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Discussion on: Is it just me or is Microsoft really crushing it lately?

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eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

I think Satya Nadella has been an excellent steward of the company, and is positioning the company for the now, the new, and the future. And embracing being a participant at the table, rather than trying to own the table.

This is a big change from previous leadership.

I was one of the blue-badges impacted by Satya's changes when he took the helm. My development branch office* was shuttered, and everyone there hit by the layoff. Despite that turn, I harbor no ill-will towards Satya or Microsoft, and I applaud his stellar leadership.

* If you've run Expression Blend, Visual Studio, or Internet Explorer... you've probably used code I wrote. Hopefully not code that crashed. ;-)

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Heh. I actually found Expression Blend rather promising. I'd almost forgotten about it! While I'm not a fan of .NET as a whole (I'll be reevaluating that with Core eventually), I never found any UI development platform that quite matched the experience of Expression Blend.

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eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

My biggest regret over Expression Blend is that it was not released in conjunction with WPF and XAML, at their introduction. My viewpoint is that if anyone has to create or edit any kind of XML (including XAML) by hand, the developers have failed them. (XAML, Ant, XSL-FO... any sort of XML.)

Barring some infrequent situations such as merging branches in source control, or figuring out a damaged XML file.

Related to Expression Blend was SketchFlow, for prototyping that was actually functioning and not merely mock-ups and wire diagrams. It was (is?) an incredible tool for UI designers to make functioning designs.

That was a separate team that created SketchFlow, and it leveraged the power of WPF. (WPF is one of the Microsoft technologies that is best-in-breed in that domain, in my not-so-humble opinion.)

Alas, it appears SketchFlow is a casualty of the changing times. :-(

I think .NET (and Mono) is pretty darn impressive technology. For example, I've had good experiences using Visual Studio for Macintosh (formerly known as Xamarin), and F# on Mono.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

FYI: they just released WPF as open source with MIT license (today is full of news both from Microsoft and Google): blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/201...

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eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

Wow! I'm utterly shocked and pleased with this news!

I'm not shocked that Microsoft made it open source. I'm shocked that the developers were able to disentangle WPF from its tight coupling OS dependencies.