I should be able to run and build my software on the environment I want to run it on.

I think Vista has shown how badly MS can mess something up. What amazes me is how many companies are so locked into MS. They have shown their incompetance over and over again.

And yes, Entity Framework’s lack of POCO and a ‘Repository’ DD model approach out of the box show how far away they are from what we need.

Either that, or more open source developers need to realize that the only thing MS does better than you is provide good GUI tooling :) People use Linq to Sql because they can drag tables onto a designer, stored procs to a designer, and it creates it all for you – relieving you of typing up 50+ classes with hbm.xml files.

Tooling :)

I just want Ayende to show me how much better Boo can do MVC and I’ll switch over ;)

I didn’t mean to imply that the MVC effort was initially receptive to criticism or that it didn’t take people ‘shaming them’ into listening for them to do so as you quite properly point out — merely that with MVC they at least DID show it to people before it was too-far gone to be effectively changed for V1 and its this aspect that distinguished it from other product initiatives in my mind. Rather than saying ‘nice comments, we’ll consider that for v2 because we’re already 90% done with the product’, they (in the end) did start to take some of the feedback to heart in time to have it positively affect the v1 release.

My point was less about their level of listening and more about their at least offering the change for feedback before its too late for them to adopt any comments even if they want to.

Let’s not forget the necessary fighting that often has to happen before peaceable relations with Microsoft break out.

It’s great when Microsoft participates like a good, functional member of society, but lets not Microsoft too many kudos for being open and receptive citizens of the reality that it has endeavored to create.

You typically don’t get a chance to hold Microsoft accountable until you set it’s accounts on fire on its front porch and call the world’s attention to the blaze, and hopefully the reason for and context of the blaze.

If no one is threatening their market share, what do they care how much their customers complain? Before open source started making inroads they didn’t listen much at all. Now their profits are starting to depend on it.

The best way to get MS to change is to compete with it.

What makes the ASP.NET MVC process so different is WHEN they are asking for feedback. WIth EntityFramework, for example, by the time they were interested in asking for feedback the overall architecture of the entire ball of mud was already long-past baked beyond where it could accept any fundamental changes based on any of the feedback. With MVC, feedback was solicited early enough that it was possible for the feedback to shape more than just the peripheral features of the product.

I 100% agree that its the responsibility of MS customers everywhere to provide the feedback as to what we want to see, but there are practical limits to what an outsider can ‘comment’ on to them; if the software is cooked up under cloak of darkness and then delivered to us as an 85%-complete fait-acompli, then no amount of feedback at that late point will be of much value (unless they are willing to completely start again and push waaaay back planned release dates for the software in question).

Contrast the interest around adopting ASP.NET MVC with the process that begat WCF and WF (two very mildly-adopted technologies that MS previously — remember way back! — considered to be ‘pillars’ of the .NET 3.0 release). Adoption of these technologies ‘designed in a vacuum to solve theoretical problems’ are technologically interesting but miss the target of actually solving real problems by a mile.

Asking for feedback early is critical to ensuring the deliverd product actually solves a real problem rather than a hypothetical one (pretty sure this is somewhere in the Agile Manifesto ).