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Comment by keithwarren | Hacker News Reader

For those of you who don't know, Scott is really the driving force behind Microsoft's embrace of open source. The opening of ASP.NET, the .NET Framework and countless other techs would not have happened without his push.

On top of all that, he is a coder at heart and still deeply in touch with the community. You can email him directly and usually get a response within hours which is astonishing given his role and responsibilities.

This is a win for coders everywhere, regardless of your position on Microsoft and how you feel about them in general - ScottGu is one of the great guys pushing technology forward and has a serious increase in firepower every time he moves up the ladder at Microsoft. This position is tantamount to 'head of all things developer' at Microsoft.

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Personal anecdote - I had an issue with Visual Studio inverting colours and removing toolbars a few years ago and couldn't fix it even with re-install. I eventually (after going though official channels) emailed Scott and he spent a fair bit of time emailing me back and forth to get all the details of the problem and then put me in touch with a few other people in MS who helped me fix the problem.

Kudos to him, I say!

Scott also replied to me about a specific .NET issue I emailed him about more than 7 years ago. He's an incredible person and as keithwarren pointed out, it's a win not only for coders, but for everyone that uses or depends on .NET. Scott is the type of person that should to be in the highest levels of leadership.

I agree with all the nice things you say about Scott. He is an amazing guy. I had a chance to talk to him briefly many years ago and it left a solid impression.

That said, given his place in the organization as of late, I would be inclined to believe that he has minions who handle these things for him now. To keep up the cult of Scott.

I dont mean that in a negative way. In fact I think its great. We still get answers :) But I think everyone who knows Microsoft a bit from the inside now that their executives work very hard and long hours. Scott only has the same number of hours available as the rest of us. (I think).

So, can we expect OpenGL on Xbox and Windows RT in the future?

It doesn't seem out of the question. You can run Linux on Azure and Office on iPads now. Microsoft hasn't really been closed and insular for a long time. It goes to show you how long strong emotional impressions can last.

I once worked with a guy who proudly proclaimed that he hadn't used Windows in over ten years. "So that makes you an expert on it, then?"

MS lock-in tactics may be have weakened lately, but didn't disappear completely yet. And I wouldn't call that a long time. They got a lot of pressure on legal front for interoperability, so some things were forced on them and didn't come from their goodwill. Also, competition forces them to reconsider.

> I once worked with a guy who proudly proclaimed that he hadn't used Windows in over ten years. "So that makes you an expert on it, then?"

I personally don't use Windows for a while either and see no need to, but it doesn't prevent one from keeping track of MS behavior.

They really changed - until now you were free to run your own applications on your own computer without Microsoft having a say in it.

Now you have to get a signature to run your own Modern UI Apps.

You are still free to run your own apps on your own computer. I suspect you're referring to Surface RT which, technically, is a tablet (it runs Windows RT, and not Windows) and thus no different to IOS and OSX.

He was saying that Modern UI (Metro) applications require APIs that come with certain restrictions. Those restrictions hold regardless of whether the apps are being run on Windows RT tablets or Windows desktops.

It was a little scarier when it looked like Microsoft was positioning the Modern UI as a replacement for the traditional desktop Windows paradigm. If Metro:Windows as Windows:DOS, the restrictions on Metro apps would have been really bad.

"...require APIs that come with certain restrictions..."

What restrictions? I've written a number of WinRT/Metro apps and the API is not .Net but has no restrictions. Sure, there's no database support for example, but there's nothing stopping you from using SqLite or writing your own. There are also UI constraints, but that's true for any hardware.

The restrictions I'd been referring to are legal, not technical. The requirements that Metro apps be certified by Microsoft and distributed through the Microsoft store are particularly troubling to me.

Compile a WinRT app, copy it to another Windows 8 system (not Windows RT, but those work as well for this demonstration), try to execute it.

Or compile an app, wait for your vstudio developer certificate to expire, try to execute the old binary.

This is a power grab targetting their developers. Not sure Microsoft pulled off something like that before.

How long emotional impressions last? I'm sure there are good folks at Microsoft, but the company hasn't changed. Like those awful, nasty political campaign ads? Microsoft haired one of the main practitioners to promote Windows:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/technology/microsoft-battl...

Or how about Microsoft's extortion techniques being used against Android manufacturers:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/28/microsoft-samsung-extortion...

Thanks, but I'll keep staying away and encourage others to do so as well.

we'll see how long Mark Penn lasts now the new regime. he just got demoted, so I'd guess not very long.

My own wishlist: http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...

what? is .NET open source ? if it's open source is it a free software ?

You can read more here

http://www.asp.net/open-source

Well , i'm not concerned about Asp.NET but .NET itself.So this page is not going to answer my question.

Ah, an important distinction, my mistake.

asp.net is, the .NET framework not but there are some open source implementations based on the standard specification. Like Mono and DotGnu

DotGnu has been dead for nearly half a decade.

.net is "Source Available" perhaps, Microsoft makes the source available so that you can step into their code when debugging. They make it extremely easy to point VS at their symbol servers(and cache locally for performance) so you always get the exact right source you need while debugging.

If you prefer to browse the source http://referencesource.microsoft.com/ has it all including the license. It appears to be a non free license as it is for reference use only.

>They make it extremely easy to point VS at their symbol servers(and cache locally for performance) so you always get the exact right source you need while debugging.

Is this something that happens automatically? Do you have any more information how to set this up?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319037/en-us

On http://referencesource.microsoft.com in bold "How to configure Visual Studio for debugging .NET framework" which links to http://referencesource.microsoft.com/setup.html

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