Stick with Microsoft WPF (et al.) or jump ship?

Firstly some background: I'm a solution architect in the UK who deals with .Net 90% of the time and has done for the last 10 years i.e. since day one. It was a bad decision to go down this route for me. I'd have been better off with Java/J2EE. Why?

Confidence. MS has pretty much no direction with respect to their development tools roadmap and ideals. They seem to put feelers out in every direction, then cut a few directions off randomly based on how people react. That's bad if you've bet your business or career on it. They only do this because they have the cash. Examples of their current creepy tentacles which are at risk: PHP, Silverlight, Hadoop, even Java on Azure, Entity Framework, Metro.

Complexity. Everything is utterly overcomplicated. I am referring to the W products. WCF covers most of the "virtually impossibly overspecced" WS-* specifications which are pretty much never used in the real world (most companies use hack jobs for integration TBH). WPF and WWF are simply slow to build software with, induce horrid levels of coupling and untestability and have an extremely high learning curve for even simple tasks. I won't even mention Win32 if you have to go that low - it's an utter minefield.

High rate of crap employees. Seriously, I have interviewed at least 200 already employed people over the last 10 years in this sector. I've hired about 10. That's how low the bar is for getting in. It's damn hard to get rid of people once you've hired them in the UK as well so you have to be careful.

Churn rate. Utterly obsolete and expensive training (some of which is just completely wrong), no reliable roadmap, new platforms every 5 minutes to tie you into their product ecosystem and proprietary and illogical ways of doing things. Once you're in, it's hard to get out. People don't treat you with respect if you want to switch out of that side of the industry as they know about the "high rate of crap employees" as mentioned above. Also .Net software houses are usually a monoculture so it's hard to prove experience in something else, even if half your kit is Linux.

Lack of out of box solutions or free solutions. Everything is pay pay pay or build build build. If you want to integrate with Word documents, pay. If you want to integrate SVN with your IDE, pay. That is pay per server, per seat, per user, per atom if they could. If you want to wire X up with Y then you'll have to write your own shims. With the Java/Ruby/Python ecosystems, everything you need is out there for nothing - it just needs assembling.

Patterns and practices team. They are a joke. Utter mess. Nothing coherent, cohesive or useful come out of them. They don't even compare to the J2EE blueprints layed out back in 2002 which are pretty darn obsolete. Most of their own products ignore the P&P team's advice as it's shit.

Now this may sound like bitterness or diatribe but this is how it really is.

I carefully avoid mentioning the language above which is irrelevant - it's the ecosystem that's fucked.

I've noticed hat some programmers become so obsessed with not being left behind, that they spend every year learning some new flavor of the month. Of course MS promotes it, that's their job.

But great software takes time to do right. Programs that matter, programs that will last will take longer than the hype-cycle for any one language. MS Office is still written in C++, the Linux kernel is still in C, Google uses Python, Facebook favors Php. I bet there are great Java apps, and countless other worthwhile projects in more languages than you care to guess.

The permanent generalist flits from language to language, going with the flow, but misses the satisfaction of building something special. Something that took 10 years to perfect, and then 10 more to make even better. They happily guess that an iPhone app takes 200 hours (when it's more like 2000) - they cannot imagine the sheer boredom of working on one project for 10 years. They don't even know programs last 10 years.

Today I worked on on of my projects, which started in 1996. It is more satisfying today than before because we're solving a complicated problem, which makes an enormous difference to our customers. We measure our users in thousands, not millions, but for those thousands, we make lives better.

I write with a language you've probably never heard of. We use the WIN32 API as our main OS framework. If we abandoned the job tomorrow I'd pick up a book and learn something else. I trained in C, and have so far skipped over Java, and C#. When we needed web stuff I learned JavaScript et al. It's not so hard.

My advice, worry less about the language, less about whether your skills are in the latest fashionable language or framework, and a lot more about what significant problem you intent to solve over the next 10 years. Language and frameworks will always be changing, but end-users don't give a toss what language you use. They only care about the problems you solve.

I think complaints like this reveal what some people really want: to learn the "one true tech", stick with it and squeeze 10 or 15 years use out of it. That's a recipe for stagnancy be it from MS or an open source stack. People in tech just need to get used to abandoning their hard learned skills to stay relevant.

I realize there are real world employability fears that influence these choices, but for people like that being a generalist is probably a better choice.

To answer the question more directly however, WPF or any desktop stack is only a stop gap till web apps are more capable. It's definately on a downword trend.

Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone, Windows 8 Metro -- a programmer can comfortably move between these with a lot of code reuse.

This has come up numerous times on HN in the past year alone. I would hope the facts I stated above are stupidly apparent to Microsoft developers, so I'm left wondering if this is FUD from another camp or the situational awareness is really that poor.

Metro just allows some other ways of also building the UI component (with HTML5 and JS).

His fears are baseless...