Its a strategy that seems to follow the same mistake MS is making on the web...."If we offer OUR version they will come". It seems to me that ASP.Net attracts a certain type of person just like all the other languages and they would probably prefer C#. I'm just not sure I see "P" language folk running to the .Net framework vs rails, Django or the host of PHP frameworks. Its almost as if MS has this idea that everyone secretly wishes they could use MS technology and would if they had a way in.
Also do the "P" languages maintain their dynamic or weak typing capabilities when they are brought into the .Net framework? Without that I wouldn't see a point in using any of them.
Hamilton “Hammett” Verissimo, the founder of the open-source Castle Project, is joining Microsoft on August 11 as a program manager on the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF) team.
Verissimo will continue to work on Castle “as much as I want,” he blogged on July 16. “So nothing changes.”
The Castle Project has been working on “a simple set of tools to speed up the development of common enterprise and web applications while promoting good architecture.”
According to the Castle Project Web site, “Castle was born from the Apache Avalon project, in mid 2003, as an attempt to build a very simple inversion of control container.” There are a number of projects currently listed under the Castle banner, including MonoRail, a Model-View Controller framework; ActiveRecord, an enterprise data-mapping pattern; and a couple of microkernel projects.
From Verissimo’s blog post announcing his decision to join Microsoft:
“You probably remember the many times that I’ve made public my disagreement with MS, the .Net team, the ASP.Net team and even the virtualization team. I’m still carrying these disagreements, my beliefs haven’t shifted a bit. The difference is that from now on I will have a chance to make a difference, to tell people what - in my view - is wrong and how it could be fixed, directly.
“I’m joining MS with nothing but respect to those guys — as I love .net and it is my platform of choice, and the same is true to most of you reading this — and have felt the same respect from them. IMHO (In my humble opinion) respect is the foundation of a good relationship.”
Microsoft’s Developer Division has attracted several high-profile open-source developers in the past few years. Jim Hugunin of Iron Python fame and John Lam, the force behind IronRuby, are both Microsoft staffers.
