I received this from a podcast listener about 6 weeks ago.
Michael: I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while. I’m sad to see you turning toward MS. Is it because of the influence of your present job?
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Thanks for writing (anoymous by request). Let me address your comment about Microsoft on the webdevradio.com podcast.
I guess I’m a little troubled by your comments that you see I’m ‘turning towards’ MS. The podcast has probably had more PHP on it over the past couple years because it’s what I work in most of the time, but the purpose of the podcast is to talk about/discover web technologies, without respect to platform/vendor.
It’s actually much more difficult than I originally thought, because I can’t always talk as intelligently about Java or .net technologies as I’d like to, once I delve in to the intricacies of an issue, simply because I can only learn and use so much at one time. Other podcasts that focus on a particular technology – Flash or Java or whatever offer a certain benefit in that they can give much more in depth practical useful advice for that platform. I’m trying to keep a broad perspective which includes discussing all types of technology, including Microsoft’s.
For the record, I did VB programming back in the mid 90′s, then ASP programming at the same time I was starting with PHP. I did them in parallel, and was attracted to PHP far more than ASP. PHP really was more web oriented and still is. However, MS has really put a lot of thought in to their entire .Net strategy, and it’s working out for them. There’s a lot of good tech and ideas to learn in that arena, and I wouldn’t steer anyone away from that from a pure technology standpoint. It’s useful, interesting, and often practical. From a business standpoint, they make a good case with respect to value for money, but it’s not a clear cut case for all scenarios, just like PHP isn’t, nor is open source necessarily a clear winner for all scenarios. I tend to gravitate towards the open source side of things as a default mode, because I have experience with that world and it’s generally a lower startup cost. It’s partially ideological and partially pragmatism.
The .Net world has seen a lot of open source initiatives with respect to software built on .Net over the past few years. The DotNetNuke project is a great example of this, but there are hundreds of others. I think the flexibility of the .Net system as a whole has encourage a much richer ecosystem than the MS of 10-15 years ago, which was rich already. Software developers have more choices than they did then, and the internet has changed the rules of software development communities as well. MS has had to rethink their entire approach to software and has done a great job of ‘retooling’ their tools business, which has always been one of their core strengths.
Having said all this, I just woke up to read http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/01/164254 which details a developer’s struggle with Microsoft about his distributing a plugin for VSExpress, a practice which Microsoft supposedly prohibits. I may write more on this later, but I think a lot’s already been written about this already. Every time I want to like Microsoft, they pull something like this.
