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Comment by eksemplar

7 years ago

I work in the public sector in Denmark, and we’ve delt a lot with both IBM and Microsoft over the past 25 years.

Microsoft has been one of our best partners, including for the open source software we run, especially since Azure became their mission.

IBM has been one of the worst, so bad that I’d dread making any deals with them ever again.

I wouldn’t say MS is fully behind OSS though, they contribute a lot these years, but their main goal is still to sell you Azure. I think they won the hearts and minds with .Net core though, I mean VSC is the best ide and typescript is typescript, but the future of a lot of web programming lies within .Net core.

You are likely coloured by being in the one marked where .Net became significant and that’s mostly bacause the only accepted altilernative in Denmark’s monopoly friendly procurement systems were IBM mainframes or Oracle solutions.

Everywhere else RedHat/Jboss won the game and is being replaced by new JWM languages rather then node or .Net though node hides in strange places like the latest SAP framework.

Frontend/native .Net apps are fastly becoming extinct.

MS pretend love for Linux is more an acknowledgement that no one wants dotNET on IIS or anything windows centric in the cloud than any genuine love for Linux so they kind of have to pretend to like Linux workloads and unix tools if they want azure to be more then an niche product.

  • In many European countries it mostly boils down to Java vs .NET, depending on the business sector.

    And by Java I really mean Java, with alternative languages being done by clever consulting companies, which sometimes I get to rewrite back to Java.

  • Oh we have JBOSS in our stack, it’s what handles our service bus. I’d rather we didn’t though, it’s really hard to find JBOSS developers/maintainers for public sector pay checks.

    We used to see a lot more of it from our suppliers, but it seems to be rapidly going extinct. Possible because there just aren’t a lot of JBOSS developers/maintainers in general.

    I am coloured by my environment of course, but I do work in software cooperatives with 97 other muniplacities, as well as a few European communities and I don’t see anything to indicate that .Net, JAVA and PHP won’t remain the dominant techs in Europe for the foreseeable future.

    I like node.js, I use it for hobby projects and I genuinely think graphql is a lot better than rest APIs (and there isn’t a graphql adaptation for .Net that isn’t bad), but I just don’t see the adoption anywhere outside of what you hear from American startups.

    And again, I didn’t say .Net would rule all web development , I said it would be important, and if the European public sector continues to run on .Net then it’ll continue to be a billion dollar industry.

    • dotNET will stay around just like the mainframes but it’s not a growth market nor the worldwide norm for enterprise web backends.

      I work on legacy platforms so I know there is good money in dead technology. But that don’t make it the future.

      I just don’t see any legacy codebase being rewritten as dotNET and a similar amount of new greenfield dotNET projects as new Perl project being launched due to NETs heritage as a windows component.

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> the future of a lot of web programming lies within .Net core

How is that, really?

  • How is it not? I mean, we’re a muniplacity, we operate around 500 IT systems, that are all moving toward becoming web apps in some form.

    The core tech behind these is in 95% of the cases either .Net or JAVA.

    Our in-house development has moved from .Net to JavaScript, mainly because we’re small and if our front end had to be JS then our backend might as well be, but now you have something like Blazor.net emerging, allowing for full stack C#, of course we’re going that route.

    I didn’t say all, but I frankly think it’s obvious that .Net will play a big part of web development future, considering how big a part it already plays today and considering how Microsoft is moving it forward in all the right ways.

    • Historically many different companies and frameworks have targeted the web platform and almost always they lost to "plain old Javascript".

      That trend is going to continue, specially considering WebAssembly.

      But as of now there's no sign of Javascript becoming less dominant as almost all the innovation is in the land of React, Webpack, Babel, etc.

      I mean, what you're claiming "will emerge" is already there in form of Typescript, Node, React, Webpack etc and has a pretty good traction.

      4 replies →