Re-Examining Development Platforms

I've been granted an opportunity for perspective lately. I've done my best to steer away from .NET development up until recently - not because I had any particular gripes, but the technology platform just never seemed to be a great fit. C# as a language is pretty great... delegates, tail closure and nullable references are a welcome respite. VisualStudio isn't bad. If you judge IDEs by how many times they make you swear in a given workday, I'd say my four-letter word tally is comparable to that of me using Eclipse. In fact, once my development environment was up and running I thought I might grow to enjoy .NET development.

And then I started to use the foundation classes. First off... I'll acknowledge that no platform has ever been able to get dates and times "right." This is ever more apparent with .NET... who for some inexplicable reason have no real sense of this "epoch" thing that EVERY OTHER PLATFORM USES. Milliseconds since year zero are expressed as... integers? On top of that, time span arithmetic is only accurate when math is done using "ticks," which themselves are not really accurate to 1/10000 of a millisecond. I didn't go for the caesium clock upgrade in my current laptop.

Java developers often complain that anonymous classes are inelegant or verbose within Java. C# has abandoned anonymous classes in lieu of their delegate-based event handling system. However, C# developers exposed to anonymous inner classes actually seem to like them. A common gripe actually turns out to be a nifty feature when you're talking about event handling. The C#/.NET event handling mechanism isn't that fantastic... it's largely just a loose convention for using delegates. No extras or nice GoF listener patterns provided like a PropertyChangeListener.

Zooming out from design patterns and looking at .NET from an enterprise integration pattern perspective, the .NET platform is definitely at a major disadvantage when compared to JVM-based platforms. I've already covered the state of .NET integration frameworks but to recap: it's still nearly five years behind. My time with EasyNetQ has been great, but I still find myself wishing I could use Apache Camel to construct bigger things using common EIP components.

Despite the current rant, I've been fairly complacent with my new development platform. What really stirred things back up for me was when I cracked open the JMeter-Rabbit-AMQP plugin so that I could do RPC-based load testing of EasyNetQ services. Being a JMeter extension, JMeter-Rabbit-AMQP was a Java app that required me to fire up NetBeans once again and do some Java hacking. Once I did... damn. Until I made that sudden switch back I didn't see the huge gap that existed between .NET and Java development. While C# has some advantage over the Java language, the JVM platform is still leaps ahead.

Once you begin talking about instrumentation the gap grows even wider. I have grown accustomed to the fantastic introspection and profiling offered by Java Management Extensions and VisualVM; by contrast Microsoft's laughable implementation of Performance Counters has caused me more problems than it has solved. If it works (and it often doesn't due to permissions issues or outright registry corruption) there is no instrumentation that allows for live modification of managed objects or details on garbage collection. The actual .NET API to create and maintain performance counters is actually not bad, but the Performance Counter UI is so clunky and ill-conceived that it is often difficult to make use of it.

In the end... it doesn't matter. You do the best you can with the tenured development stack because ultimately it's not about the underlying technology - it's about the squishy, business-logicy brain inside of it. Keeping that squishy brain... err... braining is the most important thing.