Microsoft is doing pretty well there, to the point that in many shopping mall shops in Europe, Android tablets have been slowly being replaced by hybrid laptops running Windows 10.
As for the .NET remark, you seem to be really pissed off about something, always bitching about MS stuff.
.NET couldn't be better.
And I’ve said that most of the energy is going toward mobile, the web and services. No one outside of game makers are making money selling mobile apps. But they are making money selling services that users interact with over the web and mobile - not the desktop.
Windows is doing pretty well across 80% of desktop, laptop and 2-1 hybrid devices.
As mentioned, I spent the last 5 years doing Forms/WPF/UWP, and there is plenty of work there. Just as there is for anyone wanting to bother with either Qt or macOS.
At least in Europe no one starves by focusing on being a desktop developer.
As mentioned, I spent the last 5 years doing Forms/WPF/UWP, and there is plenty of work there.
There were also jobs for Windows CE developers in 2015 after MS abandoned it in 2007, would that have been a good career move?
Microsoft said that they are only focusing on compatibility with Windows for .Net framework going forward and they will be adding features to .Net Core that won’t be ported to .Net Framework.
https://www.itwriting.com/blog/11291-state-of-microsoft-net-...
This is now changing. Microsoft has shifted its position so that .NET Framework is in near-maintenance mode and that new features come only to .NET Core. Last month, Microsoft’s Damian Edwards stated that ASP.NET Core will only run on .NET Core starting from 3.0, the next major version.
From the C# program manager.
Async streams, indexers and ranges all rely on new framework types that will be part of .NET Standard 2.1. As Immo describes in his post Announcing .NET Standard 2.1, .NET Core 3.0 as well as Xamarin, Unity and Mono will all implement .NET Standard 2.1, but .NET Framework 4.8 will not. This means that the types required to use these features won’t be available when you target C# 8.0 to .NET Framework 4.8.
From where I am standing, we don't care what Microsoft calls it this month, it is .NET.
Today more Linux VMs are being hosted by Azure than Windows. Microsoft is making serious investments in cross platform development and making Linux a first class development environment on Windows with improvements in WSL.
EF6 and WCF is legacy. Really? Are we arguing about SOAP in 2019?
It’s not about what Microsoft is “calling it”. It’s about where all of the future emphasis of .Net improvements are.
Lets talk again in five years time.
We already know the “trend” that .Net is going in from no less than the program manager of .Net. That “trend” is no major new features for .Net Framework and it will be stuck at 4.8.x forever while all of the innovation is happening with .Net Core.
We also know the “trend” of MS’s focus from no less than the CEO of Microsoft - a de-emphasis on Windows and an emphasis on cloud and moving to where the customers are - Linux and services for both web and mobile users.
Don’t you think it’s quite telling that the biggest news for Windows 10 lately is improved support for Linux via WSL 2.0 and how much emphasis is being put on VS Code?
.NET Core will be relevant for this kind of customers in about 5 years time, again we are still targeting 4.7.2 for bleeding edge customers.
Microsoft wants to win the hearts of FOSS developers that buy Macs as pretty UNIX for developing GNU/Linux software and are unhappy with the latest "Pro" offerings without having ever written a single line of Objective-C or Swift, that's all.
This might surprise you, but the world doesn’t revolve around your niche.
NET Core will be relevant for this kind of customers in about 5 years time, again we are still targeting 4.7.2 for bleeding edge customers.
By definition, customers using .Net Framework and SOAP are not bleeding edge. They wouldn’t have been bleeding edge 5 years ago. The industry was already moving toward REST.
Microsoft wants to win the hearts of FOSS developers that buy Macs as pretty UNIX for developing GNU/Linux software and are unhappy with the latest "Pro" offerings without having ever written a single line of Objective-C or Swift, that's all.
Are you really saying that all of Microsoft from the C# Program Manager up to the CEO is wrong for focusing more on mobile, services, and the web than Windows desktop because your niche is still focused on the desktop?
You do realize that most of the world’s only interaction with a “computer” is via the web and mobile don’t you?
Depends what "gold rush" means. The App Store makes more money than ever.
And if we remove the FAANG related products even less.
The world is a little bigger than that.
The only way to make money from people using “computers” in developing countries is by targeting services at people using mobile devices. They definitely aren’t using Windows PCs and the companies creating services aren’t hosting on Windows.
As far as “FAANG” related products, none of those companies are making most of their money from selling apps on the App Store. They are also making money from services/advertising that people access via the cell phone.
You don’t make money statistically as a mobile developer by trying to sell an app on the store. You make money from working for a company as a mobile developer just as you do from being a web developer.
I know IIS like the back of my hand - heck I was deploying Classic ASP apps to it almost 20 years ago. But, I see where the industry - and MS are going. I’m not going to stick my head in the sand like VB6 users 10 years after it was abandoned by MS.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-by-the-numbers-how-mic...
Apple sells about 20 million Macs a year and even that pales in comparison to mobile sells.
The total sales of computers is estimated to be around 63 million last quarter according to Gartner. Compared to 310 million cell phones (https://www.androidcentral.com/phone-sales-continue-decline-...)
I'd say hardware sales like that are impressive, coming from a software company.
Apple's original core competency was creating hardware, with the software existing to drive hardware sales. (That there is a "hack" in "hackintosh" suggests that this should still be true today. They don't want you to buy their OS and run it on your own hardware, but they're fine with you buying their hardware and running your own OS on it.) Microsoft's core 'competency' has always been software. (I am of course abusing the term 'competency' in this case...)
Mac sales may be small, but they are important part of the system. Who will write all these apps and on what hardware?
Apple hardware is hardly relevant outside US and a couple of first tier countries.
Mobile phones are good for exactly that, phone calls, Internet and a couple of service apps, hardly for producing content.
I also posted estimates where computer sells are a fifth of mobile sells.
Apple hardware is hardly relevant outside US and a couple of first tier countries.
And neither are PC sales. Most people’s only computer is a phone and most of the money coming from those people are on mobile.
Mobile phones are good for exactly that, phone calls, Internet and a couple of service apps, hardly for producing content.
And unless you’re Microsoft or Adobe, you’re not making money selling PC software to produce content. Companies making money on software are either doing it indirectly through services or by producing applications/services running on the web or mobile.
How fast do you think a startup founder would get laughed out of an investor’s office of he started his pitch with “I have this great idea for a Windows Application”?
On the development side, it would be crazy for any developer to tie their horse to .Net Framework when MS has publicly said that it is in maintenance mode.
There were still a few jobs for Windows CE developers as late as 2014 even though MS abandoned it after VS 2008 (2007?). It would have been foolish for me to take such a job.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADSK/autodesk/net-...
And MathWorks revenue is about a billion.
Compare that to even your middling SAAS company. I’m only saying that it is silly for someone to invest their future employability on a platform (desktop Windows) and a runtime (.Net Framework) that even MS is moving away from. Everything they announce is about Azure, .Net Core, and heck even Android these days. I’m not even saying that Windows as a server OS is the worse thing in the world - even though it’s a lot cheaper in both licensing costs and resources to use Linux even if you use .Net Core.
And a big bunch of Fortune 500 buying consulting for internal applications.
So if you want names just pick random companies from Fortune 500 list, whose main business is completely unrelated to selling software packages.
And again, .NET Framework and .NET Core, are as we say in Portugal, sand out of the same bag, .NET.
Finally, Azure runs on Hyper-V, not Linux.
As far as Azure running on Hyper V and not Linux, that’s irrelevant since developers of Azure are running in Linux VMs more than Windows VMs.
They don't care for one second, we keep getting greenfield projects with deployment requests on top of 4.7.2. And brownfield projects still using 4.5.
For them even having the possibility to migrate to 4.8 would be a dream come true, let alone something like .NET Core.
So no matter what Microsoft wants to push, they have to keep these guys happy.
And you’re in Europe, do you really have an on the ground pulse of what most Fortune 500 American companies are doing? I’m frequently looking at the job boards and most greenfield projects are (unfortunately it’s my favorite language) not focused on C#/.Net at all and those that are trying to get from under both Windows licensing and the increased resources requirements and are moving toward .Net Core.
There are still holdouts for VB6 and I still see jobs wanting people to maintain them. But would you say maintaining legacy VB6 code was a good career move?
As for VB 6, if they pay alright and offer nice remoting package, why not.
Actually I did a couple of VB.NET (.NET 4.5) support activities during last year.
See, most people around this side of the pound aren't career obsessed.
We get to work, enjoy our IT unions (in some countries), 30 day vacations and have a life outside job.
As long as it pays the bills, most people are happy with what they get.
The last thing I want is to be tied to a company because I am not competitive in the market and then start complaining about “ageism”
And I’m on the opposite side of the country from the west coast FAANG and startup culture. I’m the definition of a standard “enterprise developer”.