I think it was a recent Billy Hollis interview (Deep Fried Bytes?) where he mentioned 9 out of 10 developers he interviewed didn’t know about generics, which were introduced in 2005. He made the point that generics take about an hour to learn, and are immediately useful, and that 9 out of 10 developers didn’t know how to use them. This is an appalling (if anecdotal) statistic.

Anyway. Just take the anecdote about generics, and apply it to .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5. Add onto this the mild Microsoft spin, where (e.g.) Workflow 3.0 is portrayed as the new place to put business logic in your apps. Just little spins, like how they tell you Silverlight apps can be indexed by Google. Little things, that upon cursory inspection, are true.

Then when it comes time, you can’t deliver. And Oslo is announced at PDC, and there’s a really slick demo, and you’re amazed. Workflow’s old hat! I (secretly) never understood it anyway! I’m going to latch onto Oslo, because it’s got to be better!

Then someone comes along and tells you that you’re building your apps in an unmaintainable and untestable way. You can’t even get your data validation to work inside an UpdatePanel, which is your real problem today, and these guys are telling you to rewrite the codebehind? Which is the LEAST of your worries? And to make their ‘better way’ truly work, they introduce an extensive toolset, all unfamiliar to you? No way! I spent all of yesterday figuring out how to retrieve the ID of my TextBox control via JavaScript! I can’t wait until Silverlight comes along and gets rid of this crappy web experience, and solves all my problems!

…

So anyway, that’s the scenario. I’m just saying, if people really open up, they’ll admit that they’ve fallen way behind, behind even their “core competency,” whether that’s web development or windows development or (worst case) “.NET developer do-everything generalist.” And I do blame Microsoft for releasing more frameworks than anyone can keep up with, and releasing them in such a way that the burden of producing training/learning content is placed on the community, not on Microsoft itself.

In my ideal world, Microsoft releases no new APIs for the next year (or two), and instead focuses on improving, documenting, and exploring what they already have. Throw away Silverlight, throw away WPF even, throw away Workflow, definitely throw away Azure, throw away Oslo, keep WCF but spend the next year introducing some quickstart APIs around WCF. I don’t want them to throw away MVC but that’s only because MVC is easier to learn than traditional ASP.NET WebForms.

The C# team says they count the cost of each new feature they introduce to the language, which is great. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone else has this mindset.

…

So, let’s get somewhere useful with this long rambling comment. I think if we promoted a boycott of learning new MS technologies, especially the ones which are half-baked and not particularly easy to learn, we could free up a lot of MS developer learning capacity. I’m dead serious about this. Most everyone is informally boycotting most the new MS frameworks anyway, let’s just make it formal.

And yes, I see the irony of mentioning a MS boycott in a post about “why so mean?” It’s not a boycott, it’s a LEARNING boycott.

We can call it something constructive, like “Just Can’t Make The Time For It List 2009.” The point is that, by declaring it publicly, it frees up others to do the same–”hey, he’s right, I can’t possibly learn all that crap this year.” Then we can get closer to PUBLICLY acknowledging how far behind everyone is.

In 2004, I ironically came across the pragmatic principles (that would come to underlie the “ALT.NET way”) through Microsoft. As a member of the Microsoft flock be default, I came across PNP’s Web Service Software Factory while researching a work project. Its emphasis on patterns and best practices was a stark contrast to the emphasis and reliance on VS tooling capabilities in the VS documentation. This triggered an epiphany: good software is a function of expert design knowledge, which is distinct from specific dev tools. And so I began looking beyond Microsoft for ideas about software development.

In those days, the “movement” of applying pragmatic principles and practices specifically to Microsoft development did not exist. To understand the principles you read the Agile Manifesto, XP, GoF, the bliki, C2, O’Reilly articles, and MS PNP documents for comparison. An organized focused antagonism toward Microsoft was absent from the ideas. Nor were the ideas presented in a friendly/apologetic/nice tone, or spread through massive outreach efforts. The ideas stood merely on their strength of their arguments.

There is no doubt that Microsoft dev tools directly support and deeply connect to the “Microsoft way” of development. Publically browbeating Microsoft as a way to bolster the prominence of an alternative way only leads to disenfranchisment by others. To gain the widest, and healthiest (i.e. least sheep-like following, which would lead to the same detrimental groupthink as in the Microsoft community), voices in the ALT.NET community must merely acknowledge and accept Microsoft’s way as valid, while forcefully and respectfully pointing out its flaws. Niceness, outreach, and antagnozation are irrelevant to people achieving their personal goals.

(If ALT.NET ever forms a more cohesive organizational entity, then it can hope to change things more fundamentally. At that point, they can coherently and directly engage Microsoft with the goal of supplementing/replacing the tool support/connections to the Microsoft way with those of alternative ways. This direct discourse with Microsoft would be the more pragmatic outlet for the same sentiments that today drive the indirect, “mean” public attacks.)

My point was, some people are motivated to continuously improve, some people are not, and we can only reach the former group.

Funny, but what hit me hard is when MS essentially abandoned COM for .NET. I had spent so much time learning COM. What a waste of effort! I realized that principles, not technology is what matters. Maybe this new generation needs to get their asses burned on SharePoint or Entity Framework to come to the same conclusions I did.

Before my “awakening”, I just accepted that all software was crap and there wasn’t much we could do about it. Eventually I started trying to find better ways and stumbled into various blogs (primarily CodeBetter).

How do we get people to make that first little step to peek out into the wide, wide world?

We are not failing these people – they are failing themselves.

Good point! I’m afraid it’s not *all* apathy though (but I have no numbers to justify my fear, so take it for what it is).

I’m afraid that there are people who are just not plugged in or don’t have the time to plug in or something. How can we make it easier for them to start hearing these things?