There’s been a lot of troubling events in the world of .NET.  It seems Microsoft has changed course (again) and is promoting HTML 5 over it’s own proprietary technologies, such as Silverlight.  The uproar is that many developers have invested their careers into technologies that seem to be almost overnight no longer mainstream.

As Wikipedia says:

“The explicit disavowal of Flash seems also to signal that Microsoft does not intend .net framework websites to take over all interaction with the user. This aspect of .NET would seem at least to be obsolete.”

While I can’t argue that Microsoft is making a bad choice to support standards-based HTML 5 over its own Silverlight or Adobe’s Flash it does make a cautionary tale about investing too heavily into any one platform or technology.

I’ve always tried to “broaden my horizons” when it comes to programming.  Even when I was a heads-down Microsoft WPF developer I spent the time and effort to develop iOS apps and learn Ruby on Rails (both are SO much more enjoyable to work with by the way).  It’s this diversity that has always helped my career advance.