Observations From Recent Blog Wars

So over the past week, I've been following a bit of a stirring the blogosphere over the deliverables coming out of Microsoft's P&P group - particularly CAB and SCSF.  In case you want the loose chronology, here's how it went down.

• Oren's Initial Post
• Chris Responds
• Oren Fires Back
• Jeremy Jumps In
• Chris Offers an Olive Branch
• Adi Weighs In
• David Weighs In
• Oren Responds to Adi's Comments
• Glenn (P&P) Asks for Community Feedback In Response
• Bil Jumps In
• Oren Responds to Bil
• Sam Jumps In
• Oren Responds to Sam
• Oren Responds to Comment at Chris' blog
• Oren Starts the Conversation Wrap Up
• Sam Responds to All of the Other Responses
• Oren Kind of Breaks the Truce
• Glenn (P&P) Jumps in on the CAB Discussion
• Oren's Comments on the P&P Explanation

Wheh!!!  I'm sure that I missed several posts in all this, and the comments are probably some of the best parts, but this should be more than enough to give you an idea.

So what can we learn from this (if anything)?  Here are a couple of thoughts.

• What we as developers find helpful or useful or time saving are the things that we have spent some degree of time and energy to learn.
• We each learn differently - thereby affecting the amount of time and energy it takes us to learn something - and thereby affecting how helpful or useful we find that thing.
• The world views seem to be very different between the MSFT folks and the OSS community in the sense that MSFT deliverables seem more white box (relying on designers, wizards, code gen) while OSS deliverables seem more black box (create these artifacts, they are consumed by the framework).  If this is in fact the case, I don't look to see either side changing in the foreseeable future.  However, I think it's fair to say that where you come from shapes your expectations for a piece of technology, affects how you learn it, and subsequently affects how useful you find it to be.

Are these conversations irrelevant then?  Absolutely not!  It is fantastic to bring these thoughts and criticisms up - and perhaps it will even affect change both within and outside of Microsoft.  However, will it sway an individual from changing his/her core beliefs about how the effectiveness of a framework/tool is measured?  Probably no more than the C++ vs. VB wars caused individuals to change programming languages.