Since I started working with .NET about 6 months ago, I’ve been subscribing to a growing list of MS/.NET related blogs (OPML available here). They’re mostly very good, with useful, technical articles on how to do a myriad of different things with .NET & other MS technologies. However, one thing I’ve noticed is a distinct lack of snark. Seriously, is the .NET development blogosphere completely populated with nice, agreeable people? Where is the ESR of .NET? Even when disagreeing with people, there seems to be a ‘Just the facts mam’ philosophy, where issues are addressed calmly & without emotion.

It is for this reason that I was truly gratified to read Scott Bellware’s post Separation of Church and State – Sign the Reverse WinFX Petition. In this, he decries Microsoft’s decision to re-brand WinFX as ‘.NET 3.0′, as he feels this artificially joins the concepts of brand and version. From the opening sentence I knew I’d like this post:

Remember when versions were versions and brands were brands? That was before the marketing lunatics at Microsoft took over the asylum and made yet more decisions for which they are not intellectually qualified.

Scott gets a prize for writing the funniest, snarkiest post I’ve read this week. He manages to get insults, parody, STD metaphors & Clampett references in on a post about the naming conventions of .NET technologies. Go read the whole thing. There’s a petition up that you can sign too. More discussion & comments on Jason Zander’s post on the renaming.

And in case anyone was wondering about my opinion; I can see why they did this, but I think that releasing a product called .NET 3.0 that is actually running the 2.0 CLR seems a wee bit like marketing newspeak.

And just to top it all off, Jeff Atwood calls MS on failing to increment the version numbers of DirectX.