with Microsoft developers. Using open source tech doesn't automatically make one a great liberator or anything.
If a small fraction of the population lived up to my own realized ideals, I'd be very happy already.
I also don't remember mentioning Microsoft or open-source on my comment. I was only mentioning the "working for a paycheck" aspiration.
Context is important as you read through the comments. Read your parent post of the post I was replying to.
Someone has to do the boring jobs so the world turns.
user: rwhite
created: 1 hour ago I think .net still has a very specific place in the world on internal intranet applications and tools. It's very easy to go in and make something good enough to provide the backbone web service layer between two departments, or to provide data entry and search services.
I don't think this advantage will go away overnight but at the same time the ease of entry and user friendliness of the open source tools is something that I've found Microsoft to be completely incapable of understanding. They/we would constantly talk about our superior tooling. But the fact that we required tooling at all when you could jump into roo or ror or cake or zf and issue a few commandline calls to produce 80 of the your site blows any of microsoft's tooling away.
Yes, their stuff is good and competent, and they're serving the needs of their existing customers and developers, but they don't make kids excited to fire up Visual Studio and crank out a Windows Phone app, the same way they made kids excited to fire up Visual Basic and crank out a windows exe back in the day.
There aren't any success stories around the Microsoft ecosystem anymore. Who makes the quick bucks today? Phone game developers. Facebook game developers. That's what people are chasing, so that's what people are wanting to learn how to do on their own time.
Who wants to learn how to make Windows Phone apps? Or Silverlight apps? Or Windows app store apps RT or whatever the hell they called that mess. Noone, except those already being paid to do it. There are lots of steady jobs there, but exciting ones? No.
All of this discussion is anecdotal, we have no hard evidence really what developers under 30 think about Microsoft. And kids are extremely dynamic and fickle anyways, they will quickly adopt any technology that helps them achieve their goals as things fall in and out of favor. So its not like there are hard external barriers to Microsoft winning back young dev mindshare, only internal cultural ones.
We also seem to do much better in Asia (China, where I'm more familiar) in outreach than the west. Perhaps that is temporary and a result of startup/hacker culture not really taking hold here, but for the present we seem to be doing very well.
> There aren't any success stories around the Microsoft ecosystem anymore.
This is quite a weird statement. In the enterprise, there are plenty of success stories that even I can't understand, like Sharepoint. Perhaps you mean the lack of "sexy success stories"? I could agree with that.
1. There just aren't enough people using Windows 8 and downloading apps yet 2. MS approval process is much, much worse than Apple's. They even included things like grammar errors in the review.
The review had grammar errors? Or they pointed out your application has grammar errors?
Do you have an evidence to back that up?
The reason I ask is because whenever my company is hiring, we get plenty of fresh young faces walking through the door.
ASP.NET MVC is a great web framework.
More people seem to have heard of PHP when they think of programming, in the same way that Visual Basic was in the 90s.
From a coding perspective it is completely different and worlds better.
In the web world the onus is on MS to justify why they have advantages over Open source solutions rather than the other way around (as it was with desktop software).
Perhaps they will do so as part of this crusade for developers, but I don't think Microsoft has figured out how to capitalize on the renaissance in client software.
These days, being a Windows desktop software developer is pretty bad. Leaving out all the .net framework craze, Microsoft has made things much worse for many old software developers with their attempts to control everything. I am not OK with Microsoft being the one, who decides, whether users may run my software or not. I simply cannot develop for WinRT no matter how nice the native+HTML5 API may be. Even on desktop, Internet Explorer checks every download and hides the install button if the installer is "untrusted".
In short, Microsoft is not a reliable and respectful partner for independent software developers anymore.
Ok, don't make me laugh.
I wonder how much they pay him for writing this stuff.
Have ya not heard of any of the hundreds of open source projects that Microsoft has released? Typescript? ASP.NET MVC? Entity Framework? Reactive Extensions for .NET and Javascript?
Oh, did you expect them to just open source every single one of their products or something? Apple and Google don't even do that and I bet you love them, don't you?
Let's say they get convinced that the next big thing is some form of Intentional Programming. They are not going to do a graceful transition from .NET to IP. They'll suddenly remove all references to the Old Thing on site:microsoft.com and all you'll see is the New Thing, trumpets blaring. This is psychologically difficult for a developer who has invested years, not just months, learning the Old Thing.
The same attitude is visible with how the Metro UI is being shoved down my visual pathways with Win 8.
A related but often tacit issue is that the pace of change in technology is actually a vehicle for age discrimination. All of us do it at some level ("Good God, COBOL on the resume?! What is this, 1979?"), but I think that the lack of graceful transition from older technologies to newer ones by large firms makes it institutionalized. You have to choose your skillset carefully; the human mind cannot simply absorb ALL of COBOL, C++, Java, Ruby, SQL and NoSQL! Or it can, but you're sacrificing something, maybe even personal memories, in order to hold technical knowledge.
Microsoft had a monopolist strategy, so it was in their interest to e.g. make those monopolist products hard to interface with other companies' alternative software.
This means the APIs had to be complex with subtle bugs, so e.g. something that could run Windows applications couldn't easily be cloned -- and, as you note, periodic replacements are also needed.
Since the monopolist strategy isn't that productive anymore for MS, the pump-and-dump phenomenon ought to get better...
Edit: Also note that over complex functionality that is regularly thrown away, so developers' investments are lost, is lowering our collective life quality. I don't use MS products anymore. Maybe when/if they need to compete without monopolist strategies...
Stuff from 15 years ago is still usable on Windows 8! Visual Basic 4, 5, 6, COM/DCOM, etc.
You can still use and get documentation for all of those, including Silverlight.
> The same attitude is visible with how the Metro UI is being shoved down my visual pathways with Win 8.
So what? Ignore it and keep using all the stuff that you want to because it all still works. If enough people share your opinion, the stuff you don't like will go away and you'll be happy again when they shove something better down your visual pathway.
There's a lot of negativity here and frankly I was a little afraid to post anything positive.
I mainly used C# for some client-side stuff, but then I found out about ASP.NET MVC, which is extremely easy to use and offers a lot of flexibility. It's also nice that they made it open source (just like Entity Framework, which is brilliant too).
Later on I came into contact with Azure. I didn't even know about Azure untill I saw Scott Guthrie's presentation about it on TechDays. I have to say I'm absolutely in love with Azure. Azure has seen phenomenal improvements over the last few years. In my opinion Azure has surpassed Amazon's cloud offering by far. They offer more features (imho especially the PaaS is awesome, their services make sure you don't have to deal with sharing stuff between multiple servers), offer both Windows and Linux servers (for very good prices), it's really fast and it's also cheap (prices are the same as Amazon's, plus they offer huge free trials). Oh, and their libraries for Azure are open source too.
There is no denying that Microsoft created a LOT of awesome stuff the last few years... They really changed into an open company.
They were forced to change into an open company in regard to development tools because of competition. And that's a great thing!
I think the programming world would be worse off without the spectrum of options available to programmers today. As it stands now, no development company can rest on its laurels and is forced to innovate and adapt.
I've programmed in Assembly, Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal, Borland C++, Java, Javascript, Perl and many, many others.
>I say that because until I started playing with Perl, Java and, later (as in 2001), Python, I never really wanted to go back to MS stuff.
What "MS stuff" have you used?
I used Visual Basic from version 2 to 6 (I was the first VB MCP certified in Brazil), VBScript (and ASP) for several significant web applications (mostly e-commerce), VC/C++ 6 (for the Windows CE-based electronic voting system, in 2002) and Visual Basic .NET and C# for some desktop and ASP.NET applications.
I haven't played with ASP.NET MVC and other recent Microsoft technologies.
I have an MCSD certification in VB6 but literally nothing of that helps with their modern dev environments. In fact knowing VB6 hurt the process of learning the new stuff.
You mentioned you used "Assembly, Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal, Borland C++, Java, Javascript, Perl and many, many others", and, apart from JavaScript, none of them is closely associated with modern non-Microsoft development. I initially questioned you about it because, like myself, lack of knowledge of other options may hinder your ability to clearly assess a given technology's advantages.
Yes, but the difference is I'm not criticizing modern non-Microsoft development.
So, I wouldn't believe a word of it.
As you can see from my answer, I've used Microsoft technology extensively in the 90's. My move to Unix environments happened in the mid-00's (until then, I still used Windows on my desktop)
If they do that, developers will love them, but their Windows division will kill them. If they don't do that, only developers who don't know any better will use them.
Good luck, Microsoft, you're going to need it.
Versions after 6 had more and more panels and property sheets started cluttering up the works and crowding out my editor, and there were lots more things begging for the mouse rather than the keyboard.
Seems like their tools philosophy changed after Y2K. It was writing on the wall for me to move on when Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Shift+Tab in VS stopped working like a stack of MRU editors because they started adding visual/clickable tabs at the top for all the open editors. "It would be confusing", said the marketdroid, "to have Ctrl+Tab jump all over the place between these tabs here - better to just cycle left and right through the editor tabs in the order they are displayed." Sigh.
Eclipse kind of took over for C/C++ after that.
Also, you're complaining about very superficial stuff. My VS layout has a file explorer on the left, big code view on the right, current errors and warnings / console output on the bottom, and that's it. How is that bloated? It's basically what sublime text looks like, but then whiter.
It literally takes 2 minutes to hide all toolbars and install the 'Hide main menu' extension, what's the problem?
How many times have I had to kludge my code for running on Windows because of file locking policies that were in place for, what, DOS 3 compatibility?
It's no wonder to me why deploying to Linux is so popular. Draconian file locking policies in Windows, huge PITA right out the chute.
There are some other weird behaviors that probably shouldn't be there (such as renaming the parent of an open file or the behavior when an open file is deleted) but an application misusing the sharing flags is probably what you're thinking of.
Also, is it the other process'es responsibility to open those file handles with the confusing, poorly documented, non-zero flags so that I can read/write/delete from my process? What if I don't own or control the other process? Am I just screwed in the majority of real-world cases?
I suspect the problem here is a lot more complicated than me not setting open flags and getting all cross-eyed when visiting the CreateFile page at MSDN. The real problem is Microsoft's insane default file open semantics that do exclusive locks purely for the sake of compatibility with 30+ year old legacy. I've lost face on jobs because of file locking going on that was out of my control and creating havoc in my app. If we were targeting Linux, there wouldn't have been a problem, so the status quo is not okay.
In my opinion, Win16/32/64 code should be sandboxed and only run in VM's in future OS'es; shed the legacy design decisions like pessimistic file locking completely. Trash the standard Windows API (not just hide it) and give me a next-generation Posix or CLR as a sane platform for new development.
You can. However, there is an unfortunate behavior here that is different from Unix. When you delete an open file you cannot re-create one with the same name until the handle is dropped. (Once that gets to the NT APIs it will fail with STATUS_DELETE_PENDING until the last handle is dropped).
You could work around this by doing rename + delete instead of just delete.
I thought this behavior was dumb until I looked at the on-disk structure of FAT. No inodes. The filename is your inode. It makes it easier to implement a FAT driver if the semantics are such that the name entry sticks around until the file closes. That is a weak excuse, and sadly the people in the Windows division with the power to change this don't really care about it. (FYI, I worked in the Windows division from 2008-2011, not that I defend everything they do.)
> poorly documented, non-zero flags so that I can read/write/delete from my process?
Yeah, I agree this was kind of stupid. There are internal folks at MS, some of them quite influential, who think it's stupid too. But it's already been done.
> The real problem is Microsoft's insane default file open semantics
It's only "default" in that if you pass 0 it's what you get. If you think of "default" as FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE | FILE_SHARE_DELETE (and if everyone writing Windows software had that in their head) things would be a lot better. Granted that's a big if.
> Trash the standard Windows API (not just hide it)
This is the same fallacy a bunch of internal people came up with in Windows 8, however the truth is large chunks of the Windows API have nothing wrong with it. For example with what I'm sure are very simple changes in ntfs.sys, the corner cases around files being open [the ones I mentioned in my earlier post, not the ones around sharing flags if we consider them "by design"] go away, without invalidating every API in existence.
That's um, inconvenient. I've heard similar tales, but I'd wager there are many more corner cases that could bedevil us. For example, what about .dll's and .exe's that are currently open in other processes? My experience has been that you simply cannot do anything with those files once they have been opened.
The whole Windows file system just seems like a rat's nest of bad and worse design decisions.
> Granted that's a big if.
Stop. This is a bad design decision that has surely cost industry billions to reckon with and maybe cost a few lives along the way too. This is not the developer's fault.
> Yeah, I agree this was kind of stupid. There are internal folks at MS, some of them quite influential, who think it's stupid too. But it's already been done.
Hm, sounds like you're an insider! Right, well, I'm not satisfied with that blasé attitude. I think you ought to take more pride: Windows is kindof important, like, to humankind. It is really unethical to leave such bad designs in place, festering and impeding our progress and wasting our time. Your internal folks at MS who are clueful need to be heard.
> > Trash the standard Windows API (not just hide it) > > This is the same fallacy a bunch of internal people came up with in Windows 8, however the truth is large chunks of the Windows API have nothing wrong with it.
Seems to me that Windows RT could run on any kernel or VM. If that's the direction all development is going to take at MSFT, then do everyone a favor and chuck that boat anchor Win32 and plop the legacy apps into a VM ghetto running in seamless mode.
Don't be afraid, just do the needful.
Was. As the comment you're replying to mentions in parenthesis, I wasn't there for all that long and I left a few years ago. Not that I in my lowly position would have been able to convince people to change some of this stuff...
> Seems to me that Windows RT could run on any kernel or VM
It's pretty heavily tied to Win32 and COM.
I think the way you're talking about it is a little weird though. Would you criticize Android, for example, for having a Unix-like system underneath? I mean, 'cause Unix is like.. old, and stuff. </snark> Stuff simply being old isn't really a compelling reason to discard it. I'd say NT especially is mostly on the right track in terms of being a modern kernel. Not without its warts but it doesn't deserve comparison with DOS or 9x. COM has some good ideas at its core too.
Ah, I did not know that. So, is WinRT a peer to Win32/Win64, or is it built atop Win32/Win64? I have heard that COM is bread and butter to the way Microsoft teams compose their systems, I should have known they would have based it on that. Maintaining the legacy through COM seems to encourage coupling in the design that would make it impossible to change out the OS underpinnings.
> I'd say NT especially is mostly on the right track in terms of being a modern kernel.
In the abstract, yes, NT is a vision of pure loveliness. NT 3.5 was super exciting when it came out, such a rock solid business OS (at the time)! Not sure what we got now in the concrete sense though - it's a real hodgepodge, new and old. I sense all the wise greybeards who could provide the vision have long since moved on.
I'm not suggesting Unix-like is a panacea, but it's on a better path than Windows as far as file systems go. There are surely optimizations and streamlining that a new design could showcase to blow away Unix/Linux/BSD. A new design from Microsoft would be refreshing, mainly because they have the cash and power to do it right and still offer their all-important backwards compatibility.
But are independent developers allowed to develop for Xbox One?
No - developers not welcome.
That's an opportunity that Sony and Apple won't miss.