Thursday, May 31, 2007 11:49 PM Erwyn van der Meer

Interest in .NET declining?

Martin Fowler notices a trend: interest in the .NET platform is declining. Ruby is all the rage. He has some recommendations for Microsoft on how to better collaborate with the community instead of going its own way. Martin noticed how Microsoft created its own unit testing variant that is incompatible with NUnit.

Change is visible in some parts of Microsoft, for example Microsoft is embracing dynamic languages, but boats the size of aircraft carries can only slowly change course. There are no clear signs from upper management at Microsoft that they are indeed changing course. The recent threats against the open source community over infringement on software patents seem to indicate that the old school closed-source thinking still has big strongholds within Microsoft.

Google is about to set a standard for offline storage for web applications with Google Gears. Even better, it's open source. Does Microsoft have the guts to embrace this technology instead of creating its own variant? I doubt it.

I am still pretty excited about the .NET platform. Especially about the LINQ wave of technologies coming with .NET Framework 3.5 and Silverlight. But I am also thinking about looking into Ruby on Rails more and more.

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# re: Interest in .NET declining?

Friday, June 01, 2007 9:12 AM by Ruud Campsteijn

For me, developing software is all about the result: building something that the customer ordered and/or people want to use, making their lives easier or more fun in some way.

The .NET platform offers a framework with a whole lot of ready-to-use functionality and other tools, allowing me to focus on adding value rather than being occupied with repetitive tasks that do not clearly add to the endresult. There are a whole lot of other reasons why I chose Microsoft .NET and I personally don't care what other people choose, as long as Microsoft keeps on extending and improving .NET and related technologies. I've been using Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP for a couple of my "personal" websites for years and have been looking into Ruby for some time. All excellent stuff in a given context.

So, to cut a long story short: I'm happy with .NET and will be as long as I can build some of my solutions with it. However, noone's pointing a gun at me, pulling the trigger when I move away from .NET. Technology and platform choice are driven by a lot of factors. Sometimes you end up with .NET, sometimes with something else. My guess is that if everyone moves away from .NET to SomeNewHypedUpPlatformX, it's only until the next one comes along.

Oh and comparing Ruby On Rails (a language coupled to a webdevelopment framework) to .NET is plain wrong.

# re: Interest in .NET declining?

Thursday, July 26, 2007 8:02 AM by Vikas Goyal

I completely agree with Ruud, Instead of comparing frameworks, people start comparing companies which is wrong. Every company has its own business model. I have personally worked on both .NET and Java based frameworks and know how the productivity gets hit on java based tools. If i am able to deliver more value to my customer for same money by using Visual Studio ..i will go for it irrespective of whether it comes from Microsoft or Google. Similarly if Google goves me better search results, i will use it .. its about chosing the best product and not company.