As long time Microsoft developer, since 2002 when .Net Framework 1.0 made it’s debut, I’ve been fairly happy with where .Net was going. It seemed like it would correct a lot of the issues that Java seemed to have at the time and looked like a platform that had a lot of promise. Steve Ballmer and his Microsoft or else ethos basically made sure that would not be the case. .Net was for Windows only and there was no way Microsoft was going to play nice with Linux or the Open Source community, he made sure that .Net devs would be destined to be pigeon-holed to only work on Windows environments. Thankfully Steve has moved on and new leadership in the form of Satya Nadella came to lead Microsoft into a new age where they actually played nice with Linux and the wider development world. There were always token efforts by Microsoft but it wasn’t until Ballmer left that you could finally see that Microsoft was waking up to the fact that they would be left behind if they did not evolve.
Dot Net Core is one of the many wonderful fruits of Microsoft’s efforts to expand their influence and to embrace the larger development community. With their parallel efforts to open source many parts of the development platform, to their embrace of Linux and Node in the cloud as first class citizens, one can truly see how Microsoft has filled in the moat around their castle and is truly developing a community around themselves that plays nice not only with Linux but with Open Source! For the first time in a long time, I’m excited to be a Microsoft developer. I can actually see how my skills can now translate to other platforms and how I can contribute to various projects that are not Windows-centric. Their overall strategy of embracing best practices from the community and liberally borrowing pages from Linux is truly making their products a compelling choice and in a way cool again.
As part of this blog, I’ll be covering a variety of topics from development languages and tools to non-development related items such as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Sailing and running which are the hobbies I like to enjoy when I’m not coding. In fact, those hobbies help me balance out the coding by allowing me to remove myself from a problem and think of them in different ways. Looking forward to sharing my knowledge with the overall community!
