shanselman

Silverlight works, is supported for like 10? years, but I think it's done as far as the Open Web is concerned. I like to say that The Web killed Silverlight, not Microsoft. Now, for "Text boxes over data" apps and line of business stuff, it's fine, and does the job nicely. But will we (and should we) see sites written in Silverlight on the Open Web today? No, we shouldn't.

Working from Home: Yes, if they tell me I have to move, I will quit.

Black Culture: Well, I'm a cis-gendered white dude, so I can't be an expert on AA culture, but I have studied AA history as well as African History in college. I'm raising black sons, so I have an vested interest in the success of people of color. I've presented at PoC conferences like Blogging While Brown and FOCUS100. So I'd say I'm an advocate and enthusiast, but clearly not an expert on anything.

About the same time that Phil Haack worked on ASP.NET MVC with Scott Guthrie, we were also looking at adding jQuery (which had "won" at the time) to ASP.NET and shipping it out of the box. In order to add jQuery, a lot of legal precedent had to be worked out within MSFT. Phil had the support of ScottGu, along with the rest of the team (during IMHO a generational change of the guard) which opened the flood gates for open source.

We started with the basic "Source Opened" style where it's there and you can see it but we couldn't take contributions. In March of 2012 we started doing more Apache licenses in stead of MS-PL and took a pull request my friend Miguel de Icaza to fix a Mono bug. From that point, we were able to take PRs from the community (and run them through the same code review process that any MSFT code goes through) and now take contributions for ASP.NET MVC, Web API, EF, SignalR, and all the Azure SDKs.

Visible benefits have been that ASP.NET MVC and Web API run on Mono, we are having more fun, and we (the community) feel more in control.

JavaScript and C#.

JavaScript is the virtual machine that we don't have install...it's in the browser.

C# lets me put an app in every app store.

So, if I know JavaScript and C# I can pretty much target everything from a Netduino in 64k or the Cloud with 64 Tera(or peta)bytes

The "few people are noticing" is the worst part about working at Microsoft. We've been there each about 5 years and done (we think) some deeply cool shit and moved the needle...but we are still accused for the "sins of the father." The 90's are not 2013. I hope folks notice what we're doing.