In reply to Mario Peshev.

I am not a Microsoft fan per se. There are commercial projects that should be closed source for obvious reasons and open source which is nice. But alot of the open source has simply gone too far IMHO. Not allowing developers to protect their work with a parent project that benefits in whole from it. I noted this in another post and its off topic for this thread. But I got into it pretty heavy with the Joomla folks many years back. The Joomla CMS is at best average, its all the third party themer's , developers that make it do all the nifty things that put it into the top notoriety arena of CMS systems. Yet, they will disallow source code protection whilst they jet set around the globe for paid seminar engagements citing how wonderful the CMS is and they are and the third party developers are.

Its no secret that this stuff is pirated all over the net. I know two people at two different rather notable design/plugin firms (yoo & Rocket) that told me straight up and this was sometime back, for every 1 theme they get paid for there are 3-5 minimum that are swiped.

Open source can just as easily be dont obfuscate code that a developer/designer whatall may need edit. But code that does callbacks or even hides application critical code should be allowed to be protected. One to eliminate the piracy and accordingly to make sure security matters dont crop in.

Realize, one decent pirate can wipe out literally any one of these developer studios mainstream products 1-2-3. Alter the code inducing security breaches then as it hits "news" the developer will of course defend it as a pirated edition that there codebase had no such breach. But all a whack job need do is keep banging away at it and they are kaput. I know two different developers this happened to in the Joomla universe. They were essentially disallowed by the Joomla core to protect their work and have the components listed in the Joomla extensions area. Meanwhile, the JCore group jets around making money hand over fist when it fact its the 3P developers who make the real applications that make the CMS notable.

For them, the piracy is a "good thing" as if 10 copies of plugin "xxxx" are sold and 30-50 pirated that means there are 40-60 sites using the core application and those numbers are what they use to monetize upon.

The fact now that Microsoft, Adobe and indeed others are going to change that paradigm makes them the bad guys. Themer's and developers are going to loose groun in Joomla and Wordpress to Web.com, Wix and others. These businesses are VERY successful yet they are not doing ANYTHING special per se. There have been "build your won site" web's and applications around since day go on the net. The reason they are succeeding are multifaceted up to and including designer/developer firms not paying attention to the prospect clients needs to succeed and market effectively but there is much more.

Consider it like a pie that these third party themer's and developers have claimed. Make a honest living from. Try their best be that a great best or poor best to stay afloat and grow,
Meantime operations are popping up eating at the edges of that pie. Atop that, the pirate ants continue to munch more and more. The pie bakers tell everyone who MAKES their pie's delicious, umm sorry... We will take advantage of your work monetizing albeit indirectly on it whilst we could care less if you are stolen from or not.

Now the tide is turning. Adobe from what my birds tell me will be releasing a cloud based web service, its part of the "Creative Cloud" Direction and directly why they have move towards a billable subscription base .vs. the traditional pay through the snout.

If anyone here thinks that Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or every single CMS combined can survive the likes of what Adobe can put out there.... well... then best of luck. Want stay in the web business might start learning how to bake and ship cupcakes.

I am NOT in favor of it. Microsoft on the other hand is looking to unify all the smart technologies. It is a next logical step for digital goods. I cant say I am not in favor of that as it will revolutionize everything.

As you noted however, its not about whats wonderful for everyone. Its about control. Its about a predatory nature. No secrets there. Adobe, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple are all predatory companies. They have to be. Thats the way the billion dollar chess games play.... sorta. That is to say, sometimes my enemy in this is my friend in that.

In respect to .NET if you were engaged on .NET 1.0 thats literally dinosaur in compare to what .NET is now. If you are speaking of ASP.NET 2.0 with MVC 1.0 again, thats dinosaur. The new MVC framework is marvelous in fact. Very Very easy to work with, fully integrated into Visual Studio, completely extensible and code generation now with Visual Studio is a much less bloated footprint and much better execution speed.

I am Java aware, not certified. My brother is a Java coder, was a lead engineer for eHarmony in fact. Left because he got tired of waiting for a stock IPO.

We are working on a project here that fits into the transition of unification of the smart technologies. Initially we were looking to sell the application and its addons. So, PHP was our obvious choice as the website proprietors tend to be PHP'rs. If they needed install a complex Java application, setup a Java VM etc. on a dedicated server they'd be scratching their heads.

PHP was just piss poor (excuse my lingo) in templating speeds so we coded up an apache mod that is not as robust as Smarty but runs rings around it in speed. We developed an intelligent cache (sorta) apache mod that can decide given prioritization params whether to Ram cache, HD cache or cache to SSD based on size/server load. We developed a DB connection pool++ mod for apache that also can work in unison with the cache module and templater thus not having to run back to PHP in many instances but instead routing proper outputs to their next stage towards the production output. The system flies. We benchmarked it on Wordpress and Joomla and the results are enormous. Never benched against WP.NET but I'd say off the top of my head our three modules yield comparable speed results, perhaps even faster, Cache and Templater use quite a bit of Assembly language for the work.

In working on our base framework we found that PHP simply cant perform. Its a memory pig when it comes to Object Oriented code, I mean a real fat bloated pig. Atop that performance wise it could not handle what we expect in as far as application session load.

We had hoped the templater, cache and DB pooling would help. We even tried wield some threading into PHP areas (what a nightmare).

So... we decided that instead of sell the application we will franchise it. So now we need deal with server management and we protect our codebase at the sametime. PHP no longer matters. We went to the next logical platform. Java. Since I am C++ aware Java is not far out on my comfortable zone. Yet, at the sametime I am perfectly comfortable with C# and Visual Basic. Its just that ASP.NET last I had looked into it was no faster than PHP and also a resource cow big and fat.

We started porting the framework to Java. Fortunately the PHP code we treated in a strongly typed form .vs. the mish mosh of garbage out there that loose typing causes developers to engage in (amazes me, the performance hits alone due to the loose typing of PHP add up FAST when one looks at a significant amount of sessions active) all that dirty type conversion has a price and while in a single instance it seems like nothing, make it 1000,5000,10000 sessions and its OH CRAP!

Java SHOULD BE the preferred development platform for all web work. Period. If half of the PHP innovators took the leap to Java and put there efforts there be a very different web universe.

However... A professor at a local university was in attendance at a seminar I went to. We talked various times over the years. After the seminar some of us headed to a bar for a few cocktails and I was telling him about my experiences. He told me LOOK at ASP.Net. Told him multiple times, I'd done so in the past. Its a very robust framework, more robust than anything else out there. The development environment, far ahead of the rest and notably so, pretty much every piece of software ever made for Windows was made with Visual Studio. 20+ years of refinement, learning, correcting mistakes etc. the IDE should be ahead of the rest as it also does not have a million varied hands of third parties into it or .NET. I told him, its performance curve is no better than PHP albeit it has the extensibility to work in a distributed application model. And... its a fat pig. I told him, PHP when it comes to OOP is a fat pig. We had some relatively simple classes when being instantiated and not yet a method run would swallow 3-4K byes. As I said, for a site that gets 100 or 400 visitors an hour, who cares. But when your looking at thousands of sessions or more... well... PHP is a slow fat bloated pig with not even the most basic support of modern processors.

Linux is fast, PHP completely negates the advantages of using Linux as a Web OS IMHO.

Anyways... He incisted .NET and code generation has come a long long ways in the past few iterations of ASP.NET and C#/VB.

So I looked. I played, I read lots of things online. I was amazed to see it neck and neck with Java in most respects. So... now we have ported the framework to C# and .NET.

The fact we can when this is all completed run against IIs or Apache/Mono is rather neato.

We skipped using the Entity Framework ORM as its a fat cow that suffers speed as well. I am sure in time they will correct that. But at least for the application itself we dont need it. Down the pike for say reports generation, data archiving etc. it might be handy but we could use any ORM to simplify the coding and more so keep it flexible which is the paradigm in reporting and archival vs SQL butchery.

I would say now, "Take a look at VS 2013" as I think you might be pleasantly surprised.

Again, I am no Microsoft Fan boy or fan boy of any other platform for that matter. All the fanboy stuff is horse hockey. Its brainwash marketing no different than any other industry engages in, "Ours is best" .vs. "No theirs is best". Apple would be drowning now if it was not for fan boys as they have blown the iPhone, iPod, iPad market just as they blew it with the Mac .vs. Windows years back. Now android is #1 not because its better but because mass market will beat vertical market every time. Though I am sure Apple will reinvent itself again integrating somehow into the smart technology unification. Windows phone will emerge as the leader as Microsoft will be the entity that brings unification into the mass market and thats why .NET open sourced.

Yes, they are predatory as is Adobe, Oracle, on and on. They now see this mass market "open source" as a big conquest and as you and I both know. These entities play to win. They dont settle for co-existence when it comes to marketshares and dominance in markets.

I write this stuff and put it out there for readers at a place like WP Tavern not because I am a fanboy. Quite the opposite. I put it out there as I realize the long term (which on the www is accelerated given its 20-25 years of life now, I used the Internet before "WWW" existed, I developed for Electronic Arts, Sierra Online, Atari, Apple (*yes even the mac), Amiga, etc) ramification of it.

I put it out there as its these small business entities who are the ones who are going to get kicked in the teeth harder than they are currently kicked in the teeth while they try and make a living.

1. So they are aware of what's around the corner.

2. So they can prepare for it.

3. That perhaps a discussion take place that will ensure that these small businesses scraping out their living can continue to do so in the long term even if that means we all need get a base group together and start making our own solution where the paradigm of it is not for said group to reap all the benefits of everyone elses work but instead the paradigm being one of "All for one and one for all" in the more shall we say true spirit of open source.