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at least terrarium has a SLIGHTLY better logo... And it loaded instantly
NEW TARGET! Stop hittin the main page and nail TERRARIUM!
proof they have at least 2 servers....

at least terrarium has a SLIGHTLY better logo... And it loaded instantly
NEW TARGET! Stop hittin the main page and nail TERRARIUM!
proof they have at least 2 servers....

Give me a break. If that site is a SourceForge clone, then this site is a Slashdot clone.

Is it just me, or does that website look like it was made by someone who just picked up a copy of frontpage last week? What's up with that logo? I realize there are a lot of software developers in San Francisco but just because you live there, doesn't mean you swing that way..

Maybe RMS and the FSF has a point about all that "freedom" stuff after all. :-)

logo

True racial harmony and integration, ©2002 Microsoft.

I'd like to know who owns the ashen gray hand and the pink hand on the bottom with a brown thumb. I searched over at Getty Images without success.

Look here.

Looks like they worked pretty fast to smooth that little PR gaffe over.

You're looking at the marketing oriented site. Try this one or this one.

Not necessarily. You should check out what .Net offers!

Does anyone know about any other competitions, or similar AI programming games?

Terrarium is an AI programming game where developers write herbivorous and carnivorous bugs (and plants) in any .NET language, then let them try to survive in a P2P "terrarium" of other bugs and plants. Microsoft holds periodic contests (US contests and International contests) for Terrarium bugs, and there seems to be a fairly active community around the whole thing. And the best part is that you're learning .NET, while at the same time having fun.

Robocode is great. Its a neat exercise to get people intersted in OOP and Java.

Being a Java programmer, I've also looked at C# and seen what MS did to improve the language (lets face it, C# took the good things of Java, and fixed the bad things in Java).

The C# version of robocode?
Terrarium, and damn is it fun (I just wish you could change the stats of your offspring to 'adapt' instead of/in addition to just passing off AI)!

While not part of the language but rather somewhere in the .NET APIs, Windows.Forms is a really cool set of classes and methods that let you do GUI building with relatively little pain. Now I'm no Microsoft apologist, but what they did with Windows.Forms is a LOT nicer than AWT and Swing, and as far as I can tell, the backend was written in native code.
There are some articles about it too.

The thing that finally got me to play with C# was Terrarium. Players create 'creatures' which then compete in a peer-to-peer set of virtual terrariums. You can create plants, herbivores, or carnivores. It was quite fun (in a super geek way) and VERY challenging.

1. Newsgroups: Most microsoft technologies have a newsgroup in the microsoft.public.* hierarchy that are read not only by Microsoft employees but by dozens of regular developers who just want to help others who are having problems. I personally monitor microsoft.public.xml and microsoft.public.dotnet.xml where I answer a lot of questions and pass many of those I can't answer to the actual devs who work on the applications and APIs in question.
   
   
2. Online Communities: There are a number of strong online communities where Windows developers congregate to share information, tips and tricks. These range from Microsoft sponsored sites like GotDotNet, ASP.NET, and Windows Forms.NET that are run by MSFT employees who participate actively in these communities to independent sites like 4 Guys from Rolla, Code Project, Dev Hood, DevelopMentor and CodeGuru
   
   
3. Microsoft Websites: Few places beat MSDN as a source of information about Microsoft technologies. By the way, if you are into XML check out my Extreme XML column
   
   
4. Mailing Lists: There are number of mailing lists hosted by various parties about Microsoft technologies. The ones I've seen with the most vibrance have been the DevelopMentor mailing lists and the ASP Friends lists

Though you've got a rather nasty attitude to a person expressing a simple opinion, here are some benchmarks of .NET vs J2EE architecture here
and an interesting IO benchmark here
this computation benchmark is interesting (java w/ hotspot jitter
here is a simplified benchmark with integer and fp operations
Also, to my understanding, the .NET IL is not stack based as is the JVM which Sun had said is not designed for speed but for simple architectures in embeded designs.
One of the advantages over Java is that C# allows inline allocation (as opposed to heap allocation) for simple structs or primitives.
Try not to use foul language, it just makes you look reactionary and foolish.
Then again all these benchmarks could be fabricated but since i have had experience with C# development and Java (w/ AWT and swing) 1.3, I noticed the speed difference right away...

why is everyone here happily comparing .NET and ".mac"/iTools? .NET is a *set of technologies*. a framework. it's not *at all* only about online storage, email providing etc. if you want to compare it, compare it to something like java (even that would have to be specified more). "Simply put, Microsoft .NET is Microsoft's strategy for delivering software as a service." it would go too far to explain .NET here, but if you like, check these: http://www.microsoft.com/net/ http://www.csharp.org/about.htm (about C#) http://www.gotdotnet.com/

And left open security holes, and been vulnerable to virii. But, but, fewer lines of code!

Election to the Bundestag with open SOURCE With the election to the Bundestag to 22.9.2002 a system the provisional official final result developed with open SOURCE often commodity is to determine. According to data citizen of Berlin of the software enterprise IVU , which could become generally accepted during an advertisement against more than 70 competitors, is based the software on a three-layer architecture, Java components and the data base system MySQL. For the data acquisition and result presentation as well as to the data import and to the print preparation Web Clients come to the employment.

A network is to form of the IVU and the system developed together for the Federal Statistical Office, begun with the national returning officers up to the federal returning officer. First the national returning officers are the results of the constituencies into the system to enter and to the superordinate federal returning officer to convey. Subsequently, the software with consideration of various plausibility checks computes the election results on land and federal level. From the data the system determines the lists of names of the delegates and calculates the allocation of seats of the new Bundestag. ( daa /c't)

Thats makes as much sense as the Open Source Movement itself. When they wake up they will move to .NET

Please review:
.NET beats J2EE response times on Oracle 9i

http://tpga.virtualave.net/game-links.htm

If you're a Microsoft type, MS is running a .NET "artificial life" sort of thing here:

http://www.gotdotnet.com/terrarium/

They could actually charge for a devkit or usage to break even on the project. Even if it did costsome money, I could see it being well worth the price, if it works well.

I just wonder how it will tie into my app. Will it open my browser? Will the Google Bar plugin be the foundation?

The post describes a SOAP web service which in most cases is an RPC call in your application of choice. However unlike RPC in days of yore using SOAP to do RPC in applications is relatively easy. If you want to learn more about SOAP I suggest reading A GEntle Introduction To SOAP by Sam Ruby for an overview of the protocol and A Busy Developer's Guide to WSDL 1.1 to see how one could go from defining a WSDL file (as the Google sys admin is trying to do) to actually accessing the web service remotely from a Java application.

There is also a grab bag of resources on XML webservices at the .NET Framework community website.

To answer your question, if the Google API is available as a web service then it can be intergrated into any application at all from command line to dynamic web page to GUI application as long as there is network availability on the host machine.

here.

And regarding your comment re: Perl and Java, it's obvious that you've never practiced what you preach. I've done web services in Perl, Java, and C++, using both Apache's and Microsoft's XML libraries and models. And .NET blows them all away. You sound like some sort of "armchair developer," like Malda.

I think this link will explain what .NET is better than anything else. It's a competitor for J2EE.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/compare/

Curious marketing hype with this product. Sounds to me like an attempt to undermine Java with their own language.

* The ability to use any programming language. Give developers the ability to use any programming language. Allow applications written with different programming languages to integrate deeply with each other. Leverage current development skills to go forward without retraining. Customers have discovered the exorbitant cost of finding developers skilled in some specialized technologies. Prominent industry analysts recommend using existing skills whenever possible, and avoiding the high cost and high failure rate of relying on the technical skills in shortest supply.
A Guide to Reviewing the Microsoft .NET Framework Page 1

They seem to mean "the ability to use any language" as long as it's VisualBasic or C#. I also notice that the introduction of .NET has generated a massive number of books and training courses. Must be because they can "leverage current development skills to go forward without retraining" so well. Just how "exorbitant" is the "cost of finding developers skilled in some specialized technologies" like C#?

The Java Pet Store, Sun's J2EE best practices blueprint application, was rewritten in C#. It took 1/4 the code and performs anywhere from 15 to 28 times faster than J2EE. Check it out here. Debate on how it was done can be found here.

The Terrarium game alone is enough to make me try .NET

I'm probably going to loose badly but I'll keep on trying. I'll probably use the : [assembly: OrganismClass("NakedBabe")]

From the intro page:

Terrarium is a multiplayer ecosystem game developed using the .NET Framework.

It will probably give you some ideas on how to implement this kind of thing.

Here is the website Terrarium

I know I'll get flamed for this, but ...

If you want to use templates as well as garbage collection, you might like Managed C++, the .NET version of C++.

It'll let you code in C++ (with templates etc) but also use garbage collected arrays etc, and the .NET class library.

Don't ask me why I'm bothering to respond to such a moronic post, but if someone's really looking to for a proof-of-concept application for .NET, they can check out http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/compare/ to see how Oracle's benchmarks for their implementation of Sun's own J2EE blueprint Java Pet Store application were destroyed by rewriting it as a .NET app in C#. The performance improved by a factor of 28 in a fraction of the code. Oh yeah, Oracle supposedly rewrote their implementation in response, but curiously won't release the details about how they did it. How convenient. :)

you were looking for some proof about c# being faster than java....here you go

Look at This...

(.NET 28 times faster than J2EE).

Also, the SDK is FREE!!!

The new universal runtime takes (obviously) a very substantial amount of ideas from java and expands on them

What exactly does it expand on?

- You can pretty much write in the language of your choice on top of it.

No, actually you can write in one of the supported langauges on top of it, all of the useful ones of which have corresponding projects that target the JVM. Nothing I've seen about the CLI or the CLR suggests to me that it's got anything over Java. IL is just JVM bytecode warmed over. There's nothing about JVM bytecode that inherently ties it to the Java Language - just judge from the ports of Perl, Python, Scheme, etc. As long as a language can understand the Java object model, it can compile/reconstruct JVM bytecode, thus enabling it both inherit from Java libraries and allow inheritance from its own libraries. There's no particular reason, for example, why C# can't be compiled to JVM bytecode, since the object models are easily mappable between the two.

- C# introduces some ideas that are, imho, an improvement over java such as boxing, where for example, a native type such as an integer is transparently converted to the object type without the need for function calls.

Wow, now there's a feature, because those wrapper types are so painful to call -

Never mind that explicit object encapsulation of primitives provides some uses of its own - protecting against accidental casting comes to mind.

- A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI). Thus your handy dandy super duper collection of anyting in the world could run on top the runtime, thus being garbage collected, and the rest of your code could run 'raw' outside of it.

Yes, but all the data types you want to transfer between your 'raw' elements and your 'safe' code have to be part of the managed extensions Microsoft has introduced, so you're still going to end up rewriting large sections of code. Besides that, all of the overhead of JNI is still there, it's just abstracted by the runtime.

- COM developers are going to like this runtime a lot. It introduces 'revolutionary' (sarcasam) ideas such as searching in the current directory for a COM object and not requiring really gross GUIDs to load interfaces and libraries.

So it's finally catching up to Java in this regard? Whoopee. I will admit that the abstraction layer that allows old COM objects to plug in to .NET seamlessly are nice, but there are similar projects to make it work for Java on Win32 platforms, too.

The obvious attraction of some of these features is enough for any developer to say hmmmmmmmmmmm

No, actually they're enough to make any Java developer say "yawnnnnnn...."

Nobody ever said that we should be copying .NET from the ground up. What we should be doing is making it possible to talk to .NET's Web Services, which should be possible, since SOAP 1.1, WSDL, and UDDI are open protocols, and are probably going to make up the W3C XML-RPC spec when it's finished. The rest of it's fluff - I don't think anybody's going to worry about making Web Forms work on Linux, for example. C# and the CLR have nothing to do with Web Services - they're just an attempt to steal Java's thunder on WORA. The Java community is already working on Web Services APIs for Java - JAX-RPC and JAXM. That's where Open Source developers should be concentrating, too.

The most important thing besides getting tools that speak the wire protocols is creating something to compete with Microsoft for authentication services. This is where Microsoft expects to control the whole ball of wax. If they are the only authenticators, they can charge for every transaction. If Ximian is smart, they'll release an authentication framework as soon as they can, hopefully not long after Hailstorm is in the water (since before is likely a hopeless cause at this point).

Perl for .NET

Python for .NET

.NET Framework Community Website

ASP.NET

and of course,

MSDN .NET Developer Center

FWIW, asp.net and gotdotnet.com are supposedly running the .NET platform.