Awful open-source .Net software

[RFH Customer: cswd]

I've done an informal survey of nearly ALL pieces of open-source .Net software over the last week and have come to some conclusions:

• They all seem to be based on commercial products which the company thinks would be "cool" and "fashionable" to open-source.
• They are all really ugly hack ups
• Poor support for shared hosting / medium trust
• Poor customisation support
• Awful licenses
• Not tested properly
• No support

This is a bit frustrating. Has anyone else found this?

[jaimalchohan]

Jup

I was looking for an open-source shopping cart a few months ago, nothing out there caught my eye as being highly customisbale and secure, so I went with osCommere...even tho I don't know the first thing about PHP, I ended up hiring a PHP dev to do the backend customisation.

The thing abuot .Net is, a lot of the .Net junkies consist of poorly taught "Asian" developers, now they can do what needs to be done, but gove them the issues of security, stability and scalability and they just can't hack it. Hell gawd know how many .net devlopers I know who can't even write HTML without using tables. I tend to find PHP developers however to be more disiplined.

[RFH Customer: cswd]

God I hate OsCommerce. That is the worst written piece of crap known to man - impossible to customise (my last attempt at it is still alive and not selling plumbing parts as I resigned from the place as I was royally fed up with it: http://andyplumb.netsolutions.co.uk/ )

It's not "asian" developers (people are people whatever colour!) - but most ".Net developers". I think there is a skills gap between VB6 and .Net which is huge and most "programmer types" can't hack it. In the end we get pieces of crap to deal with from underqualified staff.

What I'd LIKE to see is formal "Software Engineering" sandwich degree courses where people get industry experience with really productive languages (not bloody Pascal and C++ - both destined to the bin by application developers now). Oh and a certification body like the IEE for software engineers.

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

It's not "asian" developers (people are people whatever colour!)

Its not colour, its the society of asia. Many of them are out to make money wherever, whenever - outsourced work is one of their options for them.

[RFH Reseller: Sol]

I totally agree with the statements made here so far, however I wanted to add that the number of teenagers that take on coding jobs to supplement their income is also increasing.

This in itself causes the problem to multiply as you have unskilled programmers posting articles and examples in order to better establish a name.

Too many people think it is easy to take Microsoft's Express products and produce something that is well structured and well written. An example of this was shown at the PDC by getting a female student to join in the Keynote and demo some modifications to the Personal Web Starter Kit. In my opinion Microsoft should have mentioned that the starter kits are there as a basis for learning, and not as something to build a finished product from.

I'm hoping we will see some good starter sites which show people the correct methodologies to follow when developing.

I also think a big drawback with ASP.Net is that many people came to it from just ASP. Unfortunately there is a big difference between the two technologies and it has been a hard transition for people. Going back to Asian's, I had contracted an Indian development firm to produce an ASP.Net application whilst ASP.Net was still in Beta. Unfortunately I had to pull the project from them at the first code review due to the fact that their developer did not bother using ASP.Net technology, instead they wrote the code as though they were still using ASP. This shows the cost of training developers, and whilst I do agree there are some good brains in Asia they lack the financial resources to adequately train developers. Instead they operate their businesses like Sweatshops where developers are just told to get on with it.

I want to finish by saying that I have periodically being working on a Portal application (by periodically I mean whenever I am not busy on other 'paid' projects), and before starting I reviewed everything out there. I had some key criteria that I wanted including the entire application to be multi-lingual in terms of both GUI and data storage, in addition to a good workflow model. Having searched the Net I can honestly say I have not seen a single application that meets these requirements. I know DNN and Rainbow allow the localization of a site, but they do not allow the same site to have multiple languages without creating additional pages for each language.

My concept is to allow a contributor to write an item, and place it in a workflow queue. A translators group would then be notified, so that they can translate the item. On publishing the version shown to the user would match their culture settings. I'm just really suprised that Web Applications still do not allow for data to be stored in multiple languages, and developers simply look at localizing the GUI. This is made more evident by the weak Globalization and Localization implementation in the ASP.Net Framework.

Let's just all pray that things will get better.

[RFH Reseller: Sol]

I've done an informal survey of nearly ALL pieces of open-source .Net software over the last week and have come to some conclusions:

• They all seem to be based on commercial products which the company thinks would be "cool" and "fashionable" to open-source.
• They are all really ugly hack ups
• Poor support for shared hosting / medium trust
• Poor customisation support
• Awful licenses
• Not tested properly
• No support

This is a bit frustrating. Has anyone else found this?

I really do agree with this list, however somethings need to be remembered here. Firstly most open source projects are based on commercial projects since people realize that something has a value and rather than paying for it they decide to implement it themselves. This leads to point 2 as most open source projects lack good development skills since the developers doing it are typically doing so to avoid paying for the commercial applications. Point 3 just highlights point 2 since Code Access Security and related technologies are quite new to developers (I've seen commercial applications that haven't really looked at this).

The remaining 3 points are very different. The first regarding bad licenses is very true, but I believe that to be due to the changes in time. Unfortunately the number of Open Source applications has boomed over the last few years and I don't think people looked at the licensing properly. Developers are not lawyers and most Open source developers don't want to waste the time and energy in ensuring their code is well covered legally. It is therefore, typcally to choose one of the existing Open Source License types.

A lot of open source applications are not developed under structured methodologies and hence it is very difficult for developers to agree on what features make a major release and which make a minor release. This is probably because most Open Source projects are manned mainly by developers and hence have no real project management skills. This means that the applications often have a lot of feature creep and that releases are made on a continuous basis (ie. the product never really comes out of Beta).

The final point being no support can be ascertained from viewing all the other points. The developers don't want / like to waste their time supporting the users, they just want to develop the next version. The testing is bad since they only test in their own environments and not for the masses. In addition, as they are not making money out of the application they are not inclined to waste resources on it.

I'm hoping that more developers will take advantage of test-driven development and know that we are seeing this with a few of the more complex .Net applications. I'd also like to see developers picking up better project management skills and starting to produce better documentation. I believe that those working in companies where MS Team Foundation Server is being used will be forced to learn some of these skills unless they are bottom of the chain developers. The key is more people are going to find out about development processes and this should help overall.

I have already posted about teenagers, and whilst I have no objections to them coding, I do have objections to them pitching for commercial work and then coming up sub-standard. I even have a client who had their website designed by a neighbours 12 year old. Needless to say they were not overly happy with the end result, but in all honesty what the hell did they expect?

The best example of this ignorance that I give to people is to tell them about this girl that was working in a Law firm as a PA.On one occassion she told me she had quit her job to become a 'web mistress'. I toldhow great that is and that I would give her the first contract. She was really happy and I asked home much would she charge per page. after some thought she said £5 per page. I told her that was way to high for the project I was going to give her and instead offered her £5,000 for the whole site. I think the number threw her off because she was overwhelmed and straight away agreed. she then asked what the project was, and I responded by telling her that it was a site displaying all the products sold by Kodak. The Kodak product catalog is massive as it contains chemicals, film, machines, batteries, and media to name a few. I told her if she was to do do this site as a page by page site and doing about 10 pages a day it would take her the rest of her life. Needless to say she dropped the idea of becoming a 'web mistress' since i went on to explain that she would need to learn to program if she wanted to do more complex sites.

Anyway, I rambled on long enough, but I'm sure many off you will agree with me.

[RFH Customer: cswd]

Agree.

On a similar note, I'd just like to add that I resigned from my current job over these concerns last Monday. Basically, we're hiring dregs of the IT industry because they are cheap and not vetting them properly. One of the guys doesn't even know about the Convert class! So I'm out before I can't sleep at night.

[jaimalchohan]

Its not colour, its the society of asia. Many of them are out to make money wherever, whenever - outsourced work is one of their options for them.

yup, it not the "colour" thing, its the whole 'go out and get an MCAD in 3 days' thing that makes a lot asian programmers crap. I was speaking to a collegue of mine, from India, who told how his friends basically see a job, take the relavant qualification in 4-7 days, and then apply (and get it)

[RFH Customer: cswd]

Yeah know what you mean now!

Btw I would NEVER outsource outside the UK. I made the mistake of working for a company which thought this was great. They wrote a massive PHP monster that didnt work and when we refused to pay for it, they sent us death threats...

All the companies I've worked for are bloody cowboys and indians...

[Carl Meis]

The problem with all generailaztions is that they are generalizations. Oops I just did one too!

The internet/computer industry is like the ol'west. Because it is so rapidly developing and is not easily regulable across international borders, anything goes. In the absence of constraint you have to establish them yourself. As Sol said, the minute you heard "web-mistress" you didn't need to go any further. I would not have even gotten that far. That is what certifications are for. You don't see Fortune 500 CEOs interviewing teenagers.

I have gotten some of my best code from overseas. The difference is, I wasn't dabbing around in the mud with unskilled labor. I was looking for top of the line which I still got at a discount to Western labor costs.

As they say, you pay for what you get, but if you close your eyes you'll just pay and not get.

Carl