C# and .NET's Sudden Ubiquity

But I think .NET has also long suffered from a more anemic ecosystem than other platforms have. Things like a package manager have just recently come around. Things like tooling and educational resources seem more spotty than for other platforms. (Although some of the for-pay .NET tools are really, really nice.)

So, I too would like to see it used in more interesting ways than line-of-business desktop/web apps. But I wonder how the above things will play out. I'm really glad it's not so tied down to Windows anymore. But maybe there are other issues to resolve, now.

I'd looked into mono (mod-mono/fcgi) a number of times, and it was always painful, with some performance/stability issues, and in the end worth the server license to just not deal with it.

For the past few years, I've been doing more node work than .Net and loving it. That said, I wouldn't mind doing some pieces in C#/.Net because it has a lot of niceties as well. It's generally the "enterprise" tooling, and excessive use of design patterns that has made it more painful in practice.

Good times indeed.

So we might see SharePoint for Linux yet.

The other two I suspect are very tied to win32.

I'm pretty sure this is about gaining back some developers. All the cool things happening these days on mobiles and on the web are not happening with Microsoft's platforms.

It's important to remember from where .NET comes from. It was part of a larger vision of Microsoft that included Windows Longhorn, .NET Passport, project Greenwich and Trusted Computed. Of course this vision screamed "Lock-In" and it was about just that (too bad that it is happening anyway, yet people aren't paying attention anymore). So .NET wasn't opened because it was seen as a way to keep people on Windows. Sure there was an ECMA standard, but that was just like putting lipstick on a pig (though ironically that ECMA standard is much stronger and useful than Java's JCP, which is a complete farce).

Unfortunately they missed the forest from the trees. The web developed outside of their walls, mobiles developed outside of their walls. All the cool things happening right now are happening outside of their walls. And now all of a sudden, a Windows-specific platform becomes a liability, a way to keep people out of Windows or whatever Microsoft wants to do.

Personally I'm happy about it. It's a pretty solid platform and a good alternative to the JVM. Given the dickish moves by Sun against Apache Harmony and by Oracle against Android's Dalvik, I think it's about time the JVM had some competition. .NET is still missing a healthy ecosystem though. For Java / the JVM the ecosystem is intimidating at first (e.g. so many choices, so much open-source, multiple IDEs, multiple languages, WTF), but it's actually its biggest strength. On the other hand if there's enough interest, then .NET can catch up as the basics are taken care of.

I also like Xamarin.Forms' way. Describe, in general terms, what you want the interface to look like, and it generates native GUIs for Windows Phone, Android, and iOS that follow each of their different UI conventions (tabs at the top, tabs at the bottom, menu button, etc. depending on the OS).

That's a real vindication of the "worse is better" theory.

Yes, it's multi-million dollar because that's the budget it takes to make anything complex.