Someone who won’t spend his own time to learn something new in his profession is worthless.

You are the reason people mock .NET developers.

There is so much more documentation, guides, examples, videos, tutorials, simultaneous users, etc for ASP.NET MVC.

Maybe if I was a consultant with hours of bench time or the ability to bill a client for on the job training, I’d have the time to find out?

Sure, it’s preferable if they already know the tooling. But choosing people or choosing tools based on popularity and ease of hiring is not a very good metric. It should be considered as part of the whole, granted, but it seems in the MS/.NET space, too often do companies pick sub-par technologies and people for the sake of convenience.

Developers are not construction workers that are just replaceable numbers (which is somewhat the impression I got from Peter and have witnessed in other companies and dev managers).

Dev frameworks and tools are not mere hammers that are intuitive and replaceable and have simple evaluation criteria and merits.

My point is that devs are not mere replaceable parts and tools are not mere replaceable parts. Both must be chosen carefully with many criteria taken into consideration during evaluation. Availability of pre-trained developers and popularity of a tool should be considered among the criteria, but, IMHO, should not overshadow the other criteria.

So you bought an SUV, and now you’re complaining that it’s not a sports car?

Why are you trying to turn .NET into something that it’s not? There are plenty of other communities that are exactly what you want (Ruby leaps to mind), just go there rather than p!ss into the wind. You do realize you are tilting at windmills, right?

@Chad,

I don’t think that’s what Peter is saying at all. It’s not like FubuMVC is lightyears better than ASP.NET MVC (if it’s better at all, which is another subject, but the sake of this argument we’ll say it’s slightly better) making training a group of people worth the effort.

As a manager, say I need to pick a framework to build 5 new applications in which will require me to hire 20 new developers. In that case I’m going to choose ASP.NET MVC over FubuMVC every time. It’s not that I’m looking for trained monkeys, I’m still looking for smart developers, but I’d much rather they have experience with the tools we would be using up front. Also, the number of resources for ASP.NET MVC on line are practically infinite compared to Fubu.

The NET community didn’t blow anything.

The problem isn’t that RedGate is a commercial firm nor that we might have to pay money for a great tool. $35 is a fair price. It’s not about the price.

The Reflector fiasco has nothing to do with OSS v. Commercial s/w.

It is not written in the heavens that OSS makes better s/w than commercial companies do … especially when “better” is broadly understood to include factors that are important to users of the s/w other than putative (and possibly temporary) technical advantage.

Nor did we “abdicate” anything. Reflector wasn’t OSS, It wasn’t ours. There were no worthy alternatives. We weren’t suckered into a commercial product … Reflector was IT and we were lucky to have it for free for so long.

Had it been a commercial product from the start we’d have been happy to pay for it … AS WE PAY FOR RESHARPER.

I don’t hear you saying that we’ve been lulled into complacency by JetBrains.

We were PISSED OFF about the Reflector thing for one reason only .. because REDGATE BROKE ITS PROMISE.

This offended our sense of integrity.

Once we’ve recovered, we’ll cough up the $35 and be glad to have the tool.

p.s.: Killing L2SQL was the right call and EF is the right call too.

You want to talk about complacency. nHibernate documentation and support sucked ass until it started to get threatened by … guess who.

There wouldn’t BE a FubuMVC if there wasn’t an MVC.NET. They’re both pushing each other to be better.

StructureMap is better now in part because it fights with MS Unity.

RIA Services is pushing my company to be build a better product.

This shit flows both ways.

All the MS bashing is so juvenile.

1. Repeating your primary claim here is that “the .NET community abdicates control of its own destiny to commercial vendors”.

Realistically speaking Rob, this isn’t a completely OSS community and will never be such. The .Net community has always walked a tight rope between Microsoft blazing the way forward like a inebriated elephant and the bipolar behaviours and contributions of it’s equally inebriated communtiy members.

The .net community has chosen to trust a well-known 3rd party with a shared community asset. That trust was obviously misplaced. Two things happend as a result: 1) Said 3rd party’s reputation has imploded. 2) a plethora of 3 existing options I know off has come forth in the last 2 weeks to replace Reflector.

Blow it? Dude, this community fucking rocks. A mono based reflector (MonoReflector), a sharpDeveloper based reflector (ILSpy) and our lords and saviors at Jetbrains putting Reflector into Visual Studio via R#. Fucking Awesome.

So yeah, a half decade old product just got busted open like a Piñata, but look at all the candy!

2. Your core argument however is that the .Net community replaces it’s existing accepted OSS assets with Microsoft delivers assets. My argument against that is two fold: 1) the OSS assets weren’t as appealing in comparison for the most part (2) There are new OSS assets in new areas introduced by the community at rate far exceeding that in which Microsoft can ever ship replacements.

2.1. The martyrs of the .Net community: Subversion is a massively inferior product in comparison to TFS, nHiberante is an unholy mass of undecipherable HBM files for a large set of us, MSTest is far from being the standard of .Net unit testing, Unity is also from being standard .Net IoC but it has definitely improved the whole set of IoC projects, CC.Net & NAnt are heartbreakingly bad in comparison to TFS & MSbuild,. Projects get replace Rod, there’s no emotional attachment here. Like the man himself (Dalli Lama) says “What works stays, what doesn’t – go”. (Since he was referring to religion I assume this can be applied to .Net frameworks)

2.2. The plethora of new .Net open source projects. Have you seen Codeplex recently? It has 20,000+ open source projects mostly centered on .Net. You know how many .Net codeplex projects have had releases in 2011 (the last 45 days)? more than 1,000. A thousand open source projects Rod. How can you seriously claim this isn’t a vibrant open source community?
There are dozens of MVVM solutions, dozens of ASP.Net MVC helpers, a dozen .Net based CMS, hundreds of scientific libraries, dozens of IoCs, and so on.

Summing up. The specific example of Reflector shows the awesomeness of the .Net community. Complaining about a couple of over-the-hill OSS projects who are half a decade old while 20,000+ other OSS projects were released and saying it’s the death of .Net OSS is disingenuous.

– Justin Angel

In short: Dot Net is not cool stop trying making it one.

I see your point, but I’m not sure I agree with your logic. By your logic, I might as well just train monkeys to use the tools rather than finding smart, bright people who can use anything or even make their own tooling if necessary.

IMHO, the problem in the .NET space is expressed by your post: we settle for mediocre because it’s just easier to find people who can pull levers and push buttons on our tool-of-choice rather than thinking to solve the problem the right way (which may not involve the tool-of-choice).