Its hard for me to say this in some ways, but of the bigcos, I'm most bullish on Microsoft. I might actually go stand in line (if there are any) for the Surface tablet and maybe even a Windows Phone 8 device.
They are (finally) making the right moves and doing it in a consistent and open way. Any Microsoft insiders know who is driving all this change? ScottGu? Steven Sinofsky?
Seems more like a desperation move to me. Microsoft have almost no presence in popular web apps or mobile. Almost no startups or established services use the Microsoft stack. Maybe they think that by open sourcing they will get a look by devs/shops that would never have considered them before.
I still think it's a long shot. The best development platform for .NET is Visual Studio and Windows. And the "cool startups" all use Mac OS or Linux.
.NET has been sold as an enterprise platform since the beginning. That's what it's thought of by most people, and I don't really see this changing anything. Windows Phone is way late to the party and isn't going to do anything significant in the market. Microsoft will continue to be primarily a platform for building enterprise-type CRUD apps.
Note: only their Azure + DEV arm is OSS happy - which is a result from making money with it on Azure.
Their Windows/WP/UI projects are violently closed source, almost all cross-platform Rich/UI initiatives have been killed since Sinofsky has taken back the helm. Personally they should do all C#/.NET devs a service and provide better integration/code-reuse with MonoDroid/MonoTouch, but as they don't see it in their best interest they're pushing for platform-lockin. Which is a strange play when you're hopelessly behind the incumbents.
This is starting to be a real problem for .NET devs now (since MS is losing their influence) as they become pawns in Microsoft's platform strategies, whilst we (C# devs) miss out on the most exciting platforms Microsoft doesn't want you to develop for, e.g: iOS/Android, NaCL, Unity3d, RaspPi, etc. We're just lucky Mono exists which runs on all these platforms.
That's no different from using HTML5+JavaScript against browser specific APIs or using CSS3 vendor prefixes. Calling external stuff from JavaScript (even if that external thing is Windows itself) is not new and it's not bad that it's not portable any more than writing XUL wasn't portable.
If there's no equivalent work around it's not portable - simple as that. Proprietary hooks and APIs aren't evil, but suggesting developing for Metro is "open" and portable is wrong.
Since you've mentioned it, Mozilla isn't touting to use XUL for "open" cross-browser apps - although XUL itself, unlike anything Metro, is open source and does run cross-platform. Mozilla is even deprecating the use of XUL for its new Firefox OS (Boot to Gecko) in favor of using pure HTML5 instead. Maybe MS can work together with Mozilla and come up with a common API?
>> And Boot to Gecko will no doubt use lots of Firefox OS specific stuff just as WebOS does.
Where did you hear that? everything I've heard is the exact opposite:
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/a-deep-dive-into-mozilla...
>> Everything is HTML5
>> The core to the Boot to Gecko project is the web. Everything you see — right down to the power icon and network status information — is generated by and displayed with HTML5. The icons for the apps, the apps themselves, and the notifications the apps generate… all HTML5. Even the Dialer and the Settings for the device are handled this way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS
>> Firefox OS (formerly Boot to Gecko, B2G) is an open source operating system in development by Mozilla that aims to support HTML5 apps written using "open Web" technologies rather than platform-specific native APIs. The idea is essentially to have all user-accessible software running on the phone be a Web app that uses advanced HTML5 techniques and device APIs to access the phone's hardware directly via JavaScript.[2] It initially targets Android-compatible smartphones.
The difference is Firefox OS is building as much as they can (everything?) with HTML5, Whilst all Metro's advanced functionality is hidden behind proprietary APIs - The comparison of "open-ess" between the 2 is not even close.
What existing "HTML5 API" is going to give you network status and power icon info? Of course everything will be HTML5/JavaScript/CSS just like Chrome OS, but the fact remains that that functionality doesn't exist in the W3C specs as they are.
Checking out the Mozilla Docs at https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI it appears that these "privileged" APIs are extensions, as they should be. For example, navigator.fm.antennaAvailable is to control the FM Radio.
And Boot to Gecko will no doubt use lots of Firefox OS specific stuff just as WebOS does. I'm not defending Windows 8, I'm just pointing out that it's reasonable to use a language (JavaScript) to call out to 3rd party APIs.
There are plenty of startups that have been successful on the .NET stack. The one that pops to mind first is Stack Overflow. .NET & XNA are pretty popular in indie games due to exposure to the xbox. There are many examples, but they don't tend to over lap much with the crowd here at HN.
>> In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write...
Even as a long time .NET developer, I don't believe .NET is optimal for Internet Start-Ups. Most of the pro-web talent are in Ruby/Python/node.js camps where they enjoy first class support of all the popular web DSL's (e.g. less, sass, jade, handlebars, etc). As well as all the bundling, optimization and minification tools which were available for years in other platforms and have only recently been a supported option in .NET with System.Web.Optimization. The pro-web (Single Page App) community is relatively non-existant in .NET. E.g. none of the showcase apps on http://backbonejs.org (the most popular SPA JS fx) are in .NET.
The ASP.NET website packaging model doesn't scale (productivity-wise), since the larger the website becomes the slower build/iteration times get - which is especially important for start-ups. I do believe typed languages are better suited for typed back-end services - I just no longer believe in them for fuzzy development tasks like UI/HTML generation, automated scripts, etc.
That may be so but when selling software to large enterprises then .NET really helps. I think I would be safe in saying that most enterprises will have Windows OS somewhere in the data center. We've just built a product from the ground-up using MVC 4 (yes, beta) and it is just about to ship -- plenty of pre-orders already and the IT Police just let's us "in".
.NET is the only way I would personally want to go when targeting large enterprises with products.
On Windows many new desktop applications are now being done in C# actually.
In the game industry, the game development tools which used to be developed in C++/MFC are now being coded in C#.
Microsoft is hiring compiler developers to implement native code compilation in their C#, if you search their careers portal.
Before Mac OS X, open source was also unheard of at Apple, if it wasn't for their despair at the time and the NeXTStep team, I am not sure if Apple would have so much open source projects.
It looks like they've started their big Open initiative after they found a business case for it with Windows Azure where almost everything OSS'ed in recent times runs on it.
When you're a cloud provider it makes sense to appear "more open" and support as many technologies as possible == more customers - which is good from the broad developer community as we would have never have seen their node.js on Windows support otherwise.
They are (finally) making the right moves and doing it in a consistent and open way. Any Microsoft insiders know who is driving all this change? ScottGu? Steven Sinofsky?