Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 7th Jul 2007 19:09 UTC, submitted by flanque
"Two years ago, the number of developers writing applications for the Microsoft Windows platform fell, while the opposite was true for Linux - this has now become a trend. Instead of the Web stealing away Windows Users, as people have predicted for years, it's Linux and handheld devices. According to analysts at the Evans Data Corporation research house, 64.8 percent of North American developers are writing software for Windows, down from 74 percent only a year ago. The decline in popularity of the world's most prevalent operating systems appears to coincide with the rise of Linux, as the number of developers targeting the open-source environment has gone up by three percentage points from 8.8 percent to 11.8 percent in the same year."
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RE[2]: A Prominent Windows Developer's Chronical
by google_ninja on Sun 8th Jul 2007 05:25
in reply to "RE: A Prominent Windows Developer's Chronical"
Member since:2006-02-05
Personally, I think some of this is down to the fact that Microsoft has screwed development on Windows. It isn't possible to take classical VB code and run or recompile it on a .Net environment (and Microsoft were extremely blase and hihg handed about it), and some of the new stuff is just too much of a moving target. Certainly, web applications get around that quite a bit.
At my last job, one of the other divisions was this massive enterprise app, which some genius years ago had done on VB6. We were at the point where it would take between five to ten minutes to load on average machines at the time, and quite frankly, it looked like ass.
After getting to the point where management was convinced something major had to be done with the project, VB.net was suggested as an easy solution. After some research, we found an automatic migration tool. Great! So we give it a shot, pretty sure that even if we still had to put work into it, it would make porting the monstrosity a hell of alot easier. All the tool ended up doing was commenting out roughly 95% of the code, and mangled the 5% that it actually managed to port.
The final decision was to port it to JSP/Java/Oracle like the rest of our newer apps.
Member since:
2005-07-06
A very prominent Windows developer, Mike Gunderloy (he's written dozens of books as well, notably Coder to Developer which is a must read for anyone in the software business) has been chronicling his move from .Net over to...well, anything not .Net/Windows:
Interesting read, thanks. I've been doing quite a bit more with RoR recently, and we have really great rich client tools like Qt available to us as alternatives as well.
Personally, I think some of this is down to the fact that Microsoft has screwed development on Windows. It isn't possible to take classical VB code and run or recompile it on a .Net environment (and Microsoft were extremely blase and hihg handed about it), and some of the new stuff is just too much of a moving target. Certainly, web applications get around that quite a bit.