Castle Project Founder Hamilton Verissimo Joins Microsoft
Microsoft’s Strategy is Clear for gaining Developer Mindshare now : Is this a good or bad series of actions for those of us dedicated to minimizing compromise like our counterparts in other frameworks take for granted?
In a strategic move on Microsoft’s part that has the open source community buzzing, the well-known and respected founder of the Castle Project Hamilton Verissimo has accepted a position with Microsoft’s MEF group.
Hamilton Chillin’ Castle Style
This has been a hot topic of discussion today in the open source community as Castle is one of the pioneers in ultra high-quality core architectural open source stack services in the .NET world. For a long time they were the only reasonable option for many key practices other frameworks took for granted.
For a full discussion of all dimensions of the Castle Project watch for an upcoming story where we cover each component in a logical and in-depth manner.
They have maintained a dominant position and we believe that will continue as Hamilton has an incredibly capable team that shares his intensity, passion and love of the technology.
It now is obvious (and has been for some time) that Microsoft is taking a logical approach to counter the increasing encroachment into the mindshare of their core development base. All of the Nx variants (NUnit, NHibernate, NMock, etc.) still have a large upper hand however.
This raises an interesting point for the strategist. Castle is a very solid choice for Inversion of Control/D.I. aspects as well as many others. Until now Unity (their reasonably close offering but in this writers opinion not close enough) has been lackluster. I do not believe Hamilton will be involve in any IoC related work at Microsoft as that is clearly in the Patterns and Practices camp for now. Time will tell. Here is the formal statement which is music to our ears:
What happens to Castle?
That was a delicate subject to me, but surprisingly it wasn’t a problem to them. I got a written permission to keep working on Castle as much as I want. So nothing changes…
By hiring the world’s best talent, building first generation competitors to the core mainstays such as NHibernate, and retooling their image to embrace some of the ALT.NET philosophy one has to wonder if they are building a ReSharper killer in some obscure building on campus (very, very doubtful).
The obvious questions are addressed below and for the complete list view his blog at:
http://hammett.castleproject.org/?p=312
Why?
Many reasons. First of all, meeting Scott Guthrie and talking to Brad Abrams made me realize those guys are just as fanatics about technology as I am. They want to create things that rocks, and so do I.
What are you going to do there?
If you have listened this podcast you know what the community expects from MS. I like to think I’m joining to help solve the problems pointed there.
Formally I’m joining as a Program Manager on the MEF team. I would love (and expect) to participate in several fronts, though, as any member on the DevDiv.
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“one has to wonder if they are building a ReSharper killer in some obscure building on campus (very, very doubtful)” – not really – I read in a blog (don’t remember where) that the next version of VS will be full of refactorings after the ground work has been done with VS2008
Microsoft seems like after they introduced refactorings in 2005 it has not been an area of focus as
1) The features are not evolved or indicate they are an area of focus
2) Microsoft’s knows very well they are fighting for the minds of the most important .NET developers and they have to prove to the community they ‘get it’.
I feel as an opinion only that if they blew up ReSharper it would be qute bad…
However… We all know this pattern from Microsoft as if they ‘decided it is ’strategic enough’ all bets are off.
I actually also believe however JetBrains has createed (in spite of the sheer magnitude of MSFT) very solid barriers to competition (but again, many of us though this many times before in the same spot).
Man if Microsoft goes after JetBrains on ReSharper they will have hell to pay. The ALT.NET community will form mercenary armies (grin)…
What is interesting is how coy they are being in the ‘big impact’ deliverables of say their IoC container. I do believe there is something fundamental that will attempt to push the other open source players out of consideration. Just instinct as
1) They have code out in the wild and it does show a will to innovate (unlike the refactoring code is VS 2008)
2) They are gaining all the best minds for mass-market natural trickle down of these utter common sense items to mass market usage, I know they not only assume they will own that in ORM, MVC, etc, I dont think once this Linq to Entities thing blows over they will bother to even question it as the mass market will not be allowed to consider open source. I see ‘no open source’ policies almost every day, more depending on how utterly miserable the organization is at software.
THAT IS the majority. Microsoft need to make it so idiot proof that the fundmental ‘will’ is created in these places to ‘care again if they ever cared’ about being good at software.
I am not so sure that will ever happen for the masses, as the niche spaces could likely produce enouogh specialized DSL style assets. We will see!
Damon