Post

Beth Massi
@bethmassi.net

I guess I should properly introduce myself since I'm new here. I'm a Product Manager at Microsoft working on .NET MAUI. Before that I was the Marketing Director for .NET and served on the board of directors for .NET Foundation. Before that, I was the community manager for more than a few RAD tools.

Beth Massi@bethmassi.net

I just joined Bluesky today because I'm just tired of the weirdo cringe borderline porn ads in my X-Twitter feeds. And please don't ask me about VS LightSwitch. It wasn't my fault.

0 reposts9 likes

Beth Massi
@bethmassi.net

Some of those tools included Visual Basic, Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual Studio LightSwitch. If you've never heard of these thing, you're probably just young.

Robert Byrne
@kapitar.bsky.social

Yea we made a thing that was like LightSwitch back in the day, there was always a non zero desire for “MS Access but a SaaS” out there. Also just lament the loss of plain RAD as a concept, being able to churn out a tiny WinForms internal tool in an hour etc.

Beth Massi
@bethmassi.net

It's really hard to balance pro dev and RAD scenarios. That's what happened to LS. Winforms is good but I really wanted to just type code in the generated .Designer.cs sometimes. To me WPF went too far the other way where I had to learn a new language and the designer wasn't as good.

Robert Byrne
@kapitar.bsky.social

Yea we found the same. The number of people who are power users and aren’t ‘casual devs’ is tiny, you end up just consulting/training directly with your thing as the platform. Its a pity in a way that WPF didn’t take off, as a web dev I like the premise, but yea it was too heavy for the time..

Wil Cantrell
@wilcantrell.bsky.social

I remember LightSwitch, but somehow never got around to using it. I think I had just become a manager at that time, moving away from dev to support. I'm working in MAUI now, just testing across the enterprise a Xamarin conversion from one of our apps. Even upgraded to .NET9 last week.

Wil Cantrell
@wilcantrell.bsky.social

A lot of nail biting, but my next conversion will be easier. I wish I could leave the Xamarin code as is, but I can't compile it anymore. At least on latest macOS since support dropped for Xamarin.