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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

Dice believes that developers are worrying that if they specialize in .NET development, they won’t be able to branch out to other platforms.

That's a valid concern, in my opinion. I don't know why, but even talented Microsoft developers I've spoken to have been woefully unaware of developments outside of the .Net/ASP sphere. It's almost as if innovations don't exist until they've been incorporated into the CLR. I've seen similar attitudes in Java developers, but it appears to be far worse in the .Net community.

That was, in fact, one of the reasons I chose to keep practicing other programming languages while I was employed by a .Net shop. I didn't want to end up "stuck" knowing only .Net like so many of my co-workers.

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I didn't want to end up "stuck" knowing only .Net like so many of my co-workers.

I'm in the same boat. It's a shame too, in my mind at least, because I really do enjoy working with the better parts of the platform (MVC, WCF, C# 4, VS 2010, etc).

I'm currently working in a .Net shop and the work is not terrible by any means (it's a fairly large scale web application used by school districts), but I'm starting to fall out of love with the MS lock-in and general attitude of the folks I've worked with so far. I'm pretty sure 95%+ of my current and past co-workers have no idea what hacker news is (or even /r/programming for that matter). The general reaction when telling someone about my side projects learning Scala/node/rails/etc on my (gasp) Mac at home is along the lines of "huh?".

I worked in .Net shops for a few years, back in the days before .Net MVC. Part of the reason people ended up (and maybe still end up) stuck in .Net might be because back then, as soon as you tried stepping outside of the .Net webforms box (i.e. tried to do anything remotely interesting) things because exponentially complex. Keeping all of the .Net classes and foibles in my brain during my day job was enough for me not to want to learn the intricacies of a different system in my off time.

That was years ago though... and since then I've happily moved on to being self-employed and using OSS.

Yeah Microsoft tends to deprecate and replace frameworks every few years. Usually it's an improvement, but they really keep you on an API treadmill.

Eventually I got tired of it and went back to primarily Win32 development for customer-installed apps and Linux for everything else. I feel like I can focus on quality rather than quantity much better now.

In my experience, looking at it from the other side is even worse. In fact, it's so bad that as soon as they hear Microsoft their brain shuts down. They get this emotional reaction that makes any rational discussion difficult if not impossible.

If it was merely zealotry, then I'd be okay with it. As you point out, there are zealots on both sides of any divide. No, the problem I'm talking about is ignorance. On the Unix side, people have at least heard of other frameworks. If you're a Django dev, you've probably at least heard of Rails, Plone, etc. If you're on the Microsoft/ASP.Net side of things, however, it's routine to encounter developers who haven't even heard of Django or Rails.

It's that which is mystifying, not the zealotry.

I wouldn't say zealotry is any better. I've had experiences where as soon as anything MS is brought up, or they find out you use MS technologies, you get looked at like you're crazy / inferior. Zealotry is a good word for it, because I'd get a similar feeling to when somebody finds out you pray to a different God, or even worse no God at all. In my opinion ignorance is easier to fix than zealotry.

I used to find that some years ago, but not so much any more. Microsoft used to have a reputation for making a lot of quite shoddy software (VB/VBA/etc.), but most developers, even the most hardened OSS neckbeard-wearing types will admit nowadays that .NET isn't a bad framework and C# isn't a bad language.

Zealotry will do less damage to your career than epistemic closure.

If you had to choose one of two faults: Nothing But Microsoft OR Anything But Microsoft -- you're going to be better off as an ABMer since (theoretically) your ecosystem of options is MUCH larger. Rejecting Microsoft still leaves you with several other marketable options. Rejecting everything that isn't Microsoft leaves you completely at the mercy of a single platform that you have no control over (and if you did have control over it, it still wouldn't be ideal)

You're making the assumption that MS is the only target, it's not. The reason it's so destructive is because you eliminate certain options based on emotion rather than reason.

So on one hand you're dealing with a fanatic that only sees black and white, and the other you're dealing with apathy. Not exactly good options.

You might be well-served to differentiate between "Enterprise .NET" and ".NET". I'd agree with a lot of what you're saying if it's applied to folks who "think in ASP.NET", but outside of that? Not so much. You've got Mono developers, who tend to bounce between Windows and OS X pretty regularly and a bunch of other folks who are at least aware of the stuff on the other side of the fence. And then you've got folks who use it as a tool--appropriate in some situations, not appropriate in others.

(As noted in a sibling comment, it's also very common to see people turn their brains off rather than entertain .NET as a sometimes-appropriate tool.)

I myself am a ASP.NET MVC developer by day, and play with Node.JS by night. I agree with you on the difficulty in moving outside the .NET world, but I will say ASP.NET MVC isn't nearly as bad as webforms. Webforms abstracts so much of how the web works away that that it's extremely difficult to wrap your head around anything else. And like you said, because the abstraction is so deep, it's very difficult to make room in your mind for anything BUT webforms. With ASP.NET MVC, I've found very little difference. The majority of the coding for most modern CRUD apps is on the client-side anyway, so the majority if your knowledge is transferable to Node.js. Express and ASP.NET MVC both follow a restful model, and I already had experience working with closures, async calls,from client-side javascript, so I haven't found the conversion to be very difficult at all.

Ah, okay. I moved away from .Net just after ASP.Net MVC was released, so I didn't get a chance to see what impact it would have on the community.

The reception to ASP.Net MVC, though, confirmed my original point about the .Net community. I heard lots of talk treating the MVC pattern as revolutionary, when, in fact it was something that was rather common outside of the .Net community.

It wasn't even the first .Net MVC implementation, Castle Monorail has been around since late 2005.. 3 or 4 years before the first version of ASP.Net MVC.

But it takes the Microsoft stamp to get a lot of these people excited.

See: ASP.NET MVC... it took years until the "official" framework came along for anything even close to sane became more mainstream in .NET web development.

Yes, there were other "Rails for .NET" frameworks out there. But, you are correct: the vast majority of .NET developers are waiting for the official Microsoft seal of approval before adopting anything. It's part of the culture that comes with choosing Microsoft for your stack: you want support, or at least somebody to sue when it goes wrong.

Part of the problem is that in Enterprise .NET, it's hard to convince your boss to use a non-MS solution. Unfortunately, a lot of .NET is done in the Enterprise environment, which results in a population of programmers that live in a very big bubble.

I was in that position. I professionally used .NET since its inception up until about 4 months ago. I switched to a JavaScript job at a company that doesn't use any MS tech at all. Not wanting to get stuck shoehorned as an MS-only developer was a major motivation for me making the switch.

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