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Is this the start of something new?

31 January 2007
Written by: Chris Austin Posted under Technology, Useful Sites, Dev Tools, Freelancing

Mike Guderloy, a prolific Windows and .net developer, writer, and blogger has started a new blog about his attempts to wean himself from Microsoft Development tools. I find this timely, and a bit more than a coincidence that several developers I know personally and myself have been contemplating the same move.

For me the move is not political or ethical. I am simply disappointed with the latest development tools offerings from MS. Many people rave about how they love Visual Studio 2005. Meanwhile, I must have missed that bus. I find it slow, lacking in some basic features, and for some of my projects it simply lacks the stability of Visual Studio 2003. Yes I meant stability, I keep getting compiler and debugger crashes that were not there with Visual Studio 2003.

So, I too am planning on testing the waters to see where I can make money developing for non Microsoft Platforms. I don’t know if I will spend much time on client technologies like Cocoa and GTK or if I will study what appear to be the hot new web frameworks Rails and Django. I suppose that if pressed, I can get back to java development but, not to bash the platform or the developers, I might as well stick with .net and windows. I guess after some browsing of the job boards and calls to recruiters that I know will help make up my mind; after all there is no practical point in building expertise in a new technology (IMHO), if it’s not going to get me paid.


One Response to ' Is this the start of something new? '

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  1. Andrew Woodward said,

    on January 31st, 2007 at 2:28 pm

    Chris, got your link from http://forum.softiesonrails.com/, I too am looking at the Rails framework and really excited about what it can do. I do however have to offer VS 2005 some support. MS have added a lot of open source based features including unit testing, code profiling, document generation that will aid the lone developers to write better code. I do however think the really winner for VS2005 is when you have larger teams and start to use Team Foundation server and the various flavours of VS for specific roles.

    I agree it is a big product but I have not seen anything in the open source community (and that may be my ignorance) that is as polished.

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