Microsoft is going open source?

Many other developers may agree with me when I say this: Microsoft had for very long not given enough support to small teams and community developers!

My story

I’m talking as the person that started using Microsoft technologies when there was no affordability and access to the latest and most advanced tools from Microsoft and everything you required from them either for learning or implementing in your test systems at home had to be paid for.

When I started developing for Microsoft back in 2007 I felt I didn’t have much support. Some of the obstacles I had as I recall include:

• My university didn’t have enough resources and the professors were not trained to teach using any of the Microsoft development tools.
• Microsoft’s best source of training was the E-learning platform which was paid and a bit costly.
• The community and industries in my town and region had very little interest in investing in technology and especially licenses for their non-existing software.
• There were a few small .NET learning groups but they were not very popular. I did join a group at my university but after a few sessions people lost interest and it kind of dissolved.

Having all these obstacles on hand I decided to challenge myself and learn the ‘mysterious’ programming language that somehow not many people found particularly interesting. I bought an ASP.NET book from Apress and went through all the topics and exercises in my own time whilst in my final year.

What’s happening now?

Things are much different today, more and more universities are joining the DreamSpark program which offers free software and courses for students. Even professionals have access to free content now. I really like the amount of material is being recently published in the new free e-learning website from Microsoft: MVA — Microsoft Virtual Academy. You can essentially learn whatever technology you fancy from scratch (I particularly go for C# and SQL Server). They have videos, demos and even Q&A (if you watch the presentations live).

In terms of the actual programming tools they had been a bit limited for a while. I never quite understood why they had to split their ‘integrated’ development environment (IDE) into 4 or 5 different tools (one for each language: Desktop C#, Web, C++ etc). The express editions of Visual Studio didn’t quite appeal to me as I always thought an IDE is supposed to integrate all the technologies. And of course, why the hassle of installing 5 different software applications?

Well, that’s changing now because they are finally opening up a fairly robust version of visual studio to developers. Although the Open version of Visual Studio Professional won’t offer the advanced team collaboration features and other modules like Microsoft Fakes, and the Architect features… etc, I still think it’s quite a good deal for developers. Moreover, Microsoft has announced plans to open up .NET and make it cross-platform compatible, What!?. I really thought this last bit was going to be utterly impossible (or at least not possible until far after I died!)

What’s happening next?

Microsoft has finally realised that there is also big revenue in a specific market they forgot to target for many years: Small teams and individual developers that focus in delivering portable, or non-enterprise level applications. And of course that has to be the target, since as we know, developers apps have proved to be an excellent source of income for Google and Apple).

To conclude, I think Microsoft is going in the right direction. Their intensifying efforts to encourage the developer community to join them will start to make a change (hopefully sooner than later), and the best part is that all this is down to one of the main concepts of the free market: competition. Big companies will fight to keep up to date with technologies and cool, useful and hopefully reliable features for developers. They benefit and we benefit so it’s a win-win.

… And yes, Microsoft’s last move has certainly taken me by surprise!

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David.