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How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

157 pointsby ailonalmost 9 years ago

18 comments

randomfoolalmost 9 years ago
Great to see someone holding Sinofsky to task for this!<p>Some background, from what I recall: - During the planning for Windows 8 XAML was the leading candidate for the UI technology but late in the process Sinofsky personally overruled it to make HTML the preferred UI technology.<p>- Through the first half of Win8 development XAML support for Win8 was essentially a side project by DevDiv with very little support by Windows.<p>- Other orgs analyzing UI technologies we told point blank by Windows that Silverlight was dead and HTML was the way forward.<p>- DevDiv had fairly little confidence in the HTML strategy and was essentially hedging with XAML. But Windows was focused on HTML.<p>- After people started building apps it became apparent how painful HTML was (this is IE9 HTML- no web components, no ES6, with a framework written by JS noobs), and Jupiter was re-orged into Windows. This was where XAML re-appeared in the PDC slides.<p>- Sinofsky likes to re-imagine history and say that he was merely getting the Windows org to bolster the otherwise ignored HTML platform, but this is deceiving. The message was clear to the grunts on Windows for the first half of Win8 that HTML was the direction and there was a very hostile relationship with Jupiter.<p>There was a lot of damage internally to Silverlight through this process- morale was low, internal customers were being warned off of it, etc.<p>Also this comment just gets me mad: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stevesi&#x2F;status&#x2F;733699065763004416" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stevesi&#x2F;status&#x2F;733699065763004416</a><p>Sinofsky was the root of so much politicking and poison. Good riddance SteveSi.
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markbnjalmost 9 years ago
This article is dead on from my perspective. I was one of those long-time Windows devs, started on the Win16 API, and I had invested quite a bit of time and effort into WPF and Silverlight because I thought it was cool. I remember that exact announcement, and my immediate thought was that they were ditching WPF&#x2F;XAML for this new thing, whatever it was, and I just could not see where that was going. I started working in python learning django on linux a few days later and haven&#x27;t looked back at Windows much since. I don&#x27;t know how the .NET ecosystem ultimately was impacted, but every developer has to make decisions about how to invest the scarce resource of time, and I am sure there were many people who reacted the same way the author and I did.
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resoluteteethalmost 9 years ago
It&#x27;s not just one announcement; they keep changing their mind about what the future of the windows API is. WinRT is the final nail in the coffin. Now with WinRT on one side being tied to Windows Store apps and .net&#x2F;WPF on the other side being limited to normal desktop applications, who in their right mind would devote time to building an app in either?<p>In particular, if you&#x27;re making enterprise software, for example, and aren&#x27;t interested in the Windows Store, what can you do except throw up your hands in the air and switch to the web.<p>Even if you&#x27;re determined to make a desktop app application, at this point WPF seems even more likely to become problematic in the future than the Win32 API!
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0x0almost 9 years ago
It&#x27;s crazy to think that the owner of the win32 API, probably the strongest asset in contemporary computing, ended up with such a disorganized developer story - winforms, wpf, winrt, silverlight, html.<p>The last thing you want your &quot;developers, developers, developers&quot; to do is to stop and think about which APIs they need to evaluate switching to. Because that&#x27;s how you build mindshare on iOS, Android, OSX, ChromeOS.
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belgianguyalmost 9 years ago
This feels eerily reminiscent of my own dilemma 4 years ago: The lack of direction and leadership coming from within Microsoft when it comes to building software, the willy-nilly changing of core development strategies, creating unnecessary risk (learning curves, time, money) by getting a developer to invest in something that might be relegated to the dustbin by tomorrow (including his&#x2F;her paycheck). Worst of all, you are to find out about that fact yourself, no announcements, just silence, and vague PR about the-next-big-thing, to lead you on once more. It just felt like they were flailing, thinking up something new well before the last new thing had decent support or community behind it.<p>I also wondered how a programmer used to strong-typed languages (like C#) and a robust IDE&#x2F;debugger (like Visual Studio) would fare in the hell that was a browser 4 years ago, the joyful world of JS (vanilla + frameworks) debugging and the always entertaining fight with CSS (in)compatibility, (where IE in particular has caused many a dev to utter a sigh).<p>I even made a post about it back then: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cscareerquestions&#x2F;comments&#x2F;p1r3s&#x2F;stick_with_microsoft_wpf_et_al_or_jump_ship&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cscareerquestions&#x2F;comments&#x2F;p1r3s&#x2F;st...</a> (and it got on here as well IIRC). It was titled &quot;Stick with Microsoft WPF et al or jump ship?&quot;<p>I ran as hard as I could from Microsoft and picked up Linux Ubuntu and Android development. I&#x27;m a full-time Java developer now (on Ubuntu as we speak) and very happy with that.<p>Pretty glad I dodged that bullet.
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smithkl42almost 9 years ago
Bob Muglia did something similar with Silverlight back in 2010. As I&#x27;d invested two years of my life into a Silverlight-based startup at that point, it effectively killed two years&#x27; worth of work, and left me rather soured on Microsoft.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wouldbetheologian.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;11&#x2F;its-about-trust-muglias-silverlight.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wouldbetheologian.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;11&#x2F;its-about-trust-mu...</a>
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skcalmost 9 years ago
The most annoying thing about Sinofsky is that nowadays he&#x27;s all in on anything Apple related. That makes one wonder why he made such disastrous decisions when he was in charge of Windows.<p>Apple execs were publicly (and rightfully) mocking the Windows 8&#x2F;RT mess he created and today he&#x27;s unironically critical of its aftermath while praising Apples stellar execution.
FussyZeusalmost 9 years ago
I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this contributed either directly or indirectly to the extremely barren Windows Store marketplace in terms of apps. I think Microsoft burned a whole lot of bridges with this affair in terms of people who were long time Windows developers.
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tostitos1979almost 9 years ago
I used to do quite a bit of Windows development back in the day (started with win32&#x2F;MFC, moved to winforms). I was wondering the other day why I stopped (to some extent because the modern Microsoft seems to be more hip with Linux support, containers, etc.). My guess was that things started getting wonky around the time LINQ came out. It seemed pretty unnatural to me personally, and it was being pushed hard. The metro apps was also being pushed hard at that time. My reaction was to leave the complexity&#x2F;instability behind and go to an ecosystem that seemed&#x2F;was more stable. Web based GUIs along with Python backends. I&#x27;m at the point now, where I&#x27;ve shipped a few projects using these tools, and am pretty satisfied for the most part. I do miss C# on some days, and I suspect I&#x27;ll get a chance to work with it if Microsoft keeps up being hip :)<p>P.S. I never got into ASP&#x2F;ASP.net ... is that what people use .net for most these days?
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jbandela1almost 9 years ago
When see stuff like this I think of Joel Spolsky&#x27;s post<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;APIWar.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;APIWar.html</a><p>This I think was the beginning of the downfall of Windows as the controlling force in personal computing.
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codingmywayalmost 9 years ago
I remember it all too well. I was a WPF contractor in early 2011 and Silverlight was the one of the best paying skills so it was the thing to learn until the confusion of that announcement. I got a short Silverlight role at the end of 2011 but after that things dried up totally just as I was hoping to buy a home when they were affordable.<p>I mistakenly stuck with .Net and ended up going to back end data work before returning to the web side as I had begun years before. Things are good on the web and cloud side but I stick see Xaml as too risky to go back to now, even with Xamarin.
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speederalmost 9 years ago
Microsoft is just that good in &quot;Orborning&quot; themselves.<p>(also &quot;Ratnering&quot; too, and saw some people here in HN creating the name &quot;Elop effect&quot; that is when you do a &quot;Osborne&quot; and a &quot;Ratner&quot; in the same announcement).<p>Some examples:<p>1. That Memo &quot;Symbian is dead&quot;, when in the third world Symbian was crushing the iPhone like a hydraulic press, due to its sheer utility&#x2F;price performance (ie: being almost useful was the iPhone was, for much lower price, this is including all the informal dev ecosystem). In Brazil Symbian had 68% of the market share... in the end of that year it was zero, and chinese OEMs instead took over the market selling unbranded Android phones. Nokia now in Brazil is a unknown brand, some people recognize chinese OEM factories and don&#x27;t recognize Nokia.<p>2. Microsoft repeat killings, and unkillings of their game APIs, for example they removed DirectDraw from Vista, noticed part of the sales stall was direct result of that, and put it back (in emulation form), still, this was enough to make many, many people do their best to not switch from XP, and introduced in gamers the notion to not upgrade immediately (also MS notoriously removed in Vista support for 3D Audio Hardware Acceleration, and only added partial support back on Win8, that one killed an entire industry, 3D Audio chip companies went dead left and right, or became zombies, now that 3D Audio is &#x2F;needed&#x2F; for VR to make people not feel sick, it is the GPU companies that are trying to pick up the slack and make hacky workarounds to generate 3D Audio using the video API to go around Microsoft).<p>3. Sort of part of point 2, but MS killing XNA out of the blue, the intention of XNA was to be a Xbox 360 dev API that you could also use in Windows, they killed XNA before announcing Xbox One, and now are advertising Windows Universal Platform for Xbox One with selling points very &quot;XNA-like&quot;, but this time you don&#x27;t see devs rushing to evangelize for MS, instead they are writing opinion pieces on Guardian (EPIC) warning against it, creating their own Linux Distro (Valve) to go around it, and so on. Also it caused a mono gamedev ecosystem to show up, with XNA dead, all the C# devs had to go to mono, making the previously MS-only platform games now become cross-platform (something that is probably bad for MS in the business sense).<p>4. The &quot;DX12 is Win10 only&quot; thing while Win10 is not being able to overcome past Windows versions in market share, the best outcome for this for the wide public is instead of using DX12 the devs go with Vulkan, something that for MS is obviously bad in the platform clamping-down sense. But probably what will happen is the worst outcome: like in the DX10 for Vista era, devs will just keep staunchingly supporting DX9, like they are still are (even new AAA games with native DX9 support come out sometimes), resulting into a even messier backwards compatibility environment.
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ape4almost 9 years ago
I just don&#x27;t get why they did that.
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h1srfalmost 9 years ago
And here I am still stuck on WinForms grids. WPF is too slow and the JS frameworks just spin endlessly when I try to throw the amount of data I need to display at them.
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pjmlpalmost 9 years ago
I don&#x27;t agree.<p>Switched my main focus to .NET around 4 years ago, and we keep on having more requests for proposals than we can fulfil, including new applications.
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j_salmost 9 years ago
Microsoft used to make most of their money by continuously moving the cheese; hopefully their transition to a focus on cloud stuff will continue to reduce this needless churn.
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douchealmost 9 years ago
The Windows Store is still a wasteland, and we&#x27;re four or five years on at this point.<p>The Windows 8 tablet-ification push was a serious misstep, and it is a damned shame, because the underlying guts of Windows have gotten much better since Win7.
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samfisher83almost 9 years ago
Some people will complain that windows tries too hard to maintain backward compatibility and others will complain when they don&#x27;t. Its like damned if you do or damned if you don&#x27;t.
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