The Profound Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

I get your message - that it's not about the platform, it's about the community getting lazy. And lazy is the key word here ... are all of these .NET devs out there hacking away at line-of-business CRUD apps really not capable of more? Is it that these things aren't being done or they are not being shared?

Originally I thought your piece was going to be solely negative, but I like the way you finished with a call-to-arms. You're right, .NET is a great platform and deserves better. Let's organize and build something worth porting the other direction :)

This is what mealy-mouthed "best tool for the job" rhetoric misses. Different platforms have different communities with different people in them, who place emphasis on different aspects of development.

My personal hunch is that the things that get in your way as a developer on Windows add up and become very frustrating. So, good devs either get tired of this or don't want to deal with it in the first place. The rest of them wait for an open-source solution, rewrite it in C#, and prepend the name with an "N".

Open source doesn't happen much on Windows. It mostly happens on Linux, BSD and Macs, where free* and fully-featured developer tools (including usable command line) were easily accessible for years.

.NET, on the other hand, is running pretty much only on Windows (I keep hearing that Mono is still not a production-ready thing). Don't expect people to write OSS for a platform they can't use for themselves. You have just chosen badly your environment for backend servers.

Can't some of those problems be solved with something like NServiceBus and 0MQ? Aren't F# MailBoxProcessors similar to Scala's Akka?