March 8, 2004 spout

Putting the Fun Back In Programming

I know that I'm no longer untainted because I work in the big house, but I just don’t get this. Do developers really want to build the same thing over and over, project to project, app to app or do they want to spend their time building cool, new stuff? Is .NET or Whidbey or Longhorn any different from continuing the foundation that we've built before? Does anyone really miss building their own file system or declarative content flow or toolbar? Will anyone miss building their own animation, object serialization or secure communications framework? I mean, building these infrastructure pieces is fun, but even more fun is pulling these pieces together to build something that’s never been built before.