They've only been "stale and dormant" for those not paying attention. Microsoft suffers from a reputation that's celebrating it's 10th birthday, at least.

Check out ASP.Net sometime, and see some of the innovations they've been making over the last 5 years and you'll see why Guthrie is still superman in a red shirt.

Last I tried it asp.net MVC was not RESTful and they had a different product for APIs called "Web API" that is essentially the same thing except RESTful. It seems entirely silly to me that there should be different frameworks depending on whether you are serving html or not-html data.

To me that's indicative of an organization consisting of silos.

Web API and ASP.NET MVC complement each other. Web API is a framework for building RESTful web services. You can host Web API on multiple ways, even without the need of IIS. Also, you can add the Web API libraries to an ASP.NET MVC project to facilitate the implementation of a RESTful API attached to your web application. ASP.NET MVC doesn't need to be RESTful, and it was never intended. Also, I am currently building a online application with AngularJS and Web API, and there isn't a need for ASP.NET MVC for example.

I'm not sure why you think MVC should be RESTful. These patterns solve different problems. It's fitting they have different implementations, not a one-size-fits-all framework.

I own one PC for media (win7). Wife, kids and I use mac laptops. Wife has iPhone and I use a Galaxy Note 3.

I say that to say this; I am no luddite. I've been shopping for a Win8.1 tablet to replace the Google I/O Samsung tablet and perhaps maybe my mbp. Win8.1 tablets are compelling due to the full blown desktop environment. However, the MS dev ecosystem is a bit daunting as the lifecycle or shelf life of their tech is never really known (Silverlight comes to mind here).

I work as a Firefighter (day job) and our municipality are solidly MS integrated. This doesn't look it will change in the short to near term as city IT is steadfast MS. You can byod to work at the station...however, we have two laptops on every engine and ladder apparatus. The tools we use for EMS calls are, quite frankly, complete shit. Web apps seem like a logical solution until you see how they are used in the field... latency, network i/o and the choice for browsers are limited among many/varied issues (hipaa, etc).

All that to say, I believe in Scott Guthrie. I follow him on Twitter and he seems like a logical and candid MS employee from what I've read on his blog over the years. The changes that I've seen in MS recently give me a bit of confidence to test the native development side and perhaps fix our shit software.

>However, the MS dev ecosystem is a bit daunting as the lifecycle or shelf life of their tech is never really known (Silverlight comes to mind here)

Although silverlight is not actively being developed anymore it will be supported for a considerable period of time [1]. If you have invested time to develop/learn Silverlight applications, your time was not wasted. The underlying technology (XAML) is also used for desktop (WPF), metro (windows store app) and windows phone 8 applications.

Disclaimer: My first language is not english.

1. http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/default.aspx?LN=en-us...

You'll have to rip WPF from my cold dead hands. Silver light and WinRT are just poor imitations that look similar but are missing way too many features that I use dally.

Totally agree WPF is awesome. And WinRT/Silverlight don't hold a candle to it. Only thing is WPF performance and verboseness could be better.

I use WPF at a low level (no framework components beyond Canvas) in pure C# (no icky XAML); which is probably why WinRT/Silverlight are so unappealing. WPF works well for me but eventually I'll have move onto Direct2D and DirectWrite I guess, but I'll have to use a C# wrapper.

> a logical and candid MS employee

Richard Feynman's quote comes to mind. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

I am heavy mac & linux user. I was forced to use to Microsoft stuff lately, and its not as bad I remember.

C# is nice, F# is nice, and I like powershell. Modern windows applications look nice as well.

I remember going on the web and getting infected with toolbars and what not within about 5 minutes. Its not so bad anymore.

I'm just curious - do you mind elaborating on your thought that Microsoft has been stale and dormant? This just seems so far from reality, so I'm wondering what about them gives you that impression.

The client side tools have been in purgatory for years, as things were in stasis when MS screwed up the XP to Longhorn or whatever they were calling the next generation client then.

The server side is a totally different story. Windows Server, system center, sql, etc have been going gangbusters for years.

Agreed. On the client side, a lot of effort was put into WinJS and the whole ModernUI experience.

Speaking as an ex-Microsoftie, my guess is that you'll see some of the innovation behind ModernUI apps back-propagated to thick client desktop stuff in the next major release of Windows.

As seen from outside, Microsoft seems to move very slowly. If you look it up close, you may be aware of smaller changes than those that don't pay attention and give them more importance than those on the outside, as those changes affect your work, but don't affect anyone else's.

Microsoft has been moving, but there is so much more movement outside the Microsoft ecosystem that it's easy to miss when Microsoft makes changes to its technology, even those that shake their entire ecosystem. Microsoft is just one more ecosystem among many and a very insular one.

No Microsoft launch since .NET has had any significant impact on my daily life and it would be perfectly rational to completely ignore them.

> No Microsoft launch since .NET has had any significant impact on my daily life and it would be perfectly rational to completely ignore them.

By this I can say that Apple is stale and dormant. No launch since the iPhone has any impact on my daily life, and even that is simply because it's influence on Android.

Good point. I am now curious as to how the FOSS ecosystem looks when seen from within a Microsoft-heavy environment. Does it look "slow"? Can it be safely ignored?

I see a steady flow of news of new Ubuntu releases, new PostgreSQL functionality, and miscellaneous HPC/Big Data technologies, but that's because I pay attention to that. I wonder if it would be different if I spent my day writing code in Windows, for a Microsoft stack.

I've served in an operations capacity for exclusively *-nix, mixed-stack and primarily MS environments, and I will say that from my perspective the OSS community has more news, but I find that there's less that I actually care about.

I've actually been finding MS products more easy to work with lately, while Ubuntu has been getting more frustrating. Some of that is due to familiarity, but there's also a lot of decisions I've not agreed with. In general, I like that I can write something that works for a few years in Windows - I don't have to worry if the latest package updates are going to break everything. I've lost weeks fixing dependency bugs, and I don't seem to have the same issues on Windows.

It's not different. Half of Microsoft developments these days are them implementing some open source tech (like not-Windows in Azure, Node becoming close to first-class on IIS..)

Certainly there is more than a small difference between it being rational for you to ignore a company and to call the company itself dormant and stale.