These last few weeks have seen a flurry of emotions from the .Net community.  It appears that a few product releases and a presumptive priority change for IronRuby have caused the world to come crashing down and passengers of the .Net ship to jump overboard.  I’m glad I don’t work for these emotionally unstable individuals, because if we had any debate (I’m aggressive and loud) I’d be concerned they would run from the room crying or worse yet, quit (seems more likely from the rhetoric I hear).  If this is what the Alt.Net community is made of then OSS in the world of .Net has absolutely no chance and the outside OSS world should fear their new recruits.

During the late ‘90s and early 2000s immense business systems where built on the powerhouse platform known as Microsoft Office.  Having worked, well, at all, I’ve seen first hand the ugly, but quite impressive apps built by accountants and marketiers (mark it down, that’s my word) generating great revenues or savings for their companies.  I have replied to requests to “make that an enterprise web app” with “that will fail miserably, keep using it.”  The apps are a disaster waiting to happen themselves, but that’s why we have enterprise backup systems.  It’s just not worth the IT Department’s time to rebuild Excel when it is perfectly suited for their purpose.

In come WebMatrix, LightSaber, I mean LightSwitch, and all the other “low-end” tools.  These are obviously a trend that show Microsoft is abandoning the “high-end” developer (are we really that pompous that we consider ourselves “high-end”, get over yourself you geek.  I bet they make more cash per feature than you).  Or could it be that they are making up for the fact that the last great act of feature development shown by Microsoft to the “low-end”, revenue generating, feature shipping developer is the Ribbon Bar.  I guess you could add SharePoint in there, but I won’t bate you. 

Since 2002, we’ve seen 4 iterations of Silverlight, 4 versions of the Framework, WPF, WCF, the rise of PnP, 5 versions of Visual Studio, Azure, Hyper-V, Team Foundation Server (like it or not), and a dearth of other tools in the same time that Excel has received… drum role… the Ribbon.  Yes there are nicer icons to represent values and you can make prettier tables or charts, but seriously they still use VBA!  In that same time period we’ve seen 2, count them, 2 releases of  the platform on which many businesses survive.

So yes, Microsoft has thrown the Excel and Access productivity worker (not lowend developer) a bone.  They’ve made it easier for you to say, “Sorry, I don’t do Master-Details forms.  Here’s WebMatrix, call me when you want to ship.”  Get over it, start an OSS project or, if you liked it so much, help the IronRuby team build that platform up.  Whatever you do, stop whining and do something.