Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Microsoft Matrix

My experience with Ruby is that of porting some code to C#. One thing I learned during porting is ruby code seemed much shorter! The other experience came when I tried ruby gems like project management called "Nu" and was immediately sold. This is how easy things should be in .net as well.

When I read about the Jimmy Schementi and the news of lack of commitment to IronRuby, it was again an feeling of abandonment by Microsoft. Microsoft is mostly interested in getting new people to .net world rather developing the ones already on it to higher levels. This article, though related to Microsoft.Data, has what I want to describe. Read the paragraph Thought 3: Shakespeare had it right.
Every Shakespeare play operates on three levels. The first level is embodied in a jester, who entertains the onlookers (mostly children) who are ill-equipped to understand what's going on in the plot. The second level is the plot, which entertains the onlookers who are capable of longer spurts of self-guided attention. And the third level is metaphorical, which entertains the onlookers who are capable of extracting a bottomless stream of interesting, non-explicit symbolic themes from the play's unraveling. Now, here's the kicker of it all: each level entices the onlooker to "upgrade" to the next level.
Microsoft is interested in level one. And it wants its developers to be at level one. While researching for this article found this post by Ayende
John Lam, the guy writing IronRuby, cannot look at the Ruby source code. That is the way Microsoft works. This is setting yourself up for failure, hard.
The post is more than 2 years old and it seems some things never change in Redmond (like Steve Ballmer). On the whole, it seems community wants it to be part of CodePlex Foundation.  JB Evain has some of his thoughts on IronRuby. But the sad reality is, as one of comments say,
If Microsoft doesn’t want the Iron* to have a success for .NET it just won’t happen.
I am curious as to what will be Microsoft's response. Perhaps it is time to leave Microsoft's matrix. Perhaps Google's App Engine is calling. If only they had C# and Visual Studio Integration!

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

10 Blogs to follow for .net web developers

Recently a friend asked which blogs I follow and to answer his question I thought of writing this post. Say "Ahey" if you like the list.

1. Ajaxian - I would look at this first thing in my Google reader. Sadly "Dion and Ben" are not its editors anymore.
2. Ayende @ Rahien - One of the charismatic .net developers, involved in NHibernate, RhinoMocks etc. Must for C# developers.
3. ScottGu's Blog is a good blog for .net developments.
4. Scott Hanselman is another Microsoft guy you need to follow. His ultimate developers tools list is still awesome to find stuff.
5. nettuts+ is good for its articles on web, CSS, jQuery, Html5 etc. - good for the web part.
6. Googland [dev] gathers posts from all official Google development blogs. A great resource to keep track of what's happening in Google world.
7. I like Jon Skeet from his book C# in Depth. He is not regular in blogging but I like his approach.
8. Karl Seguin seems tired of Microsoft technologies but does a good job of opening your mind.
9. High Scalability has good articles if you are interested in, well, high scalability.
10. devnetfx is my journey to become a better (10x) developer.

After compiling my list I thought it would be a good idea to share with others. So here is a link to the bundle so that you can subscribe easily - "DevNetfx" bundle

The bundle has 11 feeds as I added "dion" as well. Ahey! 

Edit: I have a lot more "Subscriptions" which I follow but the above ones covers a lot of ground from different perspectives, and yes, I do follow Coding Horror, Joel on Software but you already had them, didn't you :)