Microsoft PDC Journal

OzzyFudd writes: "I have recently returned from the Microsoft Professional Developers conference and posted a scathing journal of my week there at www.ozzyfudd.com I am an architech who works in largely heterogenous environments, hence, I go because I have to. I offer here some commentary, criticism, and humor from behind enemy lines." Gives some interesting insight into the future of C#, as well.

Comments

Why was this story posted?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but this has to be the worst story I have ever seen posted on Slashdot. It has all the attributes of the worst, most self-opinionated, badly-written rants on Usenet. If I want to read poorly written, even more poorly argued crap from the mouths of self-righteous commie-hating, gun-lovin' far right maniacs there are all sorts of sources without having links on Slashdot.

For a start the author's credibility is immediately damaged by his warez-d00d style red on dark tiled background website complete with '5 minutes in Microsoft paint' linking images. Strange given that he says 'Web and Internet Development' are his 'life.' The script kiddie image is further bolstered by his bad English, and I'd almost think he was a disaffected teenager pretending to be an adult, except that the picture he links to (check it out at http://www.scottbushey.com/art/webcam.html, Bushey fans) would surely have been more attractive. I think it's obvious that this extravagantly bearded self-proclaimed genius lacks an education from his rant on 'The Failure of the Over-educated.' An example quote illustrates his views on education:

'The over-educated suffer from having spent too much time in school, and not enough time out in Corporate America, where like no where before have the laws of nature, the beauty of predator and prey, and the best of humanity manifested themselves.'

Er... OK. 'Corporate America' and 'the best of humanity' in one sentence... And he hates Microsoft, right? Surely Microsoft are the archetypal predator? But you see the alternative is the horrible spectre of 'socialism and its evil henchmen, the over-educated.' Shudder. What we need are far more people like Bushey with their razor sharp, thoroughly coherent thinking, honed in the supremely honourable corporate jungle, producing reams of polemic cadenced in that unique English you can only acquire by not going to college. But then apart from that terrible education that I shouldn't have had, I expect I've had my mind poisoned by the CNN because they're the 'Communist News Network' (see 'Tree Hugging Hippy Crap', his incisive discussion of environmentalists and their selfish denial of furniture to needy children by protecting trees).

Of all Mr Bushey's diatribes, however, I think the 'Speak!' one sums up his attitude best:

'Are you unhappy? Pissed off? Angry? Troubled? Are you fed up with the world or just the guy down the street? Well guess what! You have an outlet, a way to vent, you have the equivelent of a thirty second spot on worldwide TV. Get yourself a website...

'Was your order screwed up at the drive thru today? Fine, let the whole world know what total assholes those idiots at the local choke and puke are. Was the woman on the phone today when you were calling the electric company to find out why they sent you someone else's bill a total bitch! Call her out in front of the whole friggen world on your website, then post a link to it on every discussion board from Yahoo to Usenet.'

Sounds like the charter for every sad Usenet poster who's ever bellowed out their futile rage in the mistaken belief that anyone cares. The question is why should the readers of Slashdot care?

Re:Anyone Have an Objective Review of .net?

[Masem]

While not truely objective, I at least know what MS is trying to do.

.NET will allow you to use apps anywhere, not just at one box, but any net-accessible machine, including potentally devices et al. Your working state is persistant when you logoff because everything's saved mostly at a central server rather than your local HD. Updates and upgrades can be easily installed at only one point, as opposed to every computer on a network. Overall, it's an interesting idea on convience.

However, there are more pitfalls than potental good things. It allows easily for pay-per-use pricing since every use can be logged centrally as well. Privacy and security would be a high risk factor since basic network transactions are at the heart of this. And of course, these apps become dependant on decent bandwidth connections to work; no problem in corporate world, but not at 40,000 ft. Finally, MS has suggested that they'll have the .NET specifications all open for third-party developers to write for it, but most will appear to work only under MS OS's (which is why they need the proprietary C# and SOAP).

Some of these are MS-isms. However, more importanty, privacy, security, and bandwidth are going to be problems in any distributed app network whether created by MS or Linus. MO

Re:Anyone Have an Objective Review of .net?

[Black Parrot]

> does anyone actually have anything good to say about it?

Sure. If you want your ability to conduct day to day operations to be at the mercy of backhoe operators, if you want your data to be stored on someone else's machine where it may or may not be snooped on without your knowing, if you want to be billed monthly for use of a critical resource, and if you want to be a victim of the ultimate vendor lock-in, then .NET is just the thing for you.

(Notice that none of this has anything to do with whether you like MS or not. If you want the perspective on MS's role in it, it should suffice to point out that this is the scam^H^H^H^Hscheme that Sun has been pushing loudly for the past several years, and MS has been alternately laughing at it or getting on the bandwagon, depending day-to-day on which stance they deem most likely to keep their customers from going over to Sun. However, it looks like they have well and truly innovated it over the last few weeks, so now they won't be laughing at it anymore. At least not until they lose interest in it and start pushing something else, like Net# or whatever they decide to call The Next Big Thing [TM].)

--

Sounds good to me

[Dacta]

I've just bothered to start reading stuff about .Net - I thought it was just MS marketing speak. There's actually some pretty cool stuff in there once you get past all the crap. (I've written something at http://www.kuro5hin.org, but it was in the moderation queue when I posted this)

Anyway, reading this guys writing makes me even more impressed with .Net (although did anyone else get the impression he loves C++ even more than most Linux hackers?). For instance:

Session state can be maintained on an alternate machine, allowing server reboots with preserved state,and it can be cookieless via url munging. You get a call stack trace and some verbose error messages. Event log and mail are built in, but mail requires that damn mail service still. Interdev will debug across languages now. Oh, and IIS gets Apache like pre-emptive recycling. The surprise here is they admitted they borrowed it from Apache. ASP is finally in its own process, and has memory leak detection. You can even assign processes and processor affinity to web apps.

Pretty cool, hey! Especially the maintaing of session state across different machines.

Will someone please remind all these VB people that it isn't object oriented, its object based? You'd think these guys are coding in C++ or Java the way the bandie OO terms about.

This guy just doesn't listen. Even MS (now!) admits that VB is only object based. However VB7 (which is the .Net version) is a proper OO language. It has proper inheritance and encapsulation - and it even does exception handling.

Object oriented development in VB.NET...hehehe, title says it all. Alan Carter, yer a dork. I want to see pointers and operator overloading.

I don't. There is no need for pointers in most coding, and generally the parts where pointers are used are the most bug prone. Java, Delphi, Python, Smalltalk - all proper OO languages and none have pointers. (Not sure about operator overloading)

The biggest worry is, of course, this:

ASP+ performance and caching was another welcome to C# filled session, and offered little other than common sense...throughput vs. responsiveness, etc... Warning to ASP coders: A lot of these "features" are going to automatically be shoving preformated html to your users. Remember how frontpage hosed yer code? Now IIS will be doing it.

The funniest thing his his whole speil:

They held up a poor guy, Eiffel author, as proof of their party language support. His language looks similar to C#...he won't be there next year.

Now this poor guy was (I believe) none other than Bertrand Meyer who (while he doesn't know much about open source software) does know his stuff when it comes to high quality software engineering. For the author of this piece not to know who he was, and to claim His language looks similar to C#... is pretty dumb. Since this guy seems to think he is some kind of technology guru, I would have expected he would have heard of Eiffel. It's not particually similar to C#, btw - have a look at design by contract for a start.

Java-bastardizing-then-dumping bastards....

[Sir_Winston]

Is it just me, or does this whole C# thing seem especially brutal considering the fact that MS was, right up to the very announcement of C#, pushing Java and especially their own bastardized version of it? Let's see: MS takes a semi-open standard invented and managed by arch-nemesis Sun, breaks it through alteration, fights a bitter court battle over the right to "innovate" on what Sun intended to be a cross-platform and uniform thing, succeeds in court and succeeds in screwing Java up with "improvements" which of course benefit mostly MS's own products, and then...as a grand finale...they drop Java like a hot potato, without warning, in favor of their own proprietary C# which will surely tilt the balance of power even further into MS's grasp?

I think that pretty much sums it up. The anti-trust case must be ruled on and upheld as soon as possible, or else we're all royally fscked. Microsoft.NET is looking more and more like a dystopian corporate-controlled world worse than those in cyberpunk scifi. Imagine a world in which software firms buy pricey MS toolkits to develop in an MS language for a yearly-licensed MS operating system which is seamlessly integrated into the MS.Network, which provides monthly-licensed access to programmes you don't own executed by machines which MS does own filled with files we own but won't be able to access unless we keep paying for monthly MS.NET accounts. That is the future MS wants, a future in which we don't own good hardware or software or the tools necessary to develop for the leading platform, but instead we own WebTerms melded to MS.NET which rents us all our applications and Internet access, hosts all our files remotely, and locks us in forever.

Aw what a blind hate again

[Otis_INF]

... from behind enemy lines.

Newsflash: They are not your enemy. THey spent 2billion dollars a year on research. that has to result in something good, plus in some environments their products are better than other products. Choose the tool that fits the job, don't change the job to fit the tool

It's also sad that the majority here who tends to post articles OR replies won't bother to look into what .NET is all about and when there is something useful to adopt and include in Open Source projects. The majority focusses on DETAILS like the C# vs Java thing (both proprietry languages designed by 1 company. what's the difference?) or fud that MS isn't capable of cooking up such an environment.

I don't care if this gets moderated down because some anti-microsoft moderator hates what I write here, but I have to say it: Microsoft releases a LOT OF sourcecode, free for all.: The duwamish bookstore, a complete e-commerce application ready to roll (a complete online store), with code, docs etc. numerous examples, tutorials and docs.

I developed a lot in java but I'm very willing to swap to C# once it's there. Why? because the tradition of well done documentation (not generated CRAP like Sun gives us), lots of examples and full applications, complete in sourcecode will be extended when .NET is fully released.

You should try it sometimes. You can benefit from it. Instead of bashing it, you could do what made MS big and Japan's economy the world leader: adapt and extend.... Open your eyes. It will do good :)
--