Microsoft at a Crossroads? Absolutely ! How about the dev community as well.
Sam Gentile has a lengthy post about a recent essay called RubyMicrosoft by none other than Martin Fowler. Both items are excellent reads. Sam underscores the chasm that exists between certain elements of the MS Development community. Although I do want to add one point - I have used Dependency Injection and ORM for almost 2 years now but I am NOT an agile programmer. I am not thrilled with writing unit tests. There I’ve said it. Yes its not very fashionable and who knows maybe in the future I will get into unit tests but for now - thanks but no thanks. Having said that, I do see a lot of value in this practice when you have a team of people who need to work on a larger code base.
I would also like to juxtapose the opinions of Sam and Fowler with the absolutely shameful way that MS has been acting toward Jamie Cansdale who had the gall to be smart enough to figure out how to create a VS Express Add-In without using MS’ plugin architecture and keys. This whole scene stinks to high heaven. No wonder people are leaving the realm of MS centric development. And the more people leave the more brainshare alternate technologies gather. In addition the more people leave the more pressure there will be on companies to implement projects with alternate technologies. I remember the days when VB was very young and most corporations were advertising for PowerBuilder developers. We are now in a similar cycle. For Pete’s sake if you have guys like Scott Hanselman going to Ruby conferences and blogging that he is a “closet railer ” (ok thats my term ), then you know somethings up.
UPDATE 6-3-07: Frans Bouma who is an ISV responds at length to the ridiculous crap the MS is pulling with Jamie. You know, the “anything but MS” camp has been accusing MS for many years of this crappy behavior. I always thought there was a lot of posturing but it looks like they were right all along. MS really is a bully.
Write a comment