To me its about trends as much as anything. I noticed a few years ago that the kids on reddit were not interested in .NET but were interested in JavaScript etc.
So, honestly one of the main reasons I got out of .NET was because it seemed like it wasn't as cool as I thought it was anymore.
Another reason, although this is probably a secondary rationalization, is that open source isn't really that big in .NET, and open source seemed important (and cool).
Which isn't to say that there aren't lots of rational reasons to get out of Microsoft development, but I just think that we should acknowledge that people don't usually do things for rational reasons. They mostly do what other people seem to think they should do.
Anyway, I don't see anything wrong with drag-and-drop components or intellisense or even compile time checks. That stuff is really helpful. I am working on composable drag-and-drop widgets for JavaScript/CoffeeScript web applications. And I think that less code is better, and if you can accomplish the same thing with a GUI designer, drag and drop and some property editing, then that is better than writing source code to do it. Its better engineering.
IDEs that are slow are not great, of course. The biggest issues for me are that most everything is closed source and generally the language C# is much more verbose compared to CoffeeScript or JavaScript. Also your software will only run on Windows desktops and not over the web.
I'm trying to understand your last few sentences. Microsoft has open sourced huge amounts of code in the last four years or so. The entire MVC framework is open source, for example. Nuget (another open source project, but built with the community) is really driving the adoption of many open source projects in the larger .net world. You have companies like telerik (huge .net shop) releasing some of their own software open source now.
Microsoft even redistributes jquery. The culture (at least in the web side of .net) has really changed in the last few years.
Which brings me to your last sentence. Any software built with .NET will not run over the web? Where are you getting that from? I've been programming .NET for 8 years now, and I've only programmed stuff that runs over the web.
Sorry that last part was a mis-stated. A lot of .NET is Windows desktop programming.
A lot of the "web" stuff is XBAP or whatever which is basically desktop packaged to go in IE.
Sure there is plenty of ASP.NET development going on, and that is over the web.
But come on, you can't say that most .NET software is not closed source. Sure, some of it is being 'opened up', but for the most part, ASP.NET and C# libraries and components are not open source. Especially when you compare the ratios to other platforms.
>But come on, you can't say that most .NET software is not closed source.
Which is probably why I said nothing even close to that.
I can only really talk about the web related tech. Huge parts of ASP.NET are open source.
Then you have projects like F# which are open source.
Nuget package manager is open source (formed out of two community open source projects).
The Dynamic Language Runtime is open source.
IronRuby and IronPython are both open source.
MEF is open source.
The Orchard CMS is open source and control has actually been given completely over to the community.
Silverlight controls was open source.
I could go on and on. Open source is bigger in microsoft than you give it credit for. When you imply that most .net software is closed source, it's true, but you can say that about any language. Most software written in ruby is closed source. The one exception might be javascript, because you can't really close the source to that.
However, you can take a look at the big .NET open source projects, or just the AltDotNet community for the counterpoint.
>Especially when you compare the ratios to other platforms.
That is a meaningless metric
>So, honestly one of the main reasons I got out of .NET was because it seemed like it wasn't as cool as I thought it was anymore.
How in the world can C# not be considered cool? It's statically typed and reflective. It's got generics (reified) and delegates. Those things led directly to anonymous types, anonymous functions (lambdas, if you wish), co & contra variance, and type inference. Those things led to expressions which enabled Linq. Then you throw in dynamics. The next version will have the compiler as a service and the 'await' keyword which vastly improves multi-core and event drive programming.
Yeah, there are other languages out there that are doing some cool things. I don't see how anyone could think C# isn't cool, though. BTW, while microsoft is still working on their C# 5 compiler, Mono (the open source .net implementation) has already completed theirs and it is available today. They had compiler as a service before microsoft even announced it.
So, honestly one of the main reasons I got out of .NET was because it seemed like it wasn't as cool as I thought it was anymore.
Another reason, although this is probably a secondary rationalization, is that open source isn't really that big in .NET, and open source seemed important (and cool).
Which isn't to say that there aren't lots of rational reasons to get out of Microsoft development, but I just think that we should acknowledge that people don't usually do things for rational reasons. They mostly do what other people seem to think they should do.
Anyway, I don't see anything wrong with drag-and-drop components or intellisense or even compile time checks. That stuff is really helpful. I am working on composable drag-and-drop widgets for JavaScript/CoffeeScript web applications. And I think that less code is better, and if you can accomplish the same thing with a GUI designer, drag and drop and some property editing, then that is better than writing source code to do it. Its better engineering.
IDEs that are slow are not great, of course. The biggest issues for me are that most everything is closed source and generally the language C# is much more verbose compared to CoffeeScript or JavaScript. Also your software will only run on Windows desktops and not over the web.