A couple of days ago I came across Scoble's post over on LonghornBlogs.com entitled “How to Hate Microsoft.” When I saw the post I didn't really pay much attention to it. I gave it a quick skim but didn't actually read what Robert was saying. Today I found myself back at the post. Rather then ignoring it for a second time I decided to read what Mr. Scoble had to say.
Simply put, I love Microsoft. I've been developing with their technology for most of my professional career. I started working with VB and then moved to the wonderful world of the web when ASP rolled along. Using Microsoft technologies I've developed a lot of application for myself and clients. The one thing that I really liked early in my career was how fast I could get myself up to speed on the Microsoft platform. It always seemed like when I tried to do some of the same things on the Java platform it wasn't quite as easy.
As I've grown professionally the things I look for in a platform have shifted dramatically. Two years ago I was looking at what Java and J2EE provided developers and thinking that it might be time to leave the Microsoft side of the development world and turn to the dark side. The frustration of developing distributed applications on Microsoft technology had me on the verge of jumping ship. How much longer could I take DLL Hell?!?!
Then something happened. I attended a Microsoft event and heard about ASP+. It sounded promising, but I was skeptical. I had been bitten many times by Microsoft technology and wasn't sure what would become the .NET platform would be able to live up to the hype. I decided early on to adopt this .NET thing, so I got all the beta software I could and tried it out. I wrote several very simplistic applications in the beta 1 days and really liked what I was seeing. This was a cool platform!
Since that time I've embraced everything .NET and have never looked back. I still try and learn as much as I can about J2EE, Java, and all the other alternative technologies out there so that I can try and keep a open mind about the best platform choice for clients, but .NET isn't making that any easier.
So what does all this have to do with Scoble? What Scoble said in his post made me feel very confident in the decisions I made two years ago when I was thinking about jumping to the J2EE/Java world. As if all the talk about what's coming in .NET v2 wasn't enough! Scoble represents a significant change inside of Microsoft. They are opening up “their world” for all of us developers to see. They're giving us very early Longhorn bits, they're writing blogs about the internals of their operation systems, and platforms. They're embracing their developer community in a truly awesome way. I am more confident then ever that I made the right choice two years ago when I decided to stick with my Microsoft roots and embrace .NET. In the coming years I believe we will see a lot of truly amazing things come out of Microsoft. As a developer I'm extremely excited about all the killer functionality I'm going to be able to provide my clients. The future looks bright!