[bsder]

> There is a distinct lack of OSS in .NET. I've been trying to find a project to contribute to among the graveyard on Github. However, I think the author falls flat explaining the why.

Simple, Microsoft killed it with the transition to .NET.

People have forgotten just how extensive both the open and paid ecosystems were around Visual Basic 6 circa 1999-2001. Those ecosystems were huge--they absolutely dwarfed open source ecosystems in the same timeframe.

Then Microsoft completely stomped it flat with .NET in 2001.

After that, people with two brain cells to rub together figured out the decision matrix really quickly.

1) Stay with VB6 until it finally breaks (still running today)

2) Switch to something non-Microsoft like Java

3) Switch to web-based stuff (Hey this XMLHttpRequest stuff is kind of cool)

4) Port it to Visual C/C++--whoops--the Microsoft C compiler sucks donkey balls

5) Port the code to Microsoft's new crap until they stab me again

And then they wonder why, 15 years after shooting their developer ecosystem in the head, their ecosystem is inferior.

[jevgeni]

The switch from older (VB6, etc) model to .NET could be compared to the switch from Python 2 to 3, only MS didn't wuss out and actually made the braking change instead of dragging everything out. You can call it "stabbing". I'd call it "necessary progress".

Just because an ecosystem is large doesn't mean it's good. I once tried to switch the automation in our team from batch files to Ruby. Huge mistake. Try finding any Ruby gem that: works, has the functionality you need, is well documented, and doesn't rely on Rails (honestly, I don't want to load a whole web framework to figure out a recurring schedule). Went with Powershell in the end and never looked back.

[bsder]

> The switch from older (VB6, etc) model to .NET could be compared to the switch from Python 2 to 3, only MS didn't wuss out and actually made the braking change instead of dragging everything out. You can call it "stabbing". I'd call it "necessary progress".

To what end?

There were billions of lines of VB6 code that got orphaned (possibly trillions). Lots of businesses simply stopped at WinXP/VB6 for this reason--I suspect this is more responsible for the continued existence of XP than anything else (hardware drivers are probably the other).

So, we now have obsolete code along with security nightmares frozen in amber and in return Microsoft killed their developer ecosystem and lost a bunch of revenue because people simply stopped in place or moved to non-Microsoft ecosystems.

Who benefited? I'm sure some manager got great numbers for a a year or two while some fraction of the developers had to upgrade. Of course, nobody measured how many developers were lost in that transition.