Last night at TechEd i was asked twice about the future of .NET etc usual rants.. but in both cases I was also asked "How would you fix all of this" style questions. It got me thinking and I dunno, here's my actual response to that question but I'd also be curious to see how you all would navigate out of this should you be "In charge" of it all?
- Tooling. Offer .NET developers a smarter approach to their deployment strategies. Instead of forcing them to abandon WPF through variety of Namespace or "Adopt HTML5 or go away" thinking, instead take a page out of the gaming / phonegap style solutions and offer them the ability to compile for both old and new via tooling. Given not much has changed in terms of developers executing on their "Apps" (forms, dashboards, blah blah) theres really no added benefit to Windows8 Style development vs WPF other than touch API's and *maybe* async support and/or Win8 Store targeting... - Design <-> Developer Design Tool. Blend was rushed, poorly thought out and had a terrible monetization projection(s) attached (MSDN killed Blend's funding). The problem hasn't gone a way its just amplified further by abstracting designers further away from the developer <-> designer workflows. I'd restart the Blend tooling problem but i'd break the problem into 3 different lenses (Screen Size/Layout, Binding, Styling and Theming). I'd focus on establishing a tool that acts as conduit / bridge to products from Adobe, Maxon (c4d), Autodesk and so on. Imho I think if you focused on both of these two core issues you could unblock a lot of stalling around platform adoption within the Microsoft ecosystem ... that being said I see none of the above leadership from Microsoft today and i'm not convinced so far we will unless its "adopt win8 or get lost" mentality (5-10yrs from now may hold some water assuming ubiquity occurs in win8 and projects being built today start sunsetting whilst at the same time developers adopt and secure their futures through Win8 learning(s)). Agree? have better idea? --- Regards, Scott Barnes http://www.riagenic.com
