| > MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks....VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated...Likewise with XNA...CSF, WCF, etc... "Deprecated" is just a word that means absolutely nothing here since all of those kits are still fully functional on current versions of Windows (including XNA and the server side stuff that you mentioned). And VB6 is 20 years old! You wanna make a bet that your Android, Dart or Go code will run in 20 years? Android code from 2008 won't even run today mate :) Also, when Google deprecates something - it's usually hooked to a service, so there's no hope to keep using it when it's no longer fashionable (like some are doing with VB6, Foxpro and other really old kits). > Whilst VisualStudio is a great IDE, I find it a subpar experience without R#. And I find the lack of a single IDE built and maintained by Google to be sub-subpar. Visual Studio is superb without R#, but even if you don't think so - at least Microsoft is making life easy by offering an IDE that is tuned specifically for the task at hand instead of using some open source pile of junk that tries to do everything. There's nothing to decide when I need to do .NET - I know what tools to use. Meanwhile Google has no comprehensive strategy here and you're forced to cobble together your own toolkit. Blech. > Another killer feature is that the language and tooling is cross-platform which supports Windows, OSX and Linux. That's a weakness because "cross-platform" means a crappy non-native Java UI or some half-functional impostor built with HTML - and those tools suck on every platform. No thanks, I like things that are native to my platform please. Besides that, I can certainly do all of my coding on Windows and build and run it on Linux without any problem thanks (because I have been). I don't really want to spend my time responding to another wall of text or the rest of this one so I'm going to end it here. I will say that Google does some cool stuff in the browser and with Android, but my main point here is that they don't put forth a very comprehensive strategy at all. Most of their developer stuff seems to be created by 20 percenters in their spare time instead of making a concerted effort like Microsoft does. |
It means everything, who want's to invest or be excited about learning technology they know to be end-of-life'd? Being deprecated is the first deathknell of a platform that begins it's slow-fade out of existence. At some point developers have to abandon the time they've invested into a platform into a new one that will be maintained in future, e.g. Cocoa/iOS/Android/HTML5/Chrome don't share the same risks of abandonment.
> And I find the lack of a single IDE built and maintained by Google to be sub-subpar
You're talking about your own feelings here, it's doesn't say anything about Google or their IDE tooling.
> Visual Studio is superb without R#, but even if you don't think so
Right, I don't, working without R# is a primitive experience that handi-caps productivity.
> at least Microsoft is making life easy by offering an IDE that is tuned specifically for the task at hand instead of using some open source pile of junk that tries to do everything
That's the exact opposite of what VS.NET is, who is the biggest offender of what you dislike. VS.NET is a kitchen-sink offering that crams in everything into a single IDE, it's the very opposite of "tuned specifically for task at hand". JetBrains platform-specific IDE's, Android Studio, XCode are examples of tuned IDE's for the task at hand. Even the DartEditor is tuned, which is more a rich editor than an IDE. It starts from a blank Eclipse Shell and only adds tooling for specifically developing Dart apps.
> That's a weakness because "cross-platform" means a crappy non-native Java UI
No cross-platform doesn't mean crappy UI, it means having the choice of developing in your preferred OS of choice, collaborating with devs on alternative OS's as well having the opportunity to host on the most cost-effective hosting solution. i.e. freedoms that .NET developers don't enjoy.
> but my main point here is that they don't put forth a very comprehensive strategy at all.
Exactly what IDE's have you used? Your perception of their tooling suggests not much. Android Studio is a very compelling offering and DartEditor actually provides a faster iterative experience which auto-builds on save and lets you debug app code natively from within Dartium in addition to the IDE.