[johnkchow]

I have one thing to say: Finally.

To give some context, my first job out of college was in a small WebForms/MVC shop in LA. It was very progressive in that my managers always pushed me to question the conventional "MS" way of programming/architecting. However, what frustrated the hell out of me was all the other MS companies around us: they were so damn dependent on what MS gave them.

I've heard countless MS devs in local meetups screaming bloody murder when MVC first came out, "Microsoft, you HAVE to train us on MVC! It's a black box, we're effed!" This shocked me, because these people wanted to literally be force-fed with MVC. Microsoft (intentionally or not) encouraged this kind of behavior with their close-mindedness, and this dependency/babying was crippling to the MS dev community.

Accepting pull requests signifies a tremendous step on MS's side, because they're finally admitting that there are actually smart developers OUTSIDE OF MS BUILDING who can help out with the framework. Their closed-software drove me away from them to RoR. Now, I have some peace of mind knowing that the bleeding of good devs away from MS stack may finally slow down. I can't wait to see the next generations of Scott Hanselman and ScottGu pushing the envelope for MS.