I’m writing this post because a lot of my friends are dyed-in-the-wool Java and Ruby developers who believe that nothing good ever came out of Redmond. I’d like them to think again.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been listening to podcasts that have come out of the .NET community: Elegant Code’s Code Cast, Scott Hanselman’s Hanselminutes and Herding Code and overall my reaction has been, “Wow, the Microsoft/.NET community is really starting to get to grips with Lean and Agile”. This wasn’t the case the last time I worked intensively with .NET about three years ago, back then it seemed that MS and .NET developers were living in the dark ages.
Listening to people working from within Microsoft talking about using Scrum and XP and Lean and how it is making their development better is heart-warming to someone who’s been pushing this message for the last ten years.
That Microsoft are dogfooding their own applications, and changing them to make them work better in support of Agile methods is fantastic news. Microsoft can do a lot of good if they support these ideas openly, and that seems to be their intention.
Microsoft isn’t just making strides in the process department though, the advances they’ve made in the CLR and the languages that run on it are really starting to pay dividends. As this post from Matthew Podwysocki shows, the generative effects of advancing the language and the platform.
That the .NET platform has been pulling ahead of Java in the feature department for a while now hasn’t been a secret. But now, for the first time, I’m starting to see people using these features and talking about these features to solve significant problems rather than brandishing them as ‘the new hotness’.
If only it wasn’t tied to Windows, I’d buy some.
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