If you are following the .NET related news your best bet is to subscribe to Mike Gunderloy’s Larkware blog. He is a human aggregator – if there’s a download to check out, a blog post detailing some obscure (or not so obscure) programming problem or anything else newsworthy, he’ll catch it and link to it. His blog is an excellent information source for all things .NET related.

Or so it was. A couple of months ago, Mike defected from the camp of Windows developers into the great unknown called Ruby on Rails. Fear not, he’s still doing what he does best - good writing and collecting interesting links from all around the world. His new blog can be found at A Fresh Cup. But it’s completely Rails oriented and Mike’s career seems to be heading exclusively into Rails. What’s “even worse” is that he switched from Windows to (gasp!) Mac OS X

What happened? Mike has been living off the contracting on Microsoft technologies for years. He invested a lot of time and probably gathered a lot of clients over the years – why would he throw all that away?

Some of his own comments and the comments on the forums of the Softies on Rails echo the same kind of sentiment – developers just can’t keep up any more. Microsoft is constantly (re)inventing itself, putting out newer and newer technologies, never stopping to catch a breath. With the rise of transparency this has become even worse (or better, depending on how you look at things) – now we get to try every alpha, beta or RC of whatever chefs in Microsoft decide to lay upon us.

In a way, I was lucky - at the time the .NET (by my own account, the dominant programming technology on Windows for the foreseeable future) came out, I was too busy working on other things. Thus I practically skipped version 1.0, touched a bit 1.1 and jumped fully in with the 2.0. By the time I needed to do GUI I was already exposed to WPF (.NET 3.0) so I skipped Windows Forms (I did a lot of similar work over the years in MFC and don’t want to do it again, thank you very much). The same happened to ADO.NET: don’t even get me started with all of Microsoft’s technologies for data access – Jet, ADO, RDO, UDA, OleDb, ADO.NET and finally DLinq. I thought DLinq might be the one they’ll stabilize on, but apparently I was wrong since next-next version will brings us entities framework.

The others were not that lucky, they absorbed each and every new thing Microsoft put out. That was their job, you know, the thing that puts food on the table.

It just keeps on going. Year after year, just as we adapt to the new wave another wave comes. Unfortunately, in the last couple of years it was impossible to transfer your knowledge forward. If you were a MFC programmer, not many things worked the same in the .NET. If you’re a Windows Forms programmer, just forget everything you’ve learned when you jump into WPF. If you did some Remoting, it’ll be useful but the model is sufficiently different in WCF. Before we adapt to .NET 3.0 we’ll have 3.5. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a bit of break then, but who knows. Look what’s going on with Silverlight (which is in itself a great technology I’ll talk about in another post).

No wonder people are switching to different platforms. The amount of information to digest is staggering and despite the Rails being moving target, Rails is still easier to follow.

My advice to those sticking to Windows? Try to filter the technology and pick (if you’re in a situation to be able to choose) only the technology that’s obviously:

• fundamentally better than the previous one
• is here to stay (I know, recognizing this is a lot easier said than done)

I’d also recommend against spreading thin over all of the technologies Microsoft offers – if you’re a desktop applications guru, don’t try to be a guru for the Web apps, databases and whatnot. Don’t get me wrong – you almost have to dabble in Web technologies and you must know decent amount of SQL even if you are a SOA architect, but you don’t have to know each and every detail.

To those leaving Windows (some actually are trying to run Rails on Windows, which might become  reality pretty soon) and jumping on the Rails bandwagon, I wish you all the best. Rails is a fine piece of technology and Ruby is a great language. I hope you’ll have fun.