Why I am not leaving .NET

This is going to be a long read, but something has just gotten me going today about making this post. I have actively been doing development for nine years. I started my development experience learning VB .NET and VBA. I got my first job with doing .NET development with C#. I enjoyed my job very much even thought I was mostly frustrated with ASP .NET Web Forms. I finally discovered ASP .NET MVC 2, which quickly got me interested in Ruby on Rails. I started playing with the magic of RoR and soon I was hooked in the community. All this time, Python was becoming a front runner as a replacement for VBA in the field of GIS which I was in. Of course this peeked my interest also. My horizons were widening, and I was learning a lot of stuff. Then, BAM!, I discovered open source software and libraries and was instantly hooked on the concept and ethos. I was experimenting with Linux and I was loving it. All of these changes were pushing me to leave .NET development and for the last three years I have been trying to just that.

Today, I do not run Windows in my house, I am a pure Linux user at home. I do development during the day in .NET using C#. This blog is created using a Python tool called Tinkerer. If you look at the contents of my posts, very few are associated with .NET. All of my OSS contributions have been made to projects that are not .NET based. The two presentations that I have given have also been Python related. This is probably not how I want to treat the community that has provided for my family and has allowed me to ship products that improve others lives.

So in summary starting today, I have decided that I am no longer leaving .NET. .NET is now open source, ASP .NET vNext is going to be running on Linux and all the reasons I was looking to leave have been removed. The .NET community is super awesome and as I move forward in my career I hope that I can contribute to the .NET ecosystem in a meaningful way.

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