Jeff Atwood's always awesome Coding Horror tackles the "Microsoft treadmill": the range of problems which arise from being a developer in the world of Redmond. Looking at Jeff's list of recent technology from Microsoft did make me shudder, and indeed made me think back to the announcement that the ADO.NET Entity Framework has been delayed.
I remember wondering what the hell the Entity Framework was to begin with, I mean take a look at this further list from the MS research departments:
LINQ, and...
LINQ for SQL, and... various other LINQs
WPF/E
Silverlight
DLR
.NET 3
.NET 3.5
Orcas
So many acronymns! So many releases! And a couple are even the same thing. In some ways, the Microsoft development world is reminiscent of the Live debacle which was unleashed on the world - too many ideas, too little coherence. It should be an exciting time to be a developer in the Microsoft world, but instead, because there is no good, consistant, focused promotion of the direction which Microsoft will be enticing developers to use, it's just confusing.
It does feel like I'm in a minority at the moment, in that I am a developer on the Microsoft platform who actually wants to work there, and doesn't feel that Ruby on Rails or Python is the best thing since sliced bread. Castle is what I need to develop, and it is built using Microsoft technology and open source brainpower. To me, it's development heaven.