What happened to you’ve been HAACKED?

I normally don’t write blog posts directly at one person. I don’t like to be confrontational, and I have professional courtesy. That being said, please take this post as constructive criticism rather than being negative.

Over the last couple of months I have noticed a steady decline in the broad coverage of topics and knowledge put forth from your blog Phil, With recent posts such as Blocking Direct Access To Views in ASP.NET MVC{#viewpost_ascx_TitleUrl}, ASP.NET MVC Update, Testing Routes In ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC Design Philosophy{#viewpost_ascx_TitleUrl}; I am more than a little disappointed with how biased the topics are. Not all of your posts are about ASP.NET MVC, but a large majority are. More then half of them in the last couple of months.

I understand that you are a new Microsoft employee and are excited about a new framework that you are working on and are trying to get feedback from the community. I am not so much disappointed in your blog as I am with Microsoft. It is clear that Microsoft has created a magnificent MVC framework and at the same time, played their cards right with the preview release of ASP.NET MVC and got the right people to spread information into the .NET community through various mediums. It was played very nicely I must admit.

Now, Phil’s blog has more subcribers than probably every single blogger on LosTechies combined. I think it was around 8000 subscribers the last time I looked. I know that before I got into a lot of open source frameworks and contributions, one of the first blogs I started reading on a regular basis was Phil’s. This was because of MVC oriented posts years ago, TDD related posts as well as content about SubText, open source etc… I wonder if a lot of other developers go down the same route and find the same blogs. If so, then I question the motivation behind these posts. This is a little extreme however as I would never presume to say that Microsoft is asking you to make these posts Phil, but this I do not know. Please correct me if I am totally wrong of this presumption.

I’m sorry Phil, I couldn’t hold it in any longer and I feel like I need to vent on this. I am frustrated that yet another avenue for great agnostic content from the open source community has now been dominated by Microsoft tools and frameworks. It’s nothing against you and I still plan on reading your blog. I will admit however that when I see posts appear on “you’ve been HAACKED!”, I do not have the same enthusiasm and excitement at the prospect of another post from your blog that I used to.

Now, with constructive criticism you need to offer a solution otherwise there is nothing to construct on. So my constructive criticism is this: Blog about what you think is most relevant but try to do so without being biased. I know probably all you are working on is ASP.NET MVC, but perhaps you can do more MVC agnostic posts rather then completely gearing your blog towards Microsoft related content.

As I said at the beginning of my post, I really don’t like posts targeted at one specific person but I really feel like someone had to say something. Maybe I am way out in left field but I had to vent some of this.