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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

One of the first tasks the new CEO will have when Ballmer leaves is the job of convincing Enterprise customers that Microsoft is still here to fill their needs.

That said, the conclusions the author came to may very well be true for classic "Web Forms" projects, and though he noted MVC... i don't feel like he gave it the proper time it deserves. In fact, I find almost the opposite of his sentiments to be true. MVC is a refined platform, and the .NET framework is a joy to work with (personal opinion). Poorly written frameworks exist in any language, but there's also a lot of GREAT code written in .net too.

The platform is expensive, and that sucks... but we sell the product for 100k a pop... so frankly neither our customers or ourselves care about the cost. Developing quickly, and with the best quality possible is more important.

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One of the first tasks the new CEO will have when Ballmer leaves is the job of convincing Enterprise customers that Microsoft is still here to fill their needs

I don't think that Enterprise customers are the problem- they already use MS all the time. It's the small to medium size companies that aren't using it - and as they become larger companies it will become a problem for MS.

> they already use MS all the time

Exactly, we've been the bread and butter for Microsoft for a long time. Yet with Windows 8, we're starting to feel like that's just not true... at least that's the sentiment when I talk to some of my colleagues. For instance We built our main product using WPF, today WPF is all but discontinued. XAML is bigger then ever, but only if you want to make a windows store app.

If I leave .NET it's not going to be because some hipster writes an article about python, and how .NET is written by children writing kludge. I know that's not true. It'll be because Microsoft stopped doing the things that made me keep using them.

"today WPF is all but discontinued"

This is an interesting claim - WPF is still the main UI framework for writing Desktop apps, right? I don't know of any replacement framework that is preferred by MS for authoring desktop apps (I never use any WinStore apps on my Windows 8 devices).

The last update to WPF was a year ago when .NET 4.5 was released. The current trajectory has major releases about every two years, or whenever there is a major update to .NET itself since it's built-in. Given that Visual Studio itself is now built around many WPF libraries, I don't necessarily see it being deprecated anytime soon (I mean, you can still develop and deploy WinForms-based software even though there aren't any new features on the roadmap). But only time will tell.

I went to BUILD in June, and attended an overview of what's new in XAML. After the talk, I went up to the guy, and I was like "Wow there's a lot of cool things going on in XAML, how much of this do we get in WPF?" His reply was basically, all of the visual studio enhancements will come to me. However the new controls etc will not. He said WPF is in maintenance mode only for now.

It seems understandable - they have limited resources and have a lot of work to do on their new WinPhone and WinStore platforms.

So, not a flurry of cutting-edge development, but very much not deprecated either.

There hasn't been a significant upgrade to WPF in years. Microsoft's stance seems to be that "desktop apps" should not be a thing any more - there weren't any WPF sessions at Build, for example.

Which is why they have BizSpark. They need to do a better job pushing/selling it. And yes, I understand many here on HN get that it's an attempt to lock in the business at a high long term cost for a short term (and I assume many HNers would say marginally small) gain.

EDIT: Was finally able to get the page to load... I see the author alluded to this: "Yes, BizSpark is a great program for giving free Microsoft stuff to startups. It’s like a drug dealer giving free samples to get you hooked on their expensive and now compulsory wares."

If you can even get them to give you the free hit. They seem to have 4 simple requirements met, but I've been turned down for the program even though I'm just a guy developing a single web app product on .NET who started a month ago and have no income yet. I've reapplied but I'm not sure it's worth it. I may end up porting it to Rails or attempting to get it to run on Mono.

While ASP.NET MVC is a huge improvement, my experience in .NET over 12-13 years has shown that most enterprise-class organizations built monolithic Web Forms apps 5-6 years ago. Upgrading these apps - especially to ASP.NET MVC - are cost prohibitive from both a licensing cost perspective and and labor perspective. When work with prospective clients today, it's almost always a situation where A) the client wants to shoehorn their favorite JavaScript MVC framework their WebForms app or B) They have functionality that is part MVC, part WebForms, and they are stuck in a corner. either way, it's always a monster mess that enterprises generally decide costs too much to clean up.

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