Where is .NET?

Gavin Joyce

10/23/2006 9:36:16 AM #

It was the lack of .NET posts on digg that pushed me to create DotNetKicks. Perhaps the anti-microsoft bias in the slashdot community is present in the digg community too? This would result in .NET posts and comments being digged down. dzone was launched by they guys who created JavaLobby, so they have a large community of Java developers there, hence the bias towards non-.NET topics.

I'm not sure what the solution is, although continuing to add your stories to DotNetKicks.com wont hurt ;).

Bo B

10/23/2006 5:38:17 PM #

Well.. since php, java, ruby etc dont have their own site like dotnetkicks.com, I suppose they have to hang out somewhere
I just see it as a symptom that those particular languages are not popular enough for anyone to bother putting up a real cool community like dotnetkicks.

Personally I used to browse alot more programmering sites before I found dotnetkicks.com, now its pretty much the only site I visit. Plenty of content there to keep my busy, I dont really have time/urge to visit more sites than that.

foobar

10/23/2006 7:59:31 PM #

Digg is quite anti-MS, so don't expect too many .NET articles on there, unless it's about some security issue or something that makes MS look bad.

Besides, digg is dying a slow death.  Now that the top 60 contributors have lost editorial control, the topics have ironically become way less interesting, because it's much harder to because a higher ranked digger.

Lowell Heddings

10/23/2006 9:12:04 PM #

Mads,

I think you should write a post about how you motivate yourself to write the volume of content that you do. I'm really quite impressed with how often you post meaningful articles.

Doug

10/24/2006 1:52:11 AM #

Digg really sucks.  Everytime I go by the front page, it is filled with mac spam basically, and yet more postings about every little thing Google is doing.
Reddit isn't that great either.  It replaces the mac spam with stupid photos and shock news stories, and freakish tidbits.  The programming section is dominated by anything related to lisp and other functional languages.

Andreas Kraus

10/24/2006 5:08:01 AM #

I agree here. It's really good to have dotnetkicks. Digg doesn't really care about Microsoft and people using that technology, it has been already said here, it's a very open-source minded community..

Robert Mischke

10/24/2006 6:17:37 AM #

Take a look at channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/ right now (9 o'clock GMT +1) their are 80 000 users online. The book sales of c# books increased by 78% this year in comparison java lost 10% (radar.oreilly.com/.../..._computer_book_mar_4.html).  Open source projects like NHibernate, various IoCs, etc. are evolving fast.

Since microsoft jumped on the blog train - the amount of .net blogs is not countable anymore.

From my perspective community and open source projects are established and moved forward only by a minority (e.g wikimedia has "only" 37 active programming contributors) and .NET reached the tipping point only two years ago - you just hanging around at the wrong places

Kevin

10/24/2006 1:07:56 PM #

Have just gone through a 5 month job search for a perm job while working as a contractor I would say that C# is out there but still looked at as experimental by a lot of folks. My interviews were for C++ and Java programming jobs. I heard over and over that the C++ team was considering moving toward C# in another release or so. In fact the place I start at next week is considering doing that. Various places are seeing C++ coming to an end of life. They also have a Java team and can see some of the benefits of the language over C++ but since they only cater to Windows hardware C# is the next logical step.

I really did not hear about Java development moving toward C#. They may use some ASP.NET but Java is solid and works on multiple platforms so why bother?

Even VB teams are not so hot on moving due to the difficulty in converting VB 6 to VB.NET.

Until they are really ready to make the switch the tend to hit a few web sites to see what C# is all about. They are not out there asking the hard questions yet. Once they start switching the sites will grow.

When I was doing C# work a few years back I had a hard time finding concrete info on the web and really wished there were more sites. I don't run into that with Java, there is plenty of info out there. I know I would rather program in Java or C# over C++. I personally feel a lot more productive and feel I am solving business problems instead of business problems and fighting the language.

JB

10/24/2006 4:27:03 PM #

What about http://www.codeproject.com/

That seems to be very much .NET related and it's huge!!!  The reason you have all of the Open source everywhere is the pure obsession with it.  .NET works great, I've only a few times had to jump out of the .NET box to get things working.  Even then I didn't like doing it...

Pat Allan

10/25/2006 3:22:44 AM #

I'm a .NET developer by day, occasional Ruby developer by night, and my preferred OS is OS X, so I'm kinda familiar with both sides of this - that said, I can only speak for myself.

While C# is a nice language to code in, it gets difficult to deal with decent size projects without an IDE (which costs money), it has to be coded on Windows (which costs money - yes, so does OS X, but Linux doesn't). The common database is MS SQL Server (which costs money), and web hosting for ASP.NET generally costs more than a *nix setup.

Yes, there's now the express IDEs and SharpDevelop, which are free, and there's Mono, but it's feels a bit too late to really capitalise on the low barriers of entry which languages like PHP, Java and Ruby have. The fact that .NET is a compiled language also doesn't work in it's favour for quick scripting tasks, compared to Bash scripting, Perl, Python and Ruby.

It could be argued that Microsoft isn't seen as a web company, so when people new to coding websites think about which server-side technology to use, .NET doesn't really get perceived as a good option - "it's for desktop applications, right?" And so much of the web is built off Unix, it's not particularly surprising that the hardcore geeks - the early adopters - have a Unix bias.

Personally, I find Ruby on Rails fun and vastly easier to code in than .NET - and I've been coding in C# for the last four years. The fact it's free (beer and/or speech) and cross platform helps matters, but the fact of the matter is, I code Ruby because I *want* to, I code .NET because I have to (for the moment, anyway). .NET is not fun for me, and I don't think it's viewed as fun for most people outside of the people who read blogs like this. .NET is seen as corporate - and the passionate early adopters don't care about that. How do you change these perception? No idea.

And I think you're very much right about most .NET developers being passive - most of my colleagues fit that category, and I think some employers are realising this - I'm in the process of applying for a job that's asking for ASP.NET developers that code Ruby in their own time.

I dunno, I've blended several different thoughts and ideas into this comment - I hope it is useful.

Pat Allan

10/25/2006 3:24:29 AM #

A quick test comment to see if commenting works in Firefox today (wasn't having much luck yesterday).

foobar

10/25/2006 5:26:45 AM #

Ruby's popularity will start to wane once the same old dynamic language problems surface and no one does anything to fix them.

The moment I see a bunch of people start to defend a platform (in this case, Ruby), I know that it's time is up.

No one defends .NET.  No one defends Java.  That's because they work.  That's because their extra complexity is required for the big projects.

Everybody bashes C++.  Yet I don't see anyone writing embedded systems in any higher level languages.

dot not

10/25/2006 11:24:40 PM #

Dot-net is invented by crooks and bastards so it's not surprising its practitioners have no appreciation of the consequences of their colleagues decisions nor the social impact, or lack thereof, of their applications.

Mohammed Hossam

10/28/2006 6:16:20 PM #

I agree with you in some parts but I don't agree with some other parts,
I agree with you that resources still not quite enough for .net, but this has lots of reasons, one of them that .net is really improving fast it is 4 years old now and we are expecting .net 3 in few weeks, so the resources are not catching up with the updates, on the other hand, Java is not evolving this fast, so resources are in sync with the problems.
but .net doesn't lack communities, from the first days we have lots of communities, like CodeProject.com, CsharpFriends.com, C-sharpCorner.com, SpellCoder.com, ... and now we have a community-driven one which is DotNetKicks.com, so no problem we are doing well and just keep blogging & digging and Kicking ... ;)

Joe Smelser

10/30/2006 2:21:42 PM #

Whether not your assertions regarding individual motivations are correct is really irrelevant, your larger point struck a cord with me and a number of folks on my team. We all need to give back to the community as you do on your blog... Thanks for the reminder, and keep up the good work, there are a lot of people who value efforts like yours…