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What is .NET?
CyberBry writes "There's a great technical overview of Microsoft .NET over at arstechnica: "In a remarkable feat of journalistic sleight-of-hand, thousands of column inches in many "reputable" on-line publications have talked at length about .NET whilst remaining largely ignorant of its nature, purpose, and implementation. Ask what .NET is, and you'll receive a wide range of answers, few of them accurate, all of them conflicting. Confusion amongst the press is rampant. The more common claims made of .NET are that it's a Java rip-off, or that it's subscription software. The truth is somewhat different.""
I haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but they actually released the dev stuff for .NET. Article here
There are some good .NET development books coming out now. Even O'Reilly has had one out for a while (which I have), so the publishing companies seem to be eager to sell .NET.
.NET framwork development tools, and it seemed much faster (probably because my hand-written code was much smaller).
.NET runtime and classes for FreeBSD. I have talked with the lead engineer of this project over e-mail, and he said that it's due to be out in late Spring. I asked him about the Windows Forms stuff, and he said it will be based on Tk (could someone explain the implications of this?). He also said that there are going to be very few UNIX-specific classes, but they hope people will develop those on their own.
Right now I am downloading the seven CD Visual Studio.NET Enterprise final version (yep, already warezed), a $2500 program. It even has a version of Visio bundled for doing application modeling, and that somehow automatically starts producing code, from what I understand. This is going to be interesting to try.
I have had the VS.NET Beta 2 for a few months, and it's generally easy to use, but very slow. I mean, a general "Hello World" application takes several seconds to compile, and also at least 3 seconds to execute! I have done the same thing using the raw
Microsoft is developing a version of the
You obviously didn't read the article.
.NET programs.
Microsoft themselves is developing a runtime for FreeBSD. When I say 'runtime' here I mean the CLR and the *BASIC* class libraries. You see, that is the standard that Microsoft has released to the EMCA as a standard, soon to be certified by ISO. It is completely open, non-patented, etc. Anyone can develop a compatible implementation.
However, a few key components are Windows-only: ADO.NET (universal data access) and WindowsForms (the GUI toolkit.) That is where Mono comes in with the development of compatible class libraries on Linux. Please understand: **the interfaces are the same as the Microsoft interfaces**, even though the implementation details are different.
Microsoft is fully aware of the Mono project and is taking no efforts to stop them. It doesn't really matter if they wanted to. The CLS (Common Language Specification) is part of the OPEN STANDARD. This is the definition of how classes and datatypes interact among languages and the IL; unless Microsoft managed to get a copyright on all the method names in WindowsForms, they can't stop me from creating a compatible implementation because I am simply using the CLS to write my classes that run on the CLR to provide objects for use by
(Short Version: go back and actually read the article, then try posting again.)
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
When your friends ask, just tell them "It's a language-neutral Java knock-off..."
.net is NOT language-neutral. It works well with "managed" languages that are very similar to C# (things like Java), but it fails to support a lot of ingrained things in languages that make them unique and usefull (like multiple inheritence in C/C++). Without this language dependent things, they are just so much foder. You might as well develop in C#.
:)
The only problem with that statement is that it's not true --
However, I've heard that C# is a pretty good knockoff of Java.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
> Anyone who wants to develop for .NET needs to shell out at least $1,079 for Visual Studio
.Net Framework Software Development Kit for free (*connection charges apply) at this link
.NET Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) includes the .NET Framework, as well as everything you need to write, build, test, and deploy .NET Framework applications--documentation, samples, and command-line tools and compilers.
Or... you can go out to MSDN and download the
From the description:
The Microsoft®
Well.
The GAC is reference-counted -- if you no longer have any applications using an assembly in the GAC, it'll get removed (there are some provisos, but that's more or less how it works).
And the GAC does have shared libraries -- it just provides a mechanism for having different versions of those shared libraries. If a bunch of applications all use the same version of the same assembly, then they'll use the same file. So there's still a benefit over static libraries. It just also fixes the problems that have ocurred with dynamic libraries. When they *can* be shared, they will be, but unlike Windows' previous DLL implementations, it doesn't _require_ them to share the same version, even if they're not compatible.
They are developing a FreeBSD port of that incomplete and nearly useless portion that they are submitting as a standard. Real .NET apps will in fact be confined to the Windows platform, unless Mono is much more successful than I suspect it can be.
Just coincidental that Windows XP drops default Java support.
.NET is that you can write in whatever language you want to and use components from other languages in your .NET programs.
.NET is about one and only one thing. Network enabled apps to take the place of Java. The details are different, but the motivation and niche in the marketplace is the same. All the rest is just clever marketing from Redmond, as usual.
First, Java works fine in XP -- you just have to (automatically) download the VM or get it from Sun.
That is precisely what I said. XP drops default Java support.
Secondly, the real advantage of
Look, this is a load of bull and you should know it. Any language that maps onto C# cleanly is the reality. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent you from writing a java bytecode compiler for just about any language, so this is no different either. But simply, java is structured a lot like C or C++ without requiring its programmer to micro-manage memory. So, it is just not that hard to program in.
Also, it won't matter much whether developers like it. Microsoft will practically pay them to write C# apps instead of Java apps, and Microsoft has the bank to do it. Default Java support is gone, which effectively kills it for recreational computer users (client end support, anyway).
No,
Well if you'd read the article then you'd realise that Intel's new Itanium architecture is actually completely unsuited for the kind of JIT techniques used by .NET due to the fact that the CPU doesn't reorder code - it needs the compiler to organise things beforehand.
So I very much doubt that Intel are pushing .NET to wean themselves off of x86...
Anyone who wants to develop for .NET needs to shell out at least $1,079
The Software Development Kit (all necessary dll's, compilers, etc.) is free. There are also a handful of free IDE's.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips