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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

Well then give us an API which isn't painful to use and give us confidence you won't abandon it after a couple of years. Maybe fully committing to dogfooding their APIs for the first time ever might inspire some faith. That's the real, underlying reason mac products have such a good relationship with developers: apple can't resist those meaty chunks. At least by comparison with MS.

Also, what percentage of those windows license sales represent an environment where installing arbitrary software is even permitted by the computers owner?

I wonder, does microsoft have a vision for an app store in the enterprise? I suppose one of the advantages of the sandboxing is it might lead to a relaxation of the rules around installing other software on corporate machines.

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I am not much of a Windows guy, but C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem pretty nice to me and have been supported about as long as Mac OS X. It's also my impression that Microsoft has introduced fewer breaking changes into .NET during that period — though again, that might just be a symptom of me being more tuned into the Apple ecosystem. Was there anything similar to what Apple did to Carbon developers a few years back, abruptly deprecating most of the framework just a few months before an OS release?

And Apple has been accused of having the opposite problem — writing APIs just for the "showcase" applications. Very often the first version of an API will be great for recreating Apple's demos, but when you need to go past that, the framework is either unhelpful or actually gets in your way. (I'd like to offer some good examples, but they're eluding me at the moment. I know I've seen a number of complaints along these lines on the Cocoa-Dev mailing list over the years.)

IMO, the reason for Apple's good relationship with developers look more like this:

• It's UNIX, which developers have always loved for fairly well-known reasons.

• Microsoft entered the last decade pretty much universally despised. Many developers would flat-out refuse to work there, despite it being a hugely successful company with generous compensation, just because association with Microsoft was so very uncool.

• Apple sold boutique computers to consumers and professionals. People who bought Apple computers were signaling "I actively seek out and pay for experiences that I like better." This meant Apple's user base has generally been disproportionately profitable for apps targeted at those markets.

• Related to the second point, Apple was the major alternative at a time when technophiles wanted to get away from Microsoft. They could have gone to Linux, but at the time Macs were just a bit more mature and "safe," particularly on laptops.

C# is the neatest thing that got out of microsoft ( with Active Directory ) , the rest is not so good , i wish the whole .net plateform was opensource and independant from MS ( yeah i know mono ,but mono is mono )

> C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem pretty nice to me and have been supported about as long as Mac OS X.

On the back end server, that's mostly true.

Microsoft has been playing the "here's a new API, we'll stop improving the old one, and make relying on it foolish" treadmill for more than 15 years: MFC, ATL, ODBC, ADO, DAO, Liquid, SilverLight, WPF, WinForms, VB6 -> VB.Net, DNA -> ASP, ...

The world, up until a few years ago, was very happy to be on that treadmill. I was always baffled by it, but I can understand the fashion and buzzword driven resume IT world.

Except, something changed in the last 3 years: People are no longer as happy with the Microsoft treadmill, and the cool kids started liking the stuff that does not strictly depend on a corporate sponsor for advances and obsoleting: Ruby [on Rails], Node.js, Clojure, and more.

I'm working on a project that's heavily invested in WPF, a decision that seemed reasonable to the decision makers back in 2010, and it's a horrible mess. There are resource leaks that have been reported as "won't fix until next version" 3 years ago, but it was only a year ago that it became clear there never will be a next version. (I have to manually call garbage collection once every second or so, or the GUI freezes with no error or explanation. Figuring that out was a few wasted days of debugging).

And WPF obsoleted WinForms; And silverlight was supposed to be a subset of WPF, except they have a weird common subset that is useful for nothing, and a lot of stuff I need was added to SilverLight, but not WPF, with the intention of adding it to the next WPF that never came.

Oh, and SilverLight was abandoned too.

... The thing I distinctly miss from working on Windows OS that Microsoft, unlike any of their competitors, always did "dogfood" their APIs. I'm willing to believe that things have recently changed as Microsoft has started copying Apple, but if you pull apart your average Apple app, it is full of Apple-private APIs, from entire replacements for UI primitives to entire underlying libraries (WebKit on iOS being a great example) to better hardware access to simple things like "synchronous HTTP connection timeouts". On Windows, it was a "big deal" when Microsoft used a single API in Office that they didn't expose to developers (and I believe that was even one you wouldn't want to use anyway, that they added because their code was so legacy).

It's worth watching the then head of OS X talk about private API's at WWDC a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd97us27eSg

It's definitely a different philosophy from Microsoft's, but it's not like they don't take their API's very seriously.

> always did "dogfood"

That's not been the case at least since .net came out.

They were trying to get developers to use .net GUIs and other APIs without dogfooding (WPF, WCF, WinForms, SilverLight, and a lot more). Most of them are horrible, buggy and unsupported a few short years later.

I'm not sure there is a lot left of the "Raymond Chen" camp of fanatic bug fixing and backward compatibility that was there in the Win32 days.

So, if it makes you feel any better, Visual Studio 2010 was developed, at least in some major part, using WPF (I remembered that one, and managed to find a reference for it on an official website). I can't say much about the other technologies, though. You certainly can't blame your WPF issues on them not eating that particular dogfood.

"Get an insider’s look at how Microsoft created the next-generation, large-scale integrated development environment experience using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 4." -- http://www.microsoftpdc.com/2009/CL09

Apple, in contrast, consistently uses things that they deny access to for normal developers; not just high-level libraries and platforms that you could technically re-implement (although they certainly do this, and they do it ludicrously often), but fundamental capabilities on their platforms that they have reserved "only for Apple" (whether just by radical un-documentation, or now by controlling software distribution and manually checking for usage).

The difference is dramatic: when you see Microsoft release a application for their operating system, you can feel pretty confident that if you spend enough time reading their developer documentation, you could build that exact same thing yourself. This is not the case with Apple. (This also has nothing to do with whether or not they will deprecate your code a couple years later.)

I'll happily believe that Microsoft has gone horrendously downhill on this axis, though, since I stopped paying attention to them in 2008 (that's when I started doing Cydia fulltime, which led me down a path that forced me to eventually switch to using a Mac as my primary development machine). If nothing else, I am under the impression that Microsoft gave up this feature with Windows 8 Metro :(.

Hence why I used the past perfect "always did" (as opposed to the present imperfect "always does"): the contention from JonnieCache was that MS does not nor nor that they ever did (as if they actually were to do so it would be "for the first time"), when radical dogfood eating that was always what made MS great and set them apart from everyone else.

> So, if it makes you feel any better, Visual Studio 2010 was developed, at least in some major part, using WPF

It doesn't make me feel better, especially since I have to support a product that uses WPF, suffers from a massive leak that (unless gc is _manually_ called every rendered frame) just stops the program from working without reporting any error - a bug microsoft does not intended to issue a fix for for WPF4 (so .. never going to fix): https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/... - reported to Microsoft more than 2 years ago.

When this product gets rewritten, it's going to be either web or an Android app. It sure as hell not going to be using any Microsoft tool.

I feel like I shouldn't have to say this, but: none of these complaints have anything to do with the concept of "dogfooding".

Well, not directly - but it's the kind of stuff that would get fixed if they were actually using it. I haven't really researched this, but AFAIK very few Microsoft products actually use WPF (or SilverLight for that matter). That's not really surprising, because most of them have a long legacy, and a rewrite of e.g. Word or Explorer to use WPF doesn't make sense.

It's been my experience that when a developer actually uses the APIs they publish, they work well, are better documented (or at the very least, when you have an inquiry you can get a knowledgeable, reasonable answer from someone on the inside, as you still can from Raymond Chen about WIN32 stuff). The horrible level of support and bug fixing is an indirect observation of very little dogfooding.

It is different from the Windows app store, but MS also just released an app store for Office & SharePoint that seems to be more enterprise focused.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/office/apps

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