Slashdot Mirror

It [C#] is complete enough that Java(tm) is including features that already exist in C# in 1.5 - including enums, attributes, and iterator-aware looping.

Otherwise, from a syntax standpoint, C# is pretty roughly equivilant to Java(tm). They are both OO languages (no flames about which is more OO, that's a dumb argument) that support single-inheritance, multiple interface implementation, and some component-oriented development paradigms (beans vs properties)

C# is similiarly including more features such as anonymous methods and Generics which made it to 1.5 before C# will get them in 2.0 "Whidbey".

I do serious, production work in both. IMHO, it isn't the language that is differentiating, it's the class libraries and the reach of the underlying platform that dictate the decision to use one vs the other.
For Windows development, C#/.Net has a serious edge.

For cross-platform server applications, Java(tm) is extremely strong.

I've already argued over this with enough people and gone through it so many times, I don't care to spend the time to detail out the .NET platform again. I would recommend you check out GotDotNet and MSDN for more info.

"It's from first hand experience benchmarking .NET applications I am actively developing. In fact the scalability factor sucks big time."

First of all, perhaps you should analyze how you're misusing the framework. I develop an application that is used by 400+ people at one major US entity, it is 100% .NET on the client and SQL Server on the backend. I have had 0 problems with performance on the backend and this app is not only highly-transactional, but also throws an OLAP front-end into the mix. You're obviously doing something wrong if you can't build a scalable enterprise application using .NET and SQL Server. And quoting Brumme like that...no wonder you posted AC. If someone would like to read the Brumme blog, go here. It's all very good information.

If look have a look at this , you'll see that this is specifically *not* a generic .NET interpreter. You can't just script any arbitrary .NET classes/objects. Instead, you have to write special classes ("cmdlets") which you may then use in your scripts. One reason for this design seems to be that these commands can support special typed streams called "pipelines", so you can combine several commands using the "|" operator on the command line in a *x shell-like manner.

the best way for Moft to keep an eye on their employees' blogs is to encourage them to run them at Moft sites like ASP.net and gotdotnet.com.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/PDC/4118/ARC334.ppt

I guess if you're a developer "star" like Chris Anderson then sending out photos of your office is OK? I think it might have been more to do with the details of the location on campus etc, altho Don Box is prone to doing that from time to time in his blog too (check out the entry entitled "old school fun" to see what I mean).

I think Microsoft realised a couple of years ago that the really powerful thing about OSS was actually the community. And they want to try to make such a community themselves. That's one of the reasons I think there seem to be so many MS staff who have blogs - they want to be seen encoraging an MS community. And why they have taken to "accidentally" releasing alpha/beta stuff into the wild recently.

Some of their efforts have been laughable in the way that they have tried to make corporate efforts look as if they are really community based. I've tried to find evidence of a genuine MS community but there isn't much about. The only equivalent to Slashdot for MS lovers in ActiveWin, which has about a dozen people that post to it, mainly when a story about Linux or critical of MS comes up.

There is a lot of activity on GotDotNet, but mostly it is technical queries.

Are there other, genuine examples of MS community sites? Or alternatively, attempts that are obviously MS driven? I'm just interested to compare the strength of the OSS community with the MS community (yes I know they are not logically exclusive, but in reality it seems to be pretty much the case).

The ability to put stuff in the system tray.

btw, there is no such thing as the Windows "system tray". The correct term is "notification area". Raymond Chen, a Microsoft dev from the Windows 95 team, describes the original Win95 taskbar design: Why do some people call the taskbar the "tray"? Because they're wrong.

One of the blogs I follow is Brad Abrams, the Lead Program Manager for the Common Language Runtime, and a lot of the posts are about programming interface guidelines and internal reimplementations, and the plusses and minuses thereof.

So the original CLR features, and by implication their implementations in the various .net languages including C#, are certainly mutable already.

Given the code-safety benefits of managed code, I'd imaging that Moft at least aspire to building their future headline products this way, and given the dogfooding tradition they're building, they've got plenty of incentive to make sure that .net rises to the challenge.

tomV

Read this blog.

• The 'Yukon' version of SQL Server will have XML as a native data type, along with the usual varchars and ints and datetimes.
• 'Yukon' will allow the use of XML Schemas to validate the XML data stored is a particular feed.
• WinFS will build on NTFS and SQL Server.
• The cited article mentioned the use of custom XML Schemas to describe the metadata for particular types of data in the file system.
• In 'Yukon' and the 'Whidbey' release of Visual Studio, the Common Language Runtime becomes part of SQL Server itself, so that (and I'm really not at all sure how much I like this with my DBA head on but I love it with my developer head on) it becomes possible to write Stored Procedures in any .net language, there's some sort of automagic mashalling between SQL and Common Type System datatypes, as well as to debug them in Visual Studio.

• The 'Yukon' version of SQL Server will have XML as a native data type, along with the usual varchars and ints and datetimes.
• 'Yukon' will allow the use of XML Schemas to validate the XML data stored is a particular feed.
• WinFS will build on NTFS and SQL Server.
• The cited article mentioned the use of custom XML Schemas to describe the metadata for particular types of data in the file system.
• In 'Yukon' and the 'Whidbey' release of Visual Studio, the Common Language Runtime becomes part of SQL Server itself, so that (and I'm really not at all sure how much I like this with my DBA head on but I love it with my developer head on) it becomes possible to write Stored Procedures in any .net language, there's some sort of automagic mashalling between SQL and Common Type System datatypes, as well as to debug them in Visual Studio.

• 1. Home/Inexperienced/Novice Users. This is your corporate drone, your mother, and the kids at school. They all want to get on the PC, get the email, write some documents, and surf the web. Don't care much for how or why things work, only that they do. This is why we end up with the gaudy Fisher Price interface and wizards and all sorts of unfunctional junk.
• 2. Systems Administrators. Your friendly neighborhood BOFH. He's just gotta keep the servers going, the desktop machines running, the database functional. Plenty of options, tweaks, dull grey backgrounds, policies, ways to make things work if you're sitting at the server console.
• 2.1 Developers. Yadda yadda yadda... need apps to sustain a monopoly... the whole bit. They get things their way inside Visual Studio and not very much else.

Reading this thread (which of course I found via my aggregator (RSS Bandit) from the Slashdot Feed, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what RSS actually IS. The beauty of RSS, IMHO, is that is is Really Simple. The Creative Commons licensed spec for RSS 2 shows that there's a tiny core of mandatory information and reasonable extensibility through the use of XML namespaces. I use RSS to locate new articles from here, from The Register, BBC News, The Guardian, ITN news (yes, I'm a news junkie), kuro5hin, InfoWorld, Wired, for product update news from various SourceForge projects I use, for tracking a bunch of techie blogs I read without having to visit every one of them regularly, for recently-posted-article lists from thirty or so sites that I couldn't possibly keep track of by visiting them individually. I figure that if you've had a look at the examples I've given, and optionally the spec, you ALREADY have enough to successfully expose and consume RSS.

But the thing is, RSS is Really Simple. Simple to consume, simple to produce. So, since I already have my reader in place, I've also got a bunch of private feeds - an RSS file that shows me login/logout events from my server logs, an RSS feed that shows me the last 25 orders valued over 250 placed by our customers, an RSS feed that lists the 25 most recent software releases we've done, outstanding Service Requests and Change requests.

All of this could be achieved in other ways - what makes it a winner for me is that, for anything that's a series of events, it's pretty much trivial to expose those events as RSS <item>s, and then I can monitor all those items, from their diverse sources, in one place.

But then, I'm already somewhat smitten with RSS, obviously.

TomV

Something is wrong with this guys brain if he cant spend a penny of his money to fix his OS

If Moft aren't spending any money trying to fix their OS, then who's paying for all the patches that they issue, day-in, day-out, for Win95, 98, ME, 2k, XP, 2k3?

But when you have to deal with problems like the legacy TerminateThread API (see this article by Chris Brumme for a flavour of the problems it can cause), and still maintain the ability to call it or get utterly crucified for 'anticompetitively' locking out the third-party apps that took this abomination and ran with it when it first, foolishly, appeared, and when you're the number one target for malware authors for whatever reason, you can spend a king's ransom on patching every month and *still* there will be holes. In the end, whatever facade you present to the Internet, it's still an abstraction of the x86 instruction set, and since all abstractions are leaky, the decision on where to lock down has to be subjective, somewhere between the Universal Turing Machine and Utterly Useless. The only truly secure machine is not switched on.

Pointless ad-hominem snideness doesn't make for a more reliable Internet or more secure Windows. It took a lot to educate our ancestors that human lives depended on hygiene, and there's still filthy bastards out there breeding all kinds of nasties for the want of soap - just as there will always be filthy bastards out there with no concept of computer hygiene. Cleanliness is next to Uptime, anyone?

TomV

The semantics of "Start" is that to do anything, you "start here". That actually makes more sense to me than putting Quit under the File menu.

On pressing start to shutdown, the history of this is contained in a blog here.

And to quote from the article: "Short answer: The same reason you turn the ignition key to shut off your car. " The long answer ultimately has to do with usability studies. So much for the theory that it doesn't make sense.

Want to know what .net can do on what hardware, check out this famous report for about the most complete publically available benchmark results for .net.

Want to know how to build a scalable system in .net (which you obviously don't know how to do, but someone else may benefit from) check out Microsoft's Pet Shop samples

As far as my personal experience, the tools available in .net for building highly scalable web sites blow away the competition (and I've used almost all of them). Want output caching, data caching, session management, page view state or whatever other cool tricks for building high performance applications? Well, they are all there and easily accessible. Is it perfect? Not yet, and with any language, any platform, any hardware - a poor design/implementation will result in poor performance... but .net makes it possible to create a high performance application with ease if you know what you're doing.

I've done the LAMP thing too, so I'm not just a Microsoft sucker. I use the best tool for the job..

-Woo

Reading around it even looks like there are those at Microsoft who've considered getting a powerbook too

With a wireless network, RemoteDesktop/VNC you can access any other PC resources you need.

Now you only have to convince your boss. Good Luck!

Look Here

As others have stated, the article states that "the difference in defect density between the two was not significant." Meaning that defect density, especially with such a small differential, has little bearing on the overall quality of the software. We know nothing of the severity, impact, etc of the defects: they could all be cosmetic for all we know. This is probably nothing more than a marketing strategy by Reasoning: publish a study without any details on a hotly debated topic and see how many people check out their site. It'd be nice if they had a downloadable version of their software to test drive.

FxCop is an example of a "defect" or code analysis tool. While I have NO idea of Reasoning's methodology, I know that with FxCop (which is specifically for .NET code analysis), you have to set it up to filter out the majority of its rules or you'll get 3000 instances of "You didn't name this variable the way MS says you're supposed to." FxCop is extensible though. The point is, not a single poster on this page (unless they work for the companies involved) knows what Reasoning's methodology or rule set was when they did this so we can glean virtually zero value from this analysis. I look forward to 600 anti-Microsoft posts because of it though....

Microsoft is taking on Sourceforge. Here's the article

There are several important differences between how .NET handles dynamic runtime loading of classes and how java does it. .NET requires a separate AppDomain, which means it has a higher overhead. Using a separate AppDomain is only needed if you need to unload/reload an assembly at runtime. Although java classloaders are difficult to grasp for many programmers, it provides a better way of handling dynamic loading. I won't bother going into the details of how dynamic loading works. Tomcat has plenty of examples of how it is done for each webapp.

If Java supported closures, the 'foreach' construct wouldn't have to be a special case. I think C# is going to have something that looks a lot like closures but for some reason, they are going to avoid providing general-purpose closure support (it's sad, really).

On the other hand, it looks like the value/class distinction in C# is going to help make its generics more efficient than Java's. It'll be like C++ except with runtime specialization when needed, so the disk image wont be bloated, just the memory image.

I can't really name an MS product that does refactoring, just like you didn't name a Sun IDE. But if you are looking for some .NET refactoring tools I'd recommend checking out C# Refactory. Also Microsoft has a nice tool called FxCop that keeps you within the Design Guidelines of .NET As for my notepad comment, the difference between using a textpad vs notepad is almost a moot point. That's not and IDE, that's a text editor. Hmmm, perhaps I use notepad like most people use "kleenex."

Paidstamp Source code has been placed on our GotDotNet Workspace

We do have a wish list for this to be developed and free, in other languages, and have the ui be simpler for first time users. See flowchart if interested in doing it for other languages as it has the basic flow of our initial project.

Hopefully you Open Source community can develop this, before someone else tries to take the idea over and Market it as theirs. Although by me putting this out, I think we have some documentation on prior art.

Anthony Loera

Brainclone Enterprises

It seems history, even short term history repeats itself. This was tried in the past by the BSD license and was taken out because it is way too onerous. The problems with requiring such credit are well enumerated by the Free Software Foundation in the essay entitled "The BSD License Problem".

On the surface, it sounds like a good idea until you consider what it means to give prominent credit to all the major people who are involved with a piece of software. The larger a project is the larger the number of active participants. More importantly when a project gets large enough it acquires dependencies that provide significant functionality which also are as deserving of credit as the original application developers.

For example I built a news aggregator that is an now a source code available project on GotDotNet that has 70 developers signed up with about a dozen having been active in one shape or the other. There are also dependencies on three external libraries that also provide significant functionality. If this was a commercial product exactly how feasible would it be for me to give prominence to everyone who provided significant value to the application? What metric would I use?

Well 78% of the developers out there disagree with you.

And they are welcome to go with Java then :) I doubt that the winwriters.com survey is scientific or all inclusive.

"strong advantages" eh? Like what exactly?

Visual Studio (one of the best IDE's going) a fantastic framework and ease of work across languages. Not to mention a much more stable target environment.

Everyone who writes non trivial Java applicatiosn knows that the ability to run on multiple VM's is often frought with peril, let alone across platforms.

Does it work? Sure. Is it a lock? hell no.

Looking for something unique to .NET over Java? An event model that is functionally equivelent when rendering to Windows native or HTML clients.

"How many phones are going to have .NET pre-installed? Is that even possible?"

1) No idea - but I doubt that applet apps delivered to phones is a big market for msot developers. On the other hand web applications that deliver to phones via a browser will be huge :)

2) As far as I know, yes.

My main problem right now is that I still have no idea what .NET is capable of, and I've spent way too much time looking already.

Look in the right places. Download the framework, go grab web matrix from someplace and write a little code.

You don't have to spend a dime.

MS created a neat little game called Terrarium to showcase .NET. So they probably do envision a future for games on .NET.

Terrarium

For an example of a Simulation, check out the Terrarium application. It can be found at "GotDotNet" (http://www.gotdotnet.com). I think it provides an example of how .Net can "shine" as a Game Development Platform (extensible design, peer to peer communities, etc.).

This is great. So many "NO WAY! .NET IS TOO SLOW!" reminds me of assembly programmers saying "C++? Its slow and a memory hog! Games will NEVER be programmed in C++!!"

Well, you can read some books on using DirectX9 for .Net, or even play some games that were made with directX and .net.

While computers gain more powerful hardware (faster CPUs, bigger memory, etc...) the coding for games will go forward to the newer languages that makes coding easier. You may not like it, but don't worry. There's always jobs for those with assembly knowledge.

And, for what its worth, I think game coding in Java will start becoming a reality in the next five years (and not just on PDAs and mobile phones)...

Now all we need to do is gather a large collection of documents generated by Office 2003 and run Microsoft's schema inference tool on them.

inference tool code & demo

....several other readers. Take a look at FxCop.
It will help you check your code for conformance to design guidelines and point out possible usage errors, localization issues, security problems, and possible performance improvements.

Maybe you'll find this useful: White paper on resource management in components written for the Common Language Runtime (CLR).

-jk

I thought DirectX 9 had a managed interface? If that's not good enough, you can go for interop with GDI+ and kill your portability (well, DX9 probably kills your portability, but assuming that its namespace is well-defined, I could see an SDL/OpenGL backend being written for Mono under that namespace). Also, .NET is only at version 1.0 (version 1.1, if you're on the VS 2003 or Windows Server 2003 betas, or have played around with Terrarium lately). Give it time. Most likely, hardcore graphic manipulation APIs were lower priority for the initial release.

Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support .NET just in case there wasn't any grassroots community who actually wanted to do it.

And I DID Go visit GotDotNet sometime. And I saw something there.... but... BUT... BUT... BUT: Got.net, "got dot net", and associated terms and devices are (c) Copyright 1995-2002 The Internet Connection Inc, a California corporation .

You CAN'T be talking about ASP/.NET/Microsoft, can you?

That is only if Mono can keep up with Microsoft's changes. Believe me, I'm pro-Mono but I just don't see projects being cross platform in the short term. For example, Mono doesn't even have .NET 1.0 implemented 100% yet; what are they going to do when Microsoft releases 1.1? 1.1 isn't 100% backwards-compatible with 1.0 and I'm already expecting to rewrite several areas of a large project (1,000,000+ lines) so it works on 1.1. I don't even think Microsoft is going to be fixing bugs in 1.0 anymore (hearsay) and everyone is going to be forced to upgrade (i.e. rewrite parts of their code) to 1.1 or work around the bugs for their 1.0 projects. Sure, Mono has a great code base, but I can't see them leveling the playing field, especially when the tools (Visual Studio.NET) don't exist for Linux yet.

Bullshit. According to this there are a grand total of 24 breaking changes in all of .NET. Which ones are requiring you to "rewrite several areas of a large project"? There are about 1000 new class members added, so that's a bit of work for the Mono guys to do, but you don't have to use them if you want to keep compatibility with Mono.

>And, of course, Microsoft Watch [microsoft-watch.com].

from teh article...."Microsoft is sending some of its crack GotDotNet evangelization team into enemy territory"....i am gonna visit there just to see their faces....r we having a plan for an attack yet?? hehehe..

how dare they trample in our territory???? lets show the .netters some /.er effects.....

This game is called terrarium and is rather cool. You write the code for a creature that is then run on everyone else's machines (safely) and competes for resources. It looks good even if you don't want to write your own creature.

"furthering .NET? Has .NET even left the starting gate in all seriousness? Other than the msn portal."

MSN portal? What the hell does the msn portal have to do with .NET?

Its difficult to find unbiased comparissons as I am sure you have seen from the flame wars that errupt every time the subject comes up. You can try this Web Services for a review of web services or this Smackdown for a synopsis of the recent petstore furore or check out GotDotNet for general stuff about .NET

It's a MS site but has a lot of info and tutorials worth to take a look: http://www.gotdotnet.com/

Here's more information about C# vs. Java generics: http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/csharp/learn/Future/ VCS Language Changes.aspx.

Better, if you picture the "dot" as a "globe" instead, it looks like the logo a Bond villain might use. Perhaps this is their prerelease logo slated for the planet Mars?

(At least you'll be able to get these images out without waiting for the slashdotted IIS servers to completely recover. And how do we know they're slashdotted, anyway? Perhaps there's a run of VB.Net coders out there hammering away at it?)

Better, if you picture the "dot" as a "globe" instead, it looks like the logo a Bond villain might use. Perhaps this is their prerelease logo slated for the planet Mars?

(At least you'll be able to get these images out without waiting for the slashdotted IIS servers to completely recover. And how do we know they're slashdotted, anyway? Perhaps there's a run of VB.Net coders out there hammering away at it?)

Whew, it took forever to find that image in that huge ugly page. I've never seen so much crap uploaded just to say "uspecified error." That include is a killer. They might not know what's wrong with it, but I do, it looks like an out of control VB of MSFC monster more than it does a web page. Is that what the .NET will be? Oh well, the picture is worth 1024 words and it takes up 11K of space. Nice work!

First, that's a very nice, PC pan-ethnic logo they've got there.

Second, I'm not sure that using the phrase "workspace" is the greatest choice. Looking at Metrowerks' package design or the name "Sourceforge" gives you a neat, romanticized image of some code artist beating away on a big piece of iron, forging something new. Its designed to appear attractive to the person doing the work, not his manager -- not MS's strong point. "Workspaces"? Might appeal to the corporate world, but in the hobbyist market, out to write some good code and have fun, I think they're missing the mark.

Third, the terminology is once again corporate: "aply to join a Workspace"..."owner, administrator, and member"

Fourth, the liberal use of "sharing source" (Microsoft's favorite term) rather than "opening source" on the site is quite prominent -- "planning on sharing the source code".

Fifth, more MS-style favorite words -- "integrate" and prominent mention of Visual Studio: "How will Workspaces integrate with Visual Studio .NET?"

Sixth, why the hell does MS distribute all their documentation in Word format? So they made it in-house...big deal. I don't use Excel to write research papers -- it's the wrong tool. Word, with macro viruses, no font embedding, security issues, large file sizes and import issues with different versions of the software, is a really crummy "publication format". It makes sense in MS-centric workgroups for exchange of documents in progress, but not for final copies.

Seventh, the damn thing is already Slashdotted.

First, that's a very nice, PC pan-ethnic logo they've got there.

Second, I'm not sure that using the phrase "workspace" is the greatest choice. Looking at Metrowerks' package design or the name "Sourceforge" gives you a neat, romanticized image of some code artist beating away on a big piece of iron, forging something new. Its designed to appear attractive to the person doing the work, not his manager -- not MS's strong point. "Workspaces"? Might appeal to the corporate world, but in the hobbyist market, out to write some good code and have fun, I think they're missing the mark.

Third, the terminology is once again corporate: "aply to join a Workspace"..."owner, administrator, and member"

Fourth, the liberal use of "sharing source" (Microsoft's favorite term) rather than "opening source" on the site is quite prominent -- "planning on sharing the source code".

Fifth, more MS-style favorite words -- "integrate" and prominent mention of Visual Studio: "How will Workspaces integrate with Visual Studio .NET?"

Sixth, why the hell does MS distribute all their documentation in Word format? So they made it in-house...big deal. I don't use Excel to write research papers -- it's the wrong tool. Word, with macro viruses, no font embedding, security issues, large file sizes and import issues with different versions of the software, is a really crummy "publication format". It makes sense in MS-centric workgroups for exchange of documents in progress, but not for final copies.

Seventh, the damn thing is already Slashdotted.

You're looking at the wrong site. The topic of discussion is gotdotnet.com, and yes that t makes all the difference. Naturally it runs the OS you'd think it would.