Phil Haack quit Microsoft for GitHub

[phatboyslim]

For anyone curious about any background on Phil Haack. Here are his notable accomplishments.

- MS Lead on ASP.net MVC framework vers. 1 through 3 (current)

- Lead on the NuGet package manager framework for Visual Studio

- This Developer's Life Podcast with Scott Hanselman

[gospelwut]

I think I owe this man some kind of expensive liquor for MVC--especially MVC3. I truly loathed ASP.NET projects until MVC3. Some will argue that people use it wrong and/or the traditional Web Forms have their advantages, but I can't really think of many situations where I'd rather do it the old way.

[robconery]

Phil also invented C#, the Faux Hawk, and Daft Punk

[phatboyslim]

I'm unable to edit my blunderous original post, but as others have pointed out, Rob Conery is the host of This Developer's Life (an excellent podcast) and not Phil Haack. Honest mistake.

[hkarthik]

I think This Developer's Life is hosted by Rob Conery.

[throwmeaway2]

Github is my social network. I wake up into it, i follow it, push to it during the day, and I survey it before sleep. I love Github (in fact i'm inlove with Github). I depend on Github. I don't do facebook, g+ or twitter for socializing.

I used to admire Haack aswell. He's a great guy. However I fell out of love with .net.

I am a polyglot programmer, with strong background in .net. To understand these Haack's "accomplishments", please look at history (google). There is nothing genious about MVC3, towards other MVC web frameworks, and its 'advanced' 3 version, it sucks really bad in testing. (I'm also an author of a .net web framework that pits against it pretty well in this regard).

* MVC - monorail -> rails. * NuGet - nupak - nu -> really rubygems. * podcast - well, whatever.

I wouldn't like to fall out of love with Github.

[redstripe]

When I went looking for a git win32 binaries a while ago the attitude was basically "lolz get a mac/linux box". Which is why I use hg instead of git.

It's great to see an open source community, that isn't engulfed in the sanfrancisco linux/mac mono culture bubble, reaching out to Win developers for the benfit of everyone.

[MartinCron]

Which is why I use hg instead of git.

I totally see where you're coming from, and I personally think hg is great. I just don't want your comment to scare windows developers off. For the record: running git on windows is great.

[malkia]

I use cygwin's git and it's fine.

From the cmd.exe prompt, some of them are still working, as long as the cygwin bin folder is in the PATH variable, and the executables end with .exe, and are not cygwin symlinks (the file would be very small and contain something like !<symlink ...>) - then they won't execute, but you can still execute them from cmd.exe, like this:

sh -c "gitk --all"

Hopefully git is still normal executable (gcc is not, for that: sh -c "gcc --help"

C:> gcc --help

Access is denied.

C:> sh -c "gcc --help"

... Help displayed

[davej]

There are WIN32 binaries linked to from the official GIT site. I mainly use mac but I have had to use the windows binaries a few times in the last few months and everything works fine.

[jroseattle]

Phil did a great job both before and after his MS career. He will do well at GitHub as well. He's one of the good guys in the C# world, and both GitHub and Microsoft will benefit from this.

[kkowalczyk]

Now I have to ask: who are the bad guys in C# world?

[traskjd]

I'm sure you mean both before and during his MS career. His post MS career is about 12 hours old :-)

But I'm sure he'll do well with it.

[jconley]

Awesome to see a hugely popular and powerful development platform getting noticed by Github. It's great technology that deserves more love and positive mindshare in the open source world.

The last startup where I was CTO was largely based on the Microsoft .NET stack and we loved almost every ounce of it as a technology. Until, of course, we tried to hire startup and open-source minded engineers in the Microsoft-hate land of Silicon Valley. That's practically impossible.

StackOverflow and (hopefully) now Github will ideally do a lot of good in the next few years to break the stigma against C#.

It seems like the C# community at large contains Enterprise-oriented folks, who only like to consume open source and not give back. They just want to get their projects done and make a profit. I wish we could see more altruistic entities and startups embrace the technology. @haacked - fix it! Github seems like an ideal platform for change in this regard.

Oh, yeah, that startup was acquired and they threw away all our back end tech for no other reason than it was Microsoft based. It's not all bad, though, I do love my shiny Macbook Pro. ;)

Feature requests: - CodePlex migration tool (I have a project there...) - Github client for Windows - Github VS integration

[lusr]

Have you tried GitExtensions? It has a Github plugin. Together with the Git Source Control Provider extension in VS, I've had no problems with Github integration (that being said I'm leaving Github for Bitbucket since Github's arbitrary limits on the number of private repositories pisses me off... for $7/mo at Github I'm getting way less than I do with Bitbucket's free plan).

[TomOfTTB]

This is a good thing for Microsoft.

Microsoft needs to become more outwardly focused and influential softies leaving the fold and pushing from the outside will do that. Right now the two good things Microsoft has going for it is MVC and C#. Both of which were inspired or heavily influenced by outside forces (MVC by Castle and C# 4 was influenced heavily by Python).

Phil Haack moving to Github will hopefully push Microsoft to embrace open collaboration systems a little better and because he's outside of Microsoft he won't have to deal with "you might kill off VS Team Foundation" hindrances.

All this in turn MIGHT give Microsoft a chance at becoming relevant again in the developer space (and please don't say "a lot of people use Microsoft" because I'm one of those people and I know a lot of those people and they're all looking at their future with worried eyes)

[runjake]

> All this in turn MIGHT give Microsoft a chance at becoming relevant again in the developer space (and please don't say "a lot of people use Microsoft" because I'm one of those people and I know a lot of those people and they're all looking at their future with worried eyes)

If you read the blog post of this very submission, it cites C# as #4 and climbing on the TIOBE language index. I know and work with a bunch of .NET developers, also, and I can't name one that's looking at the future with worried eyes.

In what way are they irrelevant in the developer space?

In my particular case, I tend to shy away from Microsoft development because the stack isn't really free, top to bottom and it seemed like MS was following trends instead of leading them (MVC was an obvious response and I see a lot of Railisms in it).

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Right now the two good things Microsoft has going for it is MVC and C#.

Right now the two good things Microsoft developer tools has going for it are those.

Let's not forget products that make Microsoft's big money - like windows and office. Not to mention other investments like azure, xbox, and ms research.

[untog]

This is great news for .NET devs- the Windows GitHub client (and VS integration) is not great.

This is awful news for .NET devs- ASP.NET MVC is the best thing that's happened to ASP.NET since it began. Losing the lead guy on that project is worrying.

[haacked]

Well, the lead developer is still on the project. He started on MVC even before me. It's in good hands. :)

[InclinedPlane]

It's a bit distressing that a lot of the most interesting .NET things (such as mono[touch,droid] and asp.net MVC) are either black sheep or 3rd party projects. .NET is a solid technology, but I fear it may end up having a limited lifespan due to being so heavily tied to windows, especially as the next generation of systems (tablets, non-traditional PCs, etc.) starts taking over the market.

[sofuture]

For the record, there are a lot of big .NET projects on Github already:

https://github.com/mono https://github.com/nhibernate https://github.com/ravendb

Good to see more momentum in that direction, though of course!

[nathanwdavis]

...and https://github.com/fsharp (the compiler, core lib extensions, IDE bindings, etc)

Also, MS contributions toward libuv (part of node.js project)

[mythz]

I'm just going to leave this here:

https://github.com/ServiceStack

Because there's a lot of C# in there as well :)

  - Web Service Framework (+ many Example/Starter Projects)
  - Json Jsv Csv Text Serailizers (+ Benchmarks)
  - Redis Client
  - Redis Web Services + Redis Admin UI
  - Orm
  - Logging Framework
  - Caching API with Memcached, Redis, InMemory & FileSystem providers

[ttrashh]

Big loss for Microsoft.

[grhino]

It could be a net gain for Microsoft if the Windows developer community begins to embrace github. As long as the most talented in the community don't leave the Windows platform, it could lead to a more vibrant and productive Windows developer community.

[mythz]

I think it's a win for MS for many of the reasons that @Haacked lists on this blog post.

IMO MS is too much driven by profits and control to realize expanding the .NET OSS community will be a NET win for their .NET platform and surrounding tooling / aspirations.

[daviding]

Phil is smart, and MVC3 helped .NET enormously but I think people are getting carried away that the guy is some sort of paid ambassador for Microsoft and .NET at Github. I imagine that he'll do whatever it takes to make Github better with the skill-set and experience he has, but that doesn't mean he has to have some mandate from Microsoft on what to change. Maybe he's just a good engineer and Github hires those? Let's give it a few months at least.

Perhaps he'll work on a whole bunch of non-Microsoft stacks now? Getting Open Source within Microsoft and the Microsoft communities is probably more an issue with culture rather than tooling - a hire won't 'fix' that. It would take many counter-culture things (and years) to change I think. Phil working at Github rather than wanting to work at Microsoft is the interesting aspect, and I can't see why that would be 'good' for Microsoft.

Congrats to Phil and Github!

[bradwestness]

I really hope this leads to better Git tools for Windows developers. I've attempted to host several C# projects on GitHub in the past, but I always end up giving up and using either CodePlex or BitBucket because it's so much easier to get up and running with HG and SVN.

Edit: Git tools, not GitHub tools.

[visoft]

There's already a wonderful tool that you can use... Git Bash :)

[scq]

Try TortoiseGit. It's like TortoiseSVN, but for Git.

[kennethologist]

This is great! Hopefully some good things will come out of this in regards to integrating Github into VS.NET. Right now I use Mecurial but would be nice to give Git a try.

All the best to Haack!

[ijoyce]

Step 1: Get respected member of MS community. Step 2: Use said community connection to move people from codeplex to github. Step 3: Profit.

[jbigelow76]

Doesn't sound like a bad outcome to me, I'll take GitHub over Codeplex any day (my own .NET code is on GH too)

[vyrotek]

Well Phil, you'll be missed. I've been following MVC since the beginning years ago and love the direction things are going with it. I only just recently had the opportunity to jump into the world of Git.

I'm sure you'll do some much needed good out there as the "Windows Badass".

[pasbesoin]

He missed the obvious: "Gitterati" (double "t" as an homage to its inspiration; feel free to reduce to "Giterati" ;-).

[hello_moto]

Let's see how long until Phil Haack enjoys the non-MS tools :)

The experience so far from ex-Softie seems to suggest that people will eventually leave MS ecosystems once they're outside the company.

The evolution is as follow:

Cheering for MS -> Hired by MS -> Trying to change the culture -> work for a while -> leave MS -> "Hello New Tech!"

PS: This isn't about good or bad.

[ronnier]

Formerly developed at all MS shops, now at Amazon mostly doing Java with a Linux workstation. Oh words can't describe how I miss Visual Studio and responsiveness of Windows 7.

[dmitriy_ko]

I wish I had such a cool last name!

[noblethrasher]

His kid has an even cooler name: http://haacked.com/archive/2007/06/06/introducing-cody-yokoy...

[cowpewter]

I'm descended from Haacks... I wonder if we're somehow distantly related. It's not a last name you see very frequently.

[bigpun]

Very cowardly move IMO