Kent

A few weeks back, there was a bit of discussion on the "Death of Microsoft". More recently, none other than the mighty Martin Fowler seemed to imply that perhaps if it isn't dead, then perhaps just sleeping. Well, if anyone felt that way, after the responses to that post have started echoing, along comes "the TestDriven.net event." The volume, not to mention the acrymony, of the response has shown me (at least), that people care about .NET and what happens in its space.

I keep myself in cat food -- like many of you -- by programming on Microsoft tools for Microsoft databases that run on Microsoft Operating Systems. It's been like that for the last 15 years or so. I've tried "the other stuff", and try to keep abreast of what's happening with Java, Linux, Ruby and other technologies. However, I see many developers with blinders on. They have a phenomenal blindness to those languages or environments they don't use. It's not just Microsoft developers, but Java developers frequently have ideas about .NET that were wrong when it shipped. PHP developers still ask, "Why do all you people seem to like ASP so much?" on discussion boards. On it goes. Some of the "Microsoft is dead/sleeping/pining for the fjords" impression is simple lack of awareness of all that is going on with .NET.

On another front, I put much of the appeal/noise about RoR to the outsider nature of it. When I was going to high school, the most visible, unified and "vibrant" communities were the punks and mods (replace with whatever you had when you were younger, and get off my lawn you damn kids). By identifying themselves as outsiders, they entered into a clique where they could feel welcome, and to a certain extent, better than those who weren't in the clique. To me, RoR provides a similar clique. It's new, hip, happening and is still a small group. (Add to this that it's new, and the natural tendency of developers to have ADD means that new often means, "Ooooo, shiny!") I suspect that this will go away as more developers move into the space, just as some developers have moved out of the Java and .NET spaces. It will cease to be the new cool tool, replaced with the next.

As for TestDriven, I hate to say it, but I think this one time Microsoft may be right. Express was a gift to developers (as a remnant of inside info, I have to say the gift was more from Dan than Microsoft), and the differentiation was always that it didn't support addons. Now, personally, if I were Microsoft I would have done a bit more to prevent addons (say, requiring a Microsoft signed addon). Doing that would have prevented this ugliness, as now the only result is more bad feelings towards Microsoft, and fewer developers willing to work on frameworks to support their tools (open source or not).

Update: More on TestDriven. What he said.