Michal Wallace wrote a blog today about his decision to move to Microsoft .Net. Software developers love their tools with almost religious loyalty. It is really tough to abandon your beloved tools and all your existing code bases to try something new. Microsoft .Net has been winning over developers for 5 years now, one developer at a time. Michal (Without an e) lists several technical reasons why .Net is better than Python, Java, and other environments, but his decision is best summed up in these quotes;
The other main advantage is the huge number of developers. Thanks to Microsoft's reach, .NET is a much bigger pond than python. I can hire .NET developers anywhere, or if i want, I can get a job as a .NET developer.
I guess most of all what I'm saying is it's time to stop being a hermit. There's no point spending years trying to make everything perfect while the rest of the world passes me by. I don't regret the work I've done, but it would sure be nice to forget about all that infrastructure and actually write some applications again.
Microsoft .Net is now the most popular development platform in the world. It supports lots of different languages, has an awesome IDE, and integrates with slick QA and code management tools. The .Net community provides tons of support, code samples, test cases, and advice.
Get a free copy of Visual Studio Express or SQL Server Express and see for yourself what everyone is talking about. Visual Studio Express supports Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, and Visual J#.
Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.
In my series on "pioking a platform" on the OnStartups.com blog, I look at this issue.
Basically, for startup entrepreneurs, what is as important as picking "the right tool for the job", is making sure that the investment is likely to reap rewards in the future.
My big issue with some of the new platforms that are "fashionable" right now (like RubyOnRails) is that it is unclear what type of ecosystem will be built around them in 5+ years.
One thing MS does well as understand the strategy of platforms and what it takes to build a sustainable one.
Posted by: Dharmesh Shah | May 01, 2006 at 10:18 AM
yeah yeah. the ultimate question: what does he know that Google,Yahoo don't knows?
Posted by: nec | May 02, 2006 at 12:56 AM
Keep banging that drum, especially to get SQL 2005 and .NET 2.0 installed so that we can get more customers! We've built on the MS stack and it's a very rapid environment, we just need to see the customers platform catch up with what we can do with the MS stuff. I hope I explained that well. For example we need customers to move to .NET 2.0 and not stay on 1.1 so that we can implement Atlas features in our reBlogger software. So keep banging that drum Don! :)
Posted by: Mark Wilson | May 02, 2006 at 07:02 AM