For those of you who don't know, Scott is really the driving force behind Microsoft's embrace of open source. The opening of ASP.NET, the .NET Framework and countless other techs would not have happened without his push.
On top of all that, he is a coder at heart and still deeply in touch with the community. You can email him directly and usually get a response within hours which is astonishing given his role and responsibilities.
This is a win for coders everywhere, regardless of your position on Microsoft and how you feel about them in general - ScottGu is one of the great guys pushing technology forward and has a serious increase in firepower every time he moves up the ladder at Microsoft. This position is tantamount to 'head of all things developer' at Microsoft.
Personal anecdote - I had an issue with Visual Studio inverting colours and removing toolbars a few years ago and couldn't fix it even with re-install. I eventually (after going though official channels) emailed Scott and he spent a fair bit of time emailing me back and forth to get all the details of the problem and then put me in touch with a few other people in MS who helped me fix the problem.
Scott also replied to me about a specific .NET issue I emailed him about more than 7 years ago. He's an incredible person and as keithwarren pointed out, it's a win not only for coders, but for everyone that uses or depends on .NET. Scott is the type of person that should to be in the highest levels of leadership.
I agree with all the nice things you say about Scott.
He is an amazing guy. I had a chance to talk to him briefly
many years ago and it left a solid impression.
That said, given his place in the organization as of late,
I would be inclined to believe that he has minions who
handle these things for him now. To keep up the cult of Scott.
I dont mean that in a negative way. In fact I think its great.
We still get answers :) But I think everyone who knows Microsoft a bit from the inside now that their executives work very hard and long hours. Scott only has the same number of hours available as the rest of us. (I think).
It doesn't seem out of the question. You can run Linux on Azure and Office on iPads now. Microsoft hasn't really been closed and insular for a long time. It goes to show you how long strong emotional impressions can last.
I once worked with a guy who proudly proclaimed that he hadn't used Windows in over ten years. "So that makes you an expert on it, then?"
How long emotional impressions last? I'm sure there are good folks at Microsoft, but the company hasn't changed. Like those awful, nasty political campaign ads? Microsoft haired one of the main practitioners to promote Windows:
MS lock-in tactics may be have weakened lately, but didn't disappear completely yet. And I wouldn't call that a long time. They got a lot of pressure on legal front for interoperability, so some things were forced on them and didn't come from their goodwill. Also, competition forces them to reconsider.
> I once worked with a guy who proudly proclaimed that he hadn't used Windows in over ten years. "So that makes you an expert on it, then?"
I personally don't use Windows for a while either and see no need to, but it doesn't prevent one from keeping track of MS behavior.
You are still free to run your own apps on your own computer. I suspect you're referring to Surface RT which, technically, is a tablet (it runs Windows RT, and not Windows) and thus no different to IOS and OSX.
He was saying that Modern UI (Metro) applications require APIs that come with certain restrictions. Those restrictions hold regardless of whether the apps are being run on Windows RT tablets or Windows desktops.
It was a little scarier when it looked like Microsoft was positioning the Modern UI as a replacement for the traditional desktop Windows paradigm. If Metro:Windows as Windows:DOS, the restrictions on Metro apps would have been really bad.
"...require APIs that come with certain restrictions..."
What restrictions? I've written a number of WinRT/Metro apps and the API is not .Net but has no restrictions. Sure, there's no database support for example, but there's nothing stopping you from using SqLite or writing your own. There are also UI constraints, but that's true for any hardware.
The restrictions I'd been referring to are legal, not technical. The requirements that Metro apps be certified by Microsoft and distributed through the Microsoft store are particularly troubling to me.
.net is "Source Available" perhaps, Microsoft makes the source available so that you can step into their code when debugging. They make it extremely easy to point VS at their symbol servers(and cache locally for performance) so you always get the exact right source you need while debugging.
If you prefer to browse the source http://referencesource.microsoft.com/ has it all including the license. It appears to be a non free license as it is for reference use only.
>They make it extremely easy to point VS at their symbol servers(and cache locally for performance) so you always get the exact right source you need while debugging.
Is this something that happens automatically? Do you have any more information how to set this up?
+1. he's been extremely supportive of our Python & node.js efforts in visual studio. a while back i gave him a demo of PTVS and he strongly encouraged & supported us in putting Python on Azure. it was the renaissance of Python at microsoft in a way.
That is great new. Good for him. I don't do much work with MS anymore but in the past I always followed Scott's blog. I am excited to see Microsoft moving in the right direction. Hell, I'm glad to see Microsoft moving in any direction. They have been stale and dormant for too long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This seems like a continuation of promoting people who are very in touch with programming, and what needs to be done internally to make things happen at Microsoft. Good first promotion by the new CEO!
It means that until now he was just temporary head of that group because there wasn't yet a successor. Now he was named that successor. The »permanent« is not part of the title; it's just an attribute.
On top of all that, he is a coder at heart and still deeply in touch with the community. You can email him directly and usually get a response within hours which is astonishing given his role and responsibilities.
This is a win for coders everywhere, regardless of your position on Microsoft and how you feel about them in general - ScottGu is one of the great guys pushing technology forward and has a serious increase in firepower every time he moves up the ladder at Microsoft. This position is tantamount to 'head of all things developer' at Microsoft.