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Comment by rtfeldman | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing this, but it's just such a foreign concept to me. The idea of - for lack of a better term - surrendering my entire development stack to a single company rings just about every alarm bell in my head.

What happens when (say) .NET isn't the best tool for a particular job? Just close your eyes and use the inferior tool anyway? Or use the right tool and just throw the hard-won Microsoft ecosystem synergies out the window? I'm constantly using different technologies for different projects; doesn't this come up a lot in the enterprise world, too?

Granted, I'm not an enterprise developer. I've never worked on a code base that more than 20 people were working on at once. But I don't understand what makes large organizations see a walled-in ecosystem like that as a plus rather than a trap.

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I started programming in C# this past month entirely due to a new project I'm working on, and at first I totally felt the same way. I honestly felt like Visual Studio had a higher learning curve than any other tool I've ever used, and I've been using Vim for the past year : )

What made it worse was that prior to this I'd never really programmed anything for Windows.

However, as I've been using it more and more, I'm beginning to see why it is the way it is, how all this abstraction and scaffolding comes together to make programming easier.

Seriously, having everything a developer could ever want accessible through one interface has some nice upsides, and I now completely see how Microsoft makes so much money off this product.

Also, I think one of the things that makes. NET so attractive is that it seems to have features or libraries for everything and the kitchen sink. C# has excellent support for "business-y" things, to a degree that makes worrying about it not a problem for many companies.

Look at it from a Fortune 500 perspective (yes obviously exceptions and I'm not saying I agree or disagree). Do we want to run all or part of our business on an open source tool/project which may or may not have a large community around it and may or may not be around tomorrow or do we use the company who is financially committed to X tool and has virtually unlimited money in the bank?

This doesn't just apply to Microsoft... look at the money Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc. bring in. As the saying goes "No one has been fired for using X software before".

"What happens when (say) .NET isn't the best tool for a particular job?"

So like when you need to write something in Python (http://pytools.codeplex.com/) or Node.js (http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/)? Yea that is all supported in VS by Microsoft. Most people don't realize at some point over the last few years they changed from the MS or screw off attitude to a more let's support what we can one. They have also started opening sourcing a lot of their stuff.

I came from Unix/Linux/PHP and Perl at the time and once I got the hang of C# and Visual Studio I have not looked back.

Sorry, but reality disagrees. Companies with money bet on a solution usually don't last, and communities build around software do last for decades.

.Net itself is the result of Microsoft abandoning (without even an upgrade path) all their previous developers twice, at around 2000 and 2002.

Enterprise IT departments are diverse as well. They are not monolithic as we portray it to be.

I've not seen any big non-tech company totally dependent on one programming stack. They spread their bets. One can see people sitting next to each other working on Node.js and Visual Basic.

If anything to go by what I've seen and provided competent people are making the decision, they try to use right tools for the right job.

"Oops we developed our product on Silverlight because we're an MS-kit company and now Silverlight is crap. Now what?"

The fact that Microsoft stopped developing a technology that hardly anybody used isn't a surprise, I don't know of any business that would keep supporting something that was so obviously not going to succeed.

"I don't know of any business that would keep supporting something that was so obviously not going to succeed."

Well... MS was that company, up until they weren't.

I've seen it myself, having worked for a dev shop that was deeply married to silverlight (within the past year). Glad I got out of that gig.

Silverlight is not a technology - at least not in the sense that it is a product and relies on two technologies - XAML and .NET.

As such it always amazes me to see otherwise intelligent people complain about Microsoft dumping or abandoning them and their Silverlight-based products.

The technologies in Silverlight are in most cases directly portable to WPF, Windows Phone and WinRT. Any Dev that throws out effort based on Silverlight probably deserves being abandoned.

What if instead they picked java applets or the slowly dying flash? It isn't that Silverlight died, the entire install runtime to run app concept (short of doing video) was killed by html5.

(just try to paint some perspective here not disagreeing)

Imagine all you've used is Microsoft's products and all of sudden some hotshot programmer comes along and says "we're going to use this software that a bunch of people wrote for free" Now that is a foreign concept.

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