Write .NET Code? There's a Big Prize For That. | Hacker News Reader

Write .NET Code? There's a Big Prize For That.

manyniches.com

21 pointsBrandonWatson13 comments

I’m not hating (I’m a .Net developer) but I don’t see the point of this. Even the worst of .Net haters wouldn’t claim you CAN’T do cool things with MS technology. They’d just say it’s harder and more expensive than doing it with Open Source :)

I wish MS would put some money into contests the would improve what’s available to the community like "best open sourced component" or "best video tutorial"

Sam, you are reading my mind. My only job in life is to think about the developer on boarding experience. That includes how to get started, what you can do with it, community support, etc. You are spot on, and it's in the works.

In my humble opinion, the biggest advantage of .net, is visual studio.

For the on boarding experience, i think it's really worth putting emphasis on the fact that the free Express versions are really fully functional products for daily use.

I would agree with that statement. I love Visual studio, its a great tool set. I use eclipse quite a lot, and on occasion I've been known to fire up netbeans.. but none of them seem as solid as visual studio does. Add in resharper and its an even more incredible platform.

It's a funny thing...when people talk about iPhone development, many times they remard on the quality of the tools - specifically XCode. IMHO, XCode is good, but loses out in a comparison to Visual Studio Express. It's a really great, and free, offering.

When you start from VIM, Emacs or even TextMate, XCode is going to look good. Starting from the Visual Studio experience makes XCode look less stellar.

Well I think most of its shortcomings are due more to paradigm rather than quality of the tool. I love Visual Studio and I learned GUI development on Windows using it, so the general concept "feels" natural to me because that's how I learned. On the other hand, XCode works well for the way the GUI system works on OS X (i.e., outlets, actions, etc.).

I think it's a bit of Apples to Oranges, especially since (a) they view the GUI and code interaction quite differently and (b) .NET is managed whereas XCode's languages usually aren't, making the toolset behave differently (for example, the .NET debugger can do a lot more introspection than the XCode debugger can in some situations).

In any event, I dig VS.NET and use it for any Windows development I do. But I think your perspective is skewed a bit. I came from VS to these other tools and love them, but I'm a bit of a simplicity nut so it might just be my preferred workflow. :)

Same here. Visual Studio is the best IDE I have used.

I have been using Eclipse for Android and Django development. I know it is free but it doesn't even come close to VS.

Why would you use a full IDE for django development? The libraries don't seem big enough to justify it.

Why not? Code completion, debugging tools, etc.

They’d just say it’s harder and more expensive than doing it with Open Source

Well hopefully this program will highlight some usages of .net where open source (or proprietary non-MS) has traditionally dominated like scientific computing, core infrastructure or rich web applications.

I've only ever seen .net in enterprise situations so here's hoping some novel things come out of this.

its to bad the project i'm most proud of is owned by my old company, and i don't have the rights to give them a demo.

And it's too bad that I'm not finished with my project to send off :-/

Anyone who has a cool or novel use of .NET can feel free to @reply me on Twitter or email me. I would love to blog about it.

@BrandonWatson or brwatson [at] microsoft

Reply on news.ycombinator.com