Too little, too late (imo). I'll think about it again once they have visual studio and all the good things running on *.nix.
It's too much of a pain to get anything to work with a .net project, and then deploy on anything other than IIS.
It's too much of a pain to get anything to work with a .net project, and then deploy on anything other than IIS.
I know people who do their .NET work in Sublime Text with a nant build chain. It's not my preferred method, but it works great for them. Hell, I know a guy that uses ASP.NET to host an Angular app, and to unify his build system, he has Grunt pick up the heavy lifting of running his MSBuild files whenever he does the pre-deploy steps for his JavaScript.
If you think you need Visual Studio to do .NET development, it's because you fundamentally don't understand the technologies at play and just wanted to say something provocative and witty.
On the off chance you're not just being knee-jerk and defensive because Something You Like is under fire--people think that VS is necessary because life is way too short to spend building something half as good as the other options in twice the time. I mean, could write Scala in TextMate, too, if I had the jones for it. But I could also not, and use IntelliJ, because I value having tools that are able to improve my productivity. (And decrease my frustration; by sticking with the JVM I have the benefit of not have to rely on Mono, whose GC, from experience, I do not trust in long-running processes; after spending a year owning a trivial Mono ASP.NET app that presented no end of troubles, I am very happy not needing to have a watchdog ready to kick it over when it undergoes its daily spaz-out.)
Xamarin Studio is not an acceptable product, either. I've been trying to use it for a couple weeks now and about ready to pitch a computer out a window--the basic functions of editing code are magnificently broken and have been for a long time. Random phantom line breaks in the editor that aren't in the code file, bad auto-indenting, phantom error highlighting, no partial-build error solving--and Visual Studio doesn't work on OS X. (To say nothing of the "you have to restart because XS forgot how to talk to xbuild" bugs...) That leaves the shitty bodges you well-actually'd your way into or not doing .NET at all. The latter makes a lot more sense for a lot more people.
I really enjoy C# and F# and I'd love to use .NET more if the frustrations in using it on not-Windows were not of such a magnitude. I am critical because it should be better and isn't. (Worse, Xamarin removed most reasons to contribute to the Mono ecosystem a while ago by making so much of the useful bits commercial, which is understandable--gotta eat--but also unfortunate.)
I would argue that it would depend on the person behind the keyboard. I love VS but I happen to be working all day on vi at work and here I know colleges that are as fast or even faster than a lot of people relying on Intellisense. So my guess is that YMMV
I think this comes down to clinging to an antiquated product model. A lot of the technologies that are seeing rapid adoption are open source and driven by transparent communities. In some cases companies back them (e.g. cloudera, datastax, 10gen, typesafe).
Even though C# and .NET has a huge developer following, .NET is losing ground to OSS within the top traffic driving sites. 10 years ago, people would build their MVP in .NET because it was the best technology around, but nowadays I see more people building new businesses and placing their strategic technology bets elsewhere (Java/Python/Ruby or Node).
A lot of these developers don't want to be married to the Windows eco-system, for a variety of reasons. Microsoft cannot continue to thrive on the sole basis of it being the only game in town anymore. So all in all what I'm trying to say is I don't think the long-term prospect is looking great.
You can make mobile apps with Xamarin, and apps for any desktop OS thanks to Mono.
You can make high-quality 2D/3D games with Unity
You can make high-performance web applications with ASP.NET + IIS.
Also, Microsoft has a great startup programme with Bizspark, we built a company on it a few years ago that eventually ended up as part of a $700m acquisition
PS. I heard 2015 will be the year of Linux
I heard that too in 2012[0], 2013 [1] and 2014 [2]
[0] http://www.linuxtoday.com/it_management/2012010900341OSOO [1] http://www.finnbay.com/linus-torvalds-leadership-defines-201... [2] http://meshedinsights.com/2014/03/14/2014-year-of-the-linux-...
>Too little
Really? Its MS, their core products and the open source we are talking about. Heck they even open sourced it under a liberal license.
Flying cars would be pretty huge even though planes have already been flying for a while...
The catch here (and point) is why should you have to switch from VS at all? If it's a real source code editor shouldn't it handle Java, Clojure, Haskell, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc all just fine? Some of the oldest and free editors do and do it well. I realize MS has an agenda (perhaps) or they've de-prioritized any of these features into oblivion -- but who are they serving, I certainly didn't feel it was me even after giving them a lot of $ for VS.
http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/
They have others but you get the idea.
And you don't need VS to do .net development; check out monodevelop or xamarin studio (they're the same basic thing)
Other types of projects, notably WebAPI, have been able to easily deploy outside of IIS for years. I actually just converted two WebAPI projects to self-hosting. It took about a day, which is not bad considering that includes time to learn what I was doing and reworking an existing deployment process.
It's about the fact that the whole .net framework is not opensource,thus forcing you to run windows server anyway.