Saturday, October 31, 2015

Dotnetrocks, a comment, and a mug

On September 24th of last month I got an email from Richard Campbell of DotNetRocks fame that said the following:
Thanks Mark - we read your comment on the show! Send your mailing address to me at richard@pwop.com and we'll send you a mug!
 

My reply to Richard's email was, "This has made my day! ...on a related note, in my day job, I moved to a corporate .Net team about 3 months ago and have been doing C# MVC 5 development utilizing KnockoutJS and a host of other open-source JavaScript frameworks and am loving it! Thanks again as I have been a long-time listener since the early days (in which I remember working in the 1.0 framework)!"
 

If you have not listened to the podcast called .Net Rocks, regardless if you are a .Net developer or not, it is worth your time. They interview and speak on various topics dealing with what is new and innovative in not only the Microsoft space, but other technologies. At the beginning of each show, one listener comment is read on air and that person who authored the comment is sent a .Net Rocks coffee mug. Franky, these are really coveted among .Net programmers who are fans of the show.



The show number in which the comment was read was #1201 and was published on October 7th, 2015.
 

Here is the comment that got read on the show:
Another great shows guys. What was interesting to me in the show was the discussion of the "new Microsoft' with its consideration of other OSs such as Linux. I just read an article that dealt with the relevance of Microsoft being an Open Source company. In short my understanding of the article is that Microsoft is too late to the Open Source ecosystem to make any significant difference in both its marketing reach as well as effect. While I thought the article made salient points such as, "The reason, ultimately, comes down to community," one must not dismiss the large number of MS .Net developers that are both active and adding to the body of both .Net as well as open source frameworks. As a former .Net dev, which has been working in Java and open source technologies for the past 8 years, one thing I well remember is the care of MS with it's developer community. Also, given that Visual Studio 2015 will be including bower and npm as first class package management systems as well as JavaScript as first-class citizens in its ecosystem, it is still too early to consider it "irrelevant." Finally, remember that MS has always been about it's "developers, developers, developers!”