Looks nice. The problem with M$ is that over the years they've always offered simple tools for creating software, and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example.
Also haven't we all tired of the hole 'M$' thing?
I can't imagine spending so much time and effort learning how to use a framework only to have it discontinued in it's infancy. Silverlight dying was a good thing and ultimately it's a win for everybody as HTML is more open, but still - I feel for the devs out there who waste their time.
Edit: On the plus it does use HTML and JS, instead of something much more closed. :)
Not really, as someone who specialised in WPF since it's latter beta stages, I still am finding plenty of work at a very good rate. Same thing goes with silverlight, even in a discontinued state, it still is going to have years and years of bug fixes. Just no new functionality.
The fact is, even today with all the frustrations I have with WPF been 'unfinished' it is still a lot more pleasurable than HTML/Knockout or something that tries to make HTML palatable.
A quick search in London on your favourite job site shows that learning WPF hasn't been a waste of time, my skills are not in a vacuum, I also have strong OOP skills, whilst knowing how to run software projects. Plus learning something is never bad. Obviously I wouldn't recommend someone learning it now. But compare it with whichever flavour of the month framework people are loving right now, people who've learn say Ruby on Rails aren't as fashionable as say Node.js is right now. But just do a quick jobs search in London and you'll see that you'd be better off on average doing WPF/Silverlight than RoR.
Because even if he was right, using the "M$" abbreviation is bad form when other people are trying to have meaningful conversations.
Probably because they had to go out of their way to describe them as M$. Googl€, App£e and ¥ahoo work just as well, but are never used.
Possibly because access is a lousy example being hat it remains after 20+ years.
Silverlight would have been a much better example.
And "M$"? Am I going to have to go find the link to that Penny Arcade cartoon?
XNA, WinRT, ...
Why do you think these tools aren't being used. I know a small company using Access to deliver business management applications and they are turning a $100k/year profit. And that's in a random, small, and crappy city in a third-world country.
This sort of stuff happens in the FOSS world all the time: projects grow, live, and die over the course of time. There is the argument that FOSS means "The Community" can take it over and maintain it if it wants, but consumers are not necessarily cut from the same cloth as producers, the skills don't necessarily translate.
I would actually like to see MS do it more often, release more things to the public at much earlier stages, because I think it's their primary differentiator over a company like Apple. Apple has dug themselves into an extremely R&D-intensive process that requires products be sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. Let's talk about the Newton, the Pippin, the iTunes Phone, the Apple TV, etc. When MS tries to do this (Zune, Windows Phone), they get mocked and people ignore their products, even though in many cases they are technically superior products. MS needs to understand that the tech culture views them as unhip and should stop spending money on trying to change that perception.
The anti-MS sentiment also seems to suggest a scenario in which a programmer would learn a particular programming language once, then live off of that for the rest of his life. We have an excellent example of where that leads, and it's called COBOL. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect programmers to learn how to learn. A particular MS or FOSS tech stalling out and dying is not going to be a huge impact on you if you're not betting the farm on one thing.
MS writes good software. You can't keep blaming the size and breadth of the company on anti-competitive behavior from the early 90s that they had already curbed by the time the DOJ tagged them for it. You can arm-chair quarterback and say that a particular example sucks compared to another particular thing, but in most of those cases it's missing the ecosystem and context of the times. Windows was the best home desktop operating system; it had its problems but every OS had problems back then. Internet Explorer really was better than Netscape Navigator (when IE6 was released in 2001, for the times it was good. The five year resting-on-laurels period was the mistake). At any period in time, regardless of how bad the latest version of Visual Studio has been, not comparing it against itself, it has been the best full-featured development IDE on the market (even the first VS.NET in 2002 was better than any non-VS product).
Then someone hired Ballmer to take over and he treated the company like a Detroit manufacturing behemoth. Any successes post-Ballmer were a result of R&D efforts that started before he took over that were too obviously going to succeed for even Ballmer to give them the axe.