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Some of this criticism was outdated already, or has gone out of date since.

WebForms (with their underlying concept of abstracting away how web really works) were already in decline two years ago, replaced by MVC.

As a former C# developer, turned Android developer, of course I have to admit there is some walled garden mentality among .NET devs, but I think they get stigmatized for that way more than average. If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone makes such a big deal out of it.

Also it's nothing in compare to vitriolic anti-M$ hater mentality, often directed at developers themselves.

Or bizarre anti .NET-bias, case in point: http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-... (I'm sure Jon Skeet was devastated).

And what's changed since 2013? Quite a lot: Roslyn... open-sourcing .NET...

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> they get stigmatized for that way more than average. If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone makes such a big deal out of it.

Yes, exactly right.

> to vitriolic anti-M$ hater mentality

Right on - this isn't what OP was demonstrating, I think, but general reactions to Microsoft technologies are pretty bizarre. Use it or don't, but I don't get all the hate.

"Use it or don't, but I don't get all the hate."

At this point, MS hate is rather pointless, but the closest analogue is today's Apple hate (and to a lesser extent, Oracle/Java hate, and today's small but growing Amazon cloud hate).

Microsoft was the king of the hill in the 90's through early 2000's, squashed small companies everywhere when they released competing products, threatening to sue IT shops (by NDA, no less!) that used Linux for questionable patent infringement, and the economics of the software biz led to many fine platforms (OS/2, Mac System 7+) getting second-class citizen status.

Today, the equivalent is Apple squashing certain web standards by ignoring them, Amazon squashing competition by building a competing version on AWS, large employers only wanting Java or .NET experience, while Oracle successfully sues Google over Java copyrights, etc. These are all manifestations of the authoritarian tech paradigms and the herd mentality which enables them, both of which many people really dislike. It unfortunately devolves into identity politics quickly ("I can't believe you use that platform" / "I can't believe you program in that language") instead of objectively looking at the good/bad sides of the dominant player.

On the other hand, riding the bandwagon side can reap many benefits.

These days with mobile and cloud dominance it seems there is enough of a customer base for a few solid ecosystems rather than a single one.

At one point, not so not so very long ago, Microsoft had 96% desktop market share. I believe that has dropped to 89%, which is still a monopoly. The Internet made that less important but there was a time when Internet Explorer was all developers cared about. If you mentioned Mozilla, they just laughed. Fortunately, Google released Chrome and after several years developers fell in love with it. Unfortunately, IE still has half the browser market because it ships default on that 89% desktop monopoly. But we have made great progress. Microsoft has open sourced .Net but it doesn't really work well on other platforms. Performance lags, for example. F#, what I'd love to use, isn't production ready on Mac or Linux.

Anyway, Microsoft has always been relevant and dangerous. Now that they are starting to release cool products they could definitely be a problem. Apple self-regulates because their products are expensive. Microsoft on the other hand, was never afraid of taking it all.

You're severely downplaying the importance of Firefox. It had a 30% market share before Chrome even existed.

By the way, I fact checked you and you're incorrect.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2893514/an-incredibly-s...

http://kuwaitiful.com/tag/ie-market-share/

Depends on which metrics you look at. Regardless, 25% vs. 30% doesn't change the substance of the argument.

You aren't paying attention to what you are saying, or the facts. Chrome was released in 2006. Firefox didn't have 20% then. In fact, it looks like it's 15%.

It was ignored by many developers, especially in the corporate world. Pages did not render well

That is true. However, by the time Chrome rolled along, most sites rendered fine in Firefox, and Safari had also been around for quite some time already. Chrome certainly helped to accelerate the pace of standards-compliant site design, but the trend was already underway before it existed.

Yes, Apple had 4% market share. Anyway, read what I wrote the first time. I nailed it. The fact that you were so far off on your estimate really makes me think you are misremembering.

To be clear, I certainly wouldn't put OP in hater category, I disagree with some of his statements but his article is balanced and substantive. Unfortunately this is not the standard

The hate comes from the iron-fist mentality MS has and had toward its users, and their lack of reliability and lack of responsibility for their part in delivering an unreliable product. Why don't you "get" that ?

Because I don't agree? What I don't "get" is why people like you assume that your opinion is completely undebateable, or that it's any more than what it is: an opinion.

their lack of reliability and lack of responsibility for their part in delivering an unreliable product

What part of .NET is unreliable?

> If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone makes such a big deal out of it.

Well it doesn't help that there's no such thing as a "ruby technology stack" let alone one under a single all-encompassing directorship. Even Rails isn't a single stack, it's just one piece of the system with plenty of bits around which don't fall under rails (OS, application server, datastore, caches, client-side anything without considering the development tools themselves), and rails is only one of the tools for its levels (not to mention the current rails is the result of community mergers).

> often directed at developers themselves

Who else should it be directed at ? the janitor ? If you have a problem with something, direct it toward its creator.

I think the OP meant it's (irrationally) directed at the developers who use .NET, not the developers of .NET.

I mean people who code in .NET to make a living, contrary to the stereotype purported by haters most of them are not brainwashed Microsoft fanboys

> If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone makes such a big deal out of it.

To be fair, Rails is amazing, the most cutting-edge web framework out there, and it's settling into adulthood nicely. The Ruby ecosystem is so perfectly suited to web development that one hardly needs to go elsewhere to get what one needs. Whatever you could need is right at hand.

The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control. He has his own hacked-together solution for his own projects, but most of what he does, he claims source control just doesn't work.

I think the main problem is that .NET tries to be all things to all devs, and so ends up solving no problems really well. People really seem to go gaga over C#, and to be sure the language isn't terrible like C/C++/Java, but it's pretty damn far from being spectacular. Ruby isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread either, but one can be enormously productive with it.

>The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control.

Well, there you have it, this guy knows a .NET dev who doesn't use legit version control, so the whole .NET stack is a joke. QED.

But it proves my point perfectly - anti .NET "racism" at its finest :) If - say - some Perl dev with academia background was ignorant of VCS, he'd just be a bad developer and that's it...

If a .NET developer who doesn't use proper source control seats next to you, then perhaps you should take a hard look at the place you work, maybe leave. When I worked with .NET I used TFS and Git. Also, I implemented RESTful web services using .NET's Web API, consumed by a large scale SPA implemented on AngularJS/TypeScript. I never had a complain.

Now, I work on an open source stack, and Rails is suited to only one project out of the multiple web services and applications I deal with. Rails does it's job well, but it isn't suited for everything.

> Rails is suited to only one project out of the multiple web services and applications I deal with.

What else do you use, and, if you don't mind elaborating, why did you pick those instead of Rails? My understanding is the more technologies you introduce, the more complex your infrastructure gets, so you're better off picking one web stack, one back-end, etc.

At the company I work for, we have 5 (off the top of my head) different micro services written in Sinatra. Two front end applications built in AngularJS, running off a NodeJS backend (which serves the static content), and one Rails application.

For the micro-services, Sinatra does the job very well, there is no need for all of the components that Rails provides; we like the flexibility.

Our front end developers have complete ownership of the two front-end apps, and they rolled with NodeJS because it allowed them to take advantage of their JavaScript skills.

The Rails app is an internal consumption app. It doesn't need to be fancy or have a need to scale. Rails and Bootstrap keep it simple stupid.

The meat of our stack is actually on the big data technologies we deal with, RedShift and Hive. We could honestly re-write any of the micro-services in .NET or any other stack for that matter, and still keep our infrastructure mostly the same.

I wouldn't let that personal experience bias your view. StackOverflow (often pointed to by .NET devs) is a prime example of engineers utilizing and pushing the limits of any tool you give them. I've also personally met and spoken with numerous .NET devs who are really good at what they do.

I never said there weren't. I know a really awesome C++ / Java dev that works with medical devices. That doesn't mean C++ isn't a terrible language. Very mature, and with the right libraries, tooling, and 30 years of experience, you can do amazing things fast with it. Just because a language / tech stack is terrible doesn't mean there aren't great people using it to do great things.

Should a new dev learn C++? I'd say they'd be better off with Go or Rust depending on what they're trying to do. Do we really want to be stuck with old, terrible languages forever? Imagine if we had to do web dev in Pascal.

> The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control.

So only .NET devs are bad? Got it.

I'm fairly sure you get beginner rails developers like that as well.

We use GIT, BDD, TDD NServiceBus. Distributed load balanced services, that you can deploy independently. Micro services would be the buzzword for it. CQRS, ServiceStack, MVC, CI, Peer Code reviews

We've never had any downtime, our code is clean, we support tons of users and don't really need lots of servers to support it.

Not everybody is the same.

Well, not really, it would be more difficult to work without git and Github in Rails than it would be to work with it. Every tutorial starts you out with it. The big struggle these days is over TDD.

> Whatever you could need is right at hand.

Except speed, a really nice IDE and good Windows support.

> The Ruby ecosystem is so perfectly suited to web development that one hardly needs to go elsewhere to get what one needs... > I think the main problem is that .NET tries to be all things to all devs...

So Ruby is all things to web devs, but it's a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs? That doesn't make any sense.

> C#...it's pretty damn far from being spectacular.

OK, why? Your response is full of opinion but you don't really back it up with any reasoning - so why should any value your words?

> Except speed, a really nice IDE and good Windows support.

Web dev doesn't need any of these things. If you need them, then what you are doing isn't web dev, it's something else.

> it's a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs?

What is "Windows-centric" development? That doesn't even make sense. Web dev is a fairly specific domain with a standards-based protocol stack that's been iterated reliably on for 30 some-odd years. The sources of variability, the browsers themselves, are well-documented now and even when the variations weren't, you could earn a pretty good living specializing in them.

Microsoft seems to throw their devs under the bus with every new release.

If you're wondering why you are being downvoted, everything you've stated so far has been opinion with no facts to back it up. Why do you think Ruby is more productive than C#? From my position (as someone who has worked with both lightly, but not extensively) I don't see it - things like LINQ in C# are enormously productive.

I'm not wondering, I've been around the block long enough to know how the upvote / downvote convention works. I'm actually surprised I'm not being downvoted more.

Dynamic typing adds an entire layer of depth to the things you can do with tooling, over and on top of what you can do with reflection. If I don't know what's going on in a web app, I can load it up in a developer console, get right to where it's going wrong, and start inspecting everything I can see, even looking up the source code of the methods, whether in my app or in the framework, right in the REPL.

You mention LINQ, that makes C# dev bearable by cutting down on the syntax you need to do basic functional programming. I wouldn't call it "enormously productive".

I don't want to argue over what "enormously" means, but LINQ is a big boost for productivity, and it's not just LINQ-to-Objects, but also LINQ to SQL, and extensibility thanks to expression trees.

And LINQ isn't an isolated example. There's an asynchronous solution for asynchronous programming built in the language (async/await since C# 5.0).

There's reactive programming - RxJava is most popular these days, and most major languages have their RX thing now, but it was in the .NET world where Reactive Extensions saw the daylight for the first time.

Or MVVM (10 years later, Google began introducing it to Android, though it's not production-ready yet).

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