I agree with you. The languages, documentation, and standard libraries of .NET are awesome. The community is definitely lacking though. These days you can get excellent help on IRC about F# and on stackoverflow for everything, but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#.
but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#.
Can you give an example of something that is cool? Everytime I think of something cool, I can think of something done on the MS stack, but maybe our definitions are different.
I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean cool F# things? All the work of Tomas Petricek is way cool. Outside of .NET there is of course tons of cool stuff, like Clojure, Rails, Haskell stuff, the recent fuss about Yacc is Dead etc.
Just things that are cool. Stuff done in F# or in other communities like the Haskell, Clojure, or Rails community.
I'm trying to see why the things coming out of the Clojure and F# community are cool, but they aren't coming out of the C#/Visual C++ community. For example, ScottGu showed off a C#/Silverlight app built by a 3rd party that was a 3D model of the human body, where you coudl strip layers and interact in real time... all rendering pushed to the GPUs. That seemed cool to me. And they did it in a week.
I'm trying to understand why we have this disconnect.
No, absolutely, there are very cool things coming out of Microsoft with regards to C#/VC++. It's just that they nearly always come from Microsoft, there isn't an active community that does these things.
My point with the 3D body example is that it was not done by MS.
But take a look at a place like CodeProject. People post their projects and write up an article describing the technical aspects of that project. It's actually a surprisingly strong community. In the past month ~500 written or updated. I actually tend to find this place more interesting than GitHub or CodePlex, due to the exposition.
This can be misleading. Often these sorts of things are built by 3rd party companies and simply released by Microsoft or hosted on MSDN/codeplex or etc. A lot of them are just people at companies with pre-existing relationships with MS coming up with good ideas. It's not the same as more OSS-style ecosystems, but it's also not a centrally planned marketing facade, either.
