Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm not so sure I believe that they're trying to do a "nice thing" out of the goodness of their hearts. They've held pretty tightly to .NET because in order to deploy anything developed in .NET you needed to buy Windows licenses. Recently that hasn't played out so well. Software developers look to minimize costs and overhead that doesn't contribute to their mission (e.g. licenses and license compliance). There's just zero reason to pay for operating systems in 2014 when there are such capable free alternatives.

So if people won't pay for operating systems what will they pay for? Stuff that still costs them money, i.e. hardware infrastructure and attendant maintenance and administration. Hello cloud. Development shops are happily sending Amazon millions of dollars a month so they don't have to buy servers, set up server rooms, hire system administrators, and worry about things like air conditioning, big UPS systems and emergency power generators, etc.

Alongside Amazon, Microsoft is doing pretty well with Azure. And you can run free operating systems on Azure, and .NET is already well supported on Azure. So what will sell more Azure? Make .NET run on the free operating systems. Now all the developers who like the free OSs on their personal dev systems are suddenly able to develop stuff they can deploy on Azure. What about all the devs that like Macs? No problem, make .NET run on Mac OS X as well.

I think this is all about making Azure services more compelling and more able to compete with Amazon than it is wanting to do "nice things" for the open source community.

Your analysis is absolutely solid, but I'm not sure anyone read this and thought "Oh gee how nice of M$ to give back".

In the end I think this is overwhelmingly a net positive for both MSFT and developers.

You know, if MS had done this even a year ago, the project I'm working on would have the server-side in .Net instead of node. I'm replacing a very old .Net project having built up too much code debt to be maintained with a green field project using flux/react server and client. <br /><br /> I really like ASP.Net MVC since v3 it's been a pleasure to work with and the first release of anything ASP that actually mirrored how I used ASP.Net for a long time before it. MVC meant no more hacking with asmx/ashx to work around the web forms event lifecycle issues. Razor is such a great view/template language I still can't believe it hasn't become more popular. <br /><br /> All of that said, there really is a lot of power in being able to use the same JS tooling both server and client. JS has always been a favorite language of mine, and I've been using node tooling even in VS web projects for 3-4 years now for client resources (pre-build events with grunt, and now gulp). <br /><br /> I think this makes a ton of sense in the wake of Azure as a platform. Especially if MS can do services in docker containers (windows or linux) and run on their infrastructure with relative ease. Companies are paying for the tooling (beyond express, now community versions), and they pay for ease of deployment/infrastructure. They don't want to pay for a lot of enterprise windows licensing anymore... MS sees the writing on the wall. <br /><br /> What I think will be really telling, is if by the end of 2016, VS runs in linux and osx as well.

Well there was that big tada about MS/Docker, now this...

A lot of good things happening in Redmond right now.

Now if they can somehow fix this upcoming Lync is now Skype Business business, I'll be really impressed.

I agree with you on the Azure vs "nice things". I also think their long-term strategy doesn't rest with the .NET framework.

However, I think they know that if they completely abandoned the .NET framework, there would be a community of very upset devs that have spent their entire careers investing in Microsoft. Instead, they're doing a slow withdrawal and "giving it to the community".

I think that in the long term, they're going to be focusing more on Sharepoint, SQL Server, and Azure; less on .NET. That's just IMHO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com