The Profound Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

I didn’t make any of these contributions because they made me feel all tingly and warm inside – I don’t have the free time for that any more, sadly. I did it because it was mission-critical to our business. So here’s my question: in the ~15 year history of .NET, no one built a reactive, server-side socket library that’s actively maintained? It’s 2014 for fuck’s sake.

The point I made four years ago this very day about why .NET adoption lags among startups is still true – .NET is the platform of choice for building line of business apps, not building customer-facing products and services. That’s reflected strongly in it’s OSS ecosystem.

Compare this to the Java ecosystem: virtually every major .NET project is a port of something originally evented for the JVM. I’m looking at you, NAnt, NUnit, NuGet (Maven), NHibernate, Lucene.NET, Helios, Akka.NET, and so on. You know what the difference is? There’s a huge population of Java developers who roll hard in the paint and build + open source hard shit. The population of people who do this in .NET is miniscule. The shortcomings of .NET’s open source ecosystem are your fault and my fault, not Microsoft’s. But the truth is that it’s our own intellectual laziness that created a ghetto of our OSS ecosystem – who’s out there building a lightweight MMO in .NET? Minecraft did it with Java! How about a real-time messaging platform – no, not Jabbr. I mean something that connects millions of users, not dozens. We don’t solve many hard problems – we build the same CRUD applications over and over again with the same SQL back-end, we don’t build innovative apps for Windows Phone or Windows 8, and there’s only a handful of kick-ass WPF developers out there building products for every day consumers. The only way to clean up our acts and to make an ecosystem worth keeping is to stop treating our tools like shit shovels and start using them to lay alabaster and marble instead. .NET is more than capable of building scalable, performant, interesting, consumer-facing software – and it falls on us, individual and independent developers, to set the example.