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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

Frameworks, popular open source programs and prebuilt social api code.

.Net is great for building things from the ground and enterprise setups but when it comes to hooking into any social site MS just doesn't stack up. Even their sponsored Facebook framework was abandoned. They invested hundreds of millions into Facebook but couldn't keep the simple framework up-to-date for their developers.

No kid is going to say "Hey, I'd love to build an enterprise level reporting program with .net" Instead they're going to want to build cool plug-ins for popular open source programs. The next generation of programmers are growing up on PHP.

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You mention the Facebook code library. What else could we do for you and this community?

As for the "cool plug-ins" bit, what is driving that decision, in your opinion? Desire for notoriety?

Desire for experience. while there are those developers brazen enough to think their first project will change the world, personally i knew my jr. high coding skills weren't exactly enterprise level. i was more interested in playing with different platforms and exploring their limits / figuring out what works. back then i was playing with ASP (haneng & 4guysfromrolla tutorials) and PHP. ASP seemed more expensive (have to pay for a windows server) and there weren't nearly as many places i could use the code (unless i wanted to do something with a DSN or ActiveX / some other piece of windows infrastructure a kid has little incentive to learn) so eventually i stopped paying attention of ASP. now, years later, seeing what the .NET professional developers at my office fill their days with - i'm glad i didn't learn more of it, lest i'd be doing what they do. no sane person should ever be confronted with DotNetNuke.

Part of the problem was that until recent years, you couldn't get free dev tools for the MS platform, pretty much stifling the hobbyist developer from using .NET. Those are the people that tend to start and contribute to open source projects like the Facebook library. Now that there are free tools there's been an up swell in open source activity on projects like those and I think it will continue to get better.

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