Microsoft and Devs: marriage counseling needed

Since I started posting on this blog again I have been thinking a lot about Windows 7 and how MS could make it developer friendly. A lot of these ideas have come from discussions with colleagues (I work for a Microsoft consulting firm) and also from articles I’ve read that I agree with.

There are two or three main problems with how Microsoft treats its development community that I take issue with. I’ll decide whether its two or three as this post continues but the point is: Good developer’s want access to the best tools (ide & api), good developer’s make good applications (elegant inside and out), and good applications make a good platform.

1. Cost of entry

This probably doesn’t need much explanation, but I doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. I don’t think many weekend devs will care about the Business Analysis tools for Visual Studio, but I think the MS development community would explode if they would release the full version of Visual Studio for free. Something simple like, “free developer tools for use with free software.” It would give college students, kids, and virtually anyone who wants to tinker with software a reason to look at the Windows platform. As it is right now, the cost is prohibitive at 250 for Standard Edition and 690 for Professional Edition.

Good devs are born from the desire to program for fun, but if you make it so the only people with access to your tools are people working at large corporations, its no longer fun its work.

2. API/Widget availability

Windows 7 is seeing the release of the “Ribbon” to developers. Currently you have to license it from Microsoft, which I didn’t even know was possible until I saw a quick presentation from Knowledge Lake at the NY Sharepoint User’s Group about how they had to do just that.

This also goes back to an article I read on Arstechnica where Peter Bright points out that the UI widgets aren’t released/standardized for the Windows platform. Not only does this mean we don’t get to use the ribbon but it also means that Windows turns into a hodgepodge.

I’m not quite sure what drives this mentality but I would like access to everything that I can get my hands on to make my apps as nice as possible. Microsoft can only benefit from awesome third party applications.

3. The community

I run a SharePoint Developer’s user group. The people who show up are really great, and I’ve had some awesome talks with guys like Paul Galvin, Michael Lotter, and Bob Fox about community development and software development.

But the feeling around these groups is just not as enthusiastic as I’ve seen elsewhere and I think its based on the simple fact that NONE of the people who show up hack in their spare time. They come for their professional betterment, not for fun, and it shows. The broader view of .NET is worse still. With the exception of the folks who work on the unadulterated awesomeness that is The Mono Project, there are very few in the community that can match the enthusiasm of the people that work on something like Rails/Gnome/KDE/etc.

This is a much tougher issue to address since a lot of the problem may stem from Microsoft’s image and where they spend their time/money. Lord knows they have plenty of the last to hold hackfests, competitions, and other community events geared toward bringing people together who are excited about the technology. It needs to be about developing for fun, instead of developing for your boss.

The great hope

If MS started to work some of these angles I think we could start to see the same vibrant open source development community around .NET apps that you see now with OS X and Cocoa. Oh, and give me a real command line too :D.

I welcome comments, and I hope that bit about the community wasn’t too harsh, but .NET is pretty awesome and everyone could benefit from a few small changes.