.NET DJ Reader's Choice awards - Pffft
I checked out .NET Developer's Journal the other day when Sam Gentile mentioned he'd had his first printed piece published there. The quality of development mags tends to run the full spectrum, so I like to see one and flip through it before subscribing. Anyway, they have their first reader's choice awards going on. I voted even though I'm not a reader, all oxymorons aside I wanted to see who was nominated and who was going to win. (Random aside, developer's choice awards of any kind remind me how I miss Delphi Informant, I used to eagerly go to Tower Records three and four times in a row when it was that time of month--yes, Tower Records, that was the closest place to me that stocked it hehe. I was incompatible with the subscription model for some reason at that age. This was when magazines still mattered.)
Anyway, in my estimation the .NET DJ's awards are pretty farcical. Some of the categories are decent, a lot of them are the exact opposite. It looks mainly like a contest of who's PR/Marketing person had more gumption.
But, I would encourage everyone to
go over and vote for NUnit under the Best .NET Testing, Q/A and Debugging category. A.) It's deserving of the award on pure merit, imo, and b.) the folks over there have provided a great unit-testing framework to the community, gratis, and I think thats deserving of special merit.
I don't want to get all Dennis and get off on a rant here, and I'm hardly a big open source proponent, but there are definite collective benefits to the Microsoft world assimilating some of the community and commonality of the open source world--supporting tools like NUnit and log4net as well as many others is a great way to recognize important contributions towards this end beyond just writing a great book or blogging some interesting things.
Here's my take on the individual categories and who's nominated. I started to go cross-eyed about the third category in and couldn't shut myself up.
Best Book: I went with Essential ASP.NET in C#, I love that book. Ingo's book is my second favorite and that might just be because I read it so long ago. I voted for Fritz because he deserves more than 1 vote duh. Plus both 'flavors' of his book are on there, so he has zero chance and that ain't right.
Best Build/Installers Tools: Uh, Nant? No FinalBuilder, VisualBuilder or any of the friendly third-party tools. Weak.
Best .NET CLI: Well I wanted to vote for Mono just because it's so freakin' cool, but that's like voting for Nader. This really shouldn't even be a category yet, but I like the concept.
Best .NET Documentation and Help Tools: Uhhh. NDoc? Hell-o. I'm guessing open source options weren't considered or allowed. God help us all if there's a Best Logging tool category.
Best .NET Editor IDE: So SharpDevelop isn't included (which would be a distant second from VS.NET, but it's still cool). No PrimalScript, no Web Matrix!?! Wierd. BUT, they do have EmEditor, my personal text editor of choice, so I'm distracted and will overlook the obvious omissions here. If VS.NET doesn't get every vote here I'd be surprosed. XMLSPY?!? I like XMLSPY, but it's not a .NET Editor or IDE even with their recent .NET extensions.
Best .NET Human Resource: Hmmm tough one. You have to give Miguel props for navigating a road totally of his own, and one which has huge positive implications for the entire .NET world. Anders. Man, I owe like 9 years of awesome frameworks to that guy, I think he's going to be tough to beat. But Don is pretty sexy in blog terms. Plus he has a tagline, make that serial taglines. He's like Arnold.
Hmm. Gotta go with Anders even though I think the gist of this was community oriented more than just biggest contributor. Which, I might add, there were a slew of folks who should have easily been on here but aren't. Actually, I started to type some names, but there's really way wau too many to list.
Best .NET Libraries and Control: category overload. And while there are some good ones here, there also are a lot of omissions. log4net is way more valuable than anything on here to me. How about the Magic Library for the love of god. I'm abstaining here because I don't want to annoint any of these as something I can't live without. Frankly there's some total dogs in the list. ActiveReports will probably win, and it's a decent tool.
Best .NET Providers, Databases, and Tools: Well, I'll vote for Proc-Blaster because I used to use it before I made my own replacement... and even though it's hardly perfect, it's a useful tool if you don't have your own. The brute force typing saved vastly outway it's quirky slowness. CodeSmith deserves a mention too, but whatever, par for the course.
Best .NET Modeling, Optimization and Analysis Tools: Hmm. Lot of dogs again. I use Enterprise Architect for my UML. XMLSPY is award-worthy too, but I don't see how it fits in this category either (Best .NET XML Tool anyone?). I'll vote for EA, it's a solid tool at a great price.
Best .NET Profilers, Optimizers, Decompilers and Obfuscators: Wow, way too broad a category, lot of good entries. And of couse no Reflector or Anarkino. Which are both indispensible. I like AQtime a lot and I haven't obfuscated much beyond the lite version in 1.1. I would have thought that Borland's optimizer would be on the list of nominees. AQTime gets my tally.
Best .NET Source Control and Team Facilitation: I would have thought there would be some other entrants. The category itself is a non-category--I guess you had to mention .NET in your marketing PDF. I don't really care for CVS itself but it's ubiquitous. Two suites I think are pretty good aren't listed; no SourceGear Vault, no Perforce. Merant wasn't on here, but that's okay to me, I have a love-hate thing with PVCS from way back. I'm going to go with no nominee and abstain, they really should to a better job culling the field.
Best .NET Testing, Q/A and Debugging: Finally! NUnit! MS ACT would be my runner-up. People love VMware so it should do well, maybe even win. I like VirtualPC myself, so whatever--if NUnit doesn't win, it's official, these awards suck. (So now we know open source isn't ineligible, and rightly so--so why were some decent tools completely overlooked?)
Best .NET Web Sites: Some decent sites on the list. Nice to see Xheo nominate their own product site. That's relevant and appropriate. Or a huge fricking joke. Hmm tough to call. Not. There are a bunch of others on here that have no business being on here, so I shouldn't single them out (but I just did!).
CA's p.r. flack was obviously from the "nominations don't cost anything school of thought"*. I would have to narrow it down to Code Project, ONDotnet and DNJ. I think I've found The Code Project to be the most useful personally, I would also point to GotDotNet, the ASP.NET site, .NET 24/7, ASPAlliance (nominated), 123aspx and C#Today as other sites that are better than a lot of the also-rans here. Winner: Code Project and it's arguably the most deserving even among the good sites not nominated.
Overall, these awards almost totally blow. A couple categories save them from being a total joke. Shame, I like these kinds of awards because in other contexts, truly deserving products have received the accolades they deserved and it's helped make small but excellent tools more viable commercially.
* Except credibility and I don't think CA worries about that a whole lot ;0