Dare Obasanjo has a well thought out post today entitled "The 3 Laws of Platform Adoption: Why Developers Choose Platforms and What it Means to You"  It in he says...

When a developer adopts a platform, there is a value exchange between the developer and the software vendor. The more value that is provided to developers by the platform vendor, the more developers are attracted to the platform. Although this seems self evident, where providers of platforms go astray is that they often don't understand the value developers actually want out of software platforms and instead operate from an if we build it they will come mentality.

He then goes on to lay out some very rational reasons why developers would choose one platform over the other.  Issues like speed of development, total cost of implementation, and ease of distribution are addressed.  Every developer should use this kind of criteria to chose their platform.

But they simply don't...

At this point I'm going to admit that this post is more of a rant than anything else.  But I think it is an important rant so I'm going to put it out there.  I'm a .Net developer and I'm also the person who chose to use .Net and C# as the default environments for the agency I work for. 

Since doing so I've received nothing but grief from most of my "techie" friends.

Just this last weekend I had an argument with a friend of mine who does a similar job over why I'm not seriously looking at moving to Ruby (and in particular Ruby on Rails).  I'm sitting there trying to explain to him that the hoops I'd have to jump through just to interact with Active Directory were ridiculous in comparison to the few lines of code it takes in C# but he just wouldn't listen. 

He swore by Ruby's ability to rapidly develop applications but after sitting there with him for hours I didn't see one thing that impressive.  At least, no more impressive than what C# can do with an assist from Subsonic. 

The saddest part of all is that his arguments are a lot saner than a few years ago when he was trying to get me onto Php. 

Again, this is more "rant" than I am comfortable with but I post it because it's a serious issue.  Environment has become the new holy war and no one seems to be acting all that rational about it.   It's the "Religion of Open" and no one seems to care what works well anymore. 

It's all very frustrating and I only hope that maybe a small number of developers might read Mr. Obasanjo's post and actually consider using the criteria he lays out.  They'd almost certainly be better off if they did.

According to Markus Spath of Blognation the most popular site in Germany right now is Pageflakes. 

Though I find iGoogle more to my personal tastes I've always been fond of Pageflakes.  I think they're probably the most innovative portal company out there but they've managed to walk the line between being innovative and still making the site easy to use. 

A few things I specifically appreciate about Pageflakes...

1. They go out of their way to localize: Sure iGoogle can tell me what the weather is if I give them a zip code but Pageflakes actually knows what my local newspaper is by auto detecting my location and includes that feed on my page by default.  It also queries flickr for any pages tagged with my city and puts a preconfigured flickr widget up.  Finally, just to out-do Google it puts up a custom widget using Google maps to show me all the events in my area.  Pretty impressive for 0 configuration.
2. Shared Pages: The ability to share a portal page with a group of people is actually a pretty powerful one and one I'm surprised doesn't get more face time in portal discussions. 
3. Built in RSS/Atom Reader: It certainly has a ways to go before it catches up with the likes of Google Reader but even now you have to admire the simplicity of it.  For a "starter kit" reader it isn't bad.

As I said above, I don't use Pageflakes because I can configure iGoogle to do what I need it to but for those who are not so technically inclined I think Pageflakes does a good job of helping them harness the power of a portal page.  If my grandmother asked me what start page she should use I wouldn't think twice before recommending Pageflakes.

Also I have to admit that, as a .Net Developer, I get a kick out of seeing a successful site written in C#.  See, not every startup needs to use LAMP.

This link comes courtesy of Ken Cox, it appears there’s a new Rich Text Editor written in C# and its open source.  I think that’s great but I really wish that either (a) Microsoft would make a standard control for this or (b) the development community would decide on one control and work on expanding the functionality of that control  

 It just seems like a waste of time for several groups to be putting effort into doing the same thing.  As great as this new control is it has less than half the functionality of FreeTextBox which has been all but abandoned by its creator.  Just think of how much more we could all have if the group that made this new control didn’t have to start from scratch.   

I do hope this control gets some traction and that they work on a plug in framework of some kind so others can easily add functionality to it.  That's' the type of thing that could really cement this control as the Rich Text Control of choice among .net developers.