1. Oren is the least bad of the three mentioned, but his "Ayende" blog at times is a little vicious when it comes to slating other people's work [1] especially when the sheer number of bugs we've tripped over in NH, Castle dynamic proxy and NH profiler is as high as it is. I'm not a TDD zealot (I write tests for critical sections only, usually after the code writing event) but from an architectural point of view, unlike J2EE etc, there are no standard abstractions so once you've integrated something, you're stuck with it unless you fancy rewriting everything. This is hard work when your codebase is around the 2 million lines of C# and 150,000 lines of NH mapping XML (yes it's that big). Cost isn't just for the product - it's an ongoing concern. We've got to the point where we are becoming "that conservative enterprise" that someone else mentioned above.
Platform that doesn't have celebrity developers: C/POSIX. Even C++11 possibly now (I haven't evaluated it fully yet). Why? It's a set of standards, not a product. You're free to move around in it. I'd argue J2EE is fairly close to that but to be honest it's a pain to work with unless you're using Java EE 6. Go is pretty celebrity-free i.e. the authors with their heritage don't do it for the fame (which in itself sounds ridiculous).
5/6. Yes we've met them as well but to be honest they want lots of money (£100k+) or are contractors. I'm quite happy to take 3 people on that basis in myself and lose 6 members of our team as there would be a net gain but unfortunately employment law in the UK doesn't allow it and PHBs think more bums on seats is a good metric for measuring productivity. This is unfortunately a universal FAIL in the UK which concentrates on unemployment figures only - it's almost programmed into the minds of all business folk.
I'm not saying the last point is specific to .Net as for example the Perl developer community in the UK is even worse (I worked for an outfit where use strict was laughed at) but it's a hell of a lot easier to get a decent C expert than it is to get a C# expert just from the sheer amount of noise from low quality developers expecting miracle salaries. Recruitment agents are a joke as well (although they're easy to get a free lunch out of ;-) but that's another story.
> I'd argue J2EE is fairly close to that but to be honest it's a pain to work with unless you're using Java EE 6
The thing with Java is that the community is freaking huge. Actually, with Java you're not talking about one community, but of several huge communities.
If you don't like J2EE, that's OK, as there are plenty of well-supported and awesome alternatives. Alternatives like Dropwizard and Play Framework. If you don't like Java, the language, that's OK too, as there are awesome alternatives, like Scala, Clojure, Groovy or JRuby, all of them widely supported with big communities behind them.
Also, people should really acquire better taste in what technologies to pick. (N)Hibernate sucks so badly that I've always been amazed of its popularity.
Agree with your point about hibernate and its derivatives. Unfortunately with .Net you're stuck with that or EF which is even worse or something off the shelf and even crappier. TBH I've actually used raw ADO.Net with provider abstraction and dapper.net recently as replacements.
Despite its inefficiency, the old CQRS pattern with commands that INSERT/UPDATE and queries as typed DataTables are actually the most scalable solution I've found (over several years, not just on small projects).
1. Oren is the least bad of the three mentioned, but his "Ayende" blog at times is a little vicious when it comes to slating other people's work [1] especially when the sheer number of bugs we've tripped over in NH, Castle dynamic proxy and NH profiler is as high as it is. I'm not a TDD zealot (I write tests for critical sections only, usually after the code writing event) but from an architectural point of view, unlike J2EE etc, there are no standard abstractions so once you've integrated something, you're stuck with it unless you fancy rewriting everything. This is hard work when your codebase is around the 2 million lines of C# and 150,000 lines of NH mapping XML (yes it's that big). Cost isn't just for the product - it's an ongoing concern. We've got to the point where we are becoming "that conservative enterprise" that someone else mentioned above.
Platform that doesn't have celebrity developers: C/POSIX. Even C++11 possibly now (I haven't evaluated it fully yet). Why? It's a set of standards, not a product. You're free to move around in it. I'd argue J2EE is fairly close to that but to be honest it's a pain to work with unless you're using Java EE 6. Go is pretty celebrity-free i.e. the authors with their heritage don't do it for the fame (which in itself sounds ridiculous).
5/6. Yes we've met them as well but to be honest they want lots of money (£100k+) or are contractors. I'm quite happy to take 3 people on that basis in myself and lose 6 members of our team as there would be a net gain but unfortunately employment law in the UK doesn't allow it and PHBs think more bums on seats is a good metric for measuring productivity. This is unfortunately a universal FAIL in the UK which concentrates on unemployment figures only - it's almost programmed into the minds of all business folk.
I'm not saying the last point is specific to .Net as for example the Perl developer community in the UK is even worse (I worked for an outfit where use strict was laughed at) but it's a hell of a lot easier to get a decent C expert than it is to get a C# expert just from the sheer amount of noise from low quality developers expecting miracle salaries. Recruitment agents are a joke as well (although they're easy to get a free lunch out of ;-) but that's another story.