Microsoft Regroups with DotNetStories.com (and a little help from me) | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Regroups with DotNetStories.com (and a little help from me)

michaelapproved.com

I'll repost my comment here:

"With PHP, never mind the lack of step-through debugging, if you want to do any kind of debugging you have to litter your code with tons of print statements to have any shot of catching the bug. Ugly."

Um....WRONG. There are many, many step through debuggers out there for PHP. Netbeans, for example, has extremely good (and free) step through debugging, along with many more features that are at least on par with what Visual Studio gives you.

If your intent is to give accurate and honest information, you should probably research your topic a bit. However, given the overall tone of the article, I'll wager honesty and accuracy were never really high on your list.

I updated the article based on your feedback. In the past when I've used PHP it was really frustrating trying to track down bugs. Looking again I see there some good possibilities out there. I'll checkout Netbeans and experiment with other IDEs again.

I'm surprised you think that the tone of my article meant I wasn't trying to be honest or accurate. I'm here engaging the discussion and accepting criticism. When I saw the feedback I felt terrible for not having that information before I posted and immediately made the update.

I appreciate the retraction. Your article, whether you intended it to or not, sounds as if you're just a little too over-to-top in love with Microsoft's technologies. That, combined with the misinformation you've now made an effort to correct, led me to the assume you were yet another Microsoft shill. If this is incorrect, I apologize.

I am in love with some Microsoft technologies and I hate some others. Their coding products helped me build so many websites and have been pretty reliable. I've tried using some other languages/databases and they haven't worked out as well for me.

For me the enterprise stuff is great, it's their consumer products that leave much to be desired...

PHP is a pretty easy target - I'd be much more interested to hear why you chose ASP.NET over modern open source frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django.

My biggest concern with those frameworks is scale and speed. Anytime I see a framework that is trying to make my life easier I think it means more overhead. It's the same reason I don't use many of the asp.net components like the Update Panel and instead use my own hyper specific javascript or jQuery.

To be fair I haven't put them to the test and I know major websites use them. It's mostly the perception I have of dealing with scale that keeps me away.

There's also the fact that asp.net works so well for me and I'm comfortable coding in it. I haven't seen a compelling enough reason to switch yet. I still used other languages but the core is .net.

I posted this article about myself because I'm excited that Microsoft is featuring me and one of my products. In the past I've been more of the programmer in the background and my business partner took care of the networking for us. Now I'm trying to make connections on my own and being part of something like this is a nice boost to my morale.

It was great to have discovered Yappler and MichaelApproved on HackerNews and I look forward to meeting more .NET devs here. I came back into MSFT to bring some of the startup mojo to our marketing and product development in developer tools, and we're definitely making forward progress.

If there are other folks on HN doing cool stuff with .NET, please let me know about you. I want to be your conduit into MSFT. Let me know how I can help you. As someone who ran a company that was a Vista launch partner, I know what a total nightmare it is to navigate MSFT. Let me help you. Oh yeah, and definitely go check out yappler.com. :)

I imagine it's thrilling to be featured by Microsoft in this way, so it seems like a big win. But your comments on Visual Studio were soaked in a Microsoft reality distortion field, and it was off-putting to me.

You have a typo on your first link to dotnetstories. (The i is missing leading to dotnetstores.com)

I fixed the title and found a plugin that will help me fix the URL. I'll poke around with it later today.

I think you mean DotNetStories.com (not stores)

Thanks. A few people have just pointed that out to me. I changed the title here and on my blog but unfortunately the url is stuck with the misspelling.

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