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.""

Comments

They've released the dev stuff.

[ratajik]

I haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but they actually released the dev stuff for .NET. Article here

Books, VS.NET, .NET FreeBSD

[XBL]

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.

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 .NET framwork development tools, and it seemed much faster (probably because my hand-written code was much smaller).

Microsoft is developing a version of the .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.

Article is inaccurate.

[Carnage4Life]

Although the article is a decent technical overview of the .NET Framework I don't agree with the articles description of what constitutes .NET. From looking at .NET first hand I prefer Miguel's description of .NET which is

Microsoft .NET strategy encompasses many efforts including: The .NET development platform, a new platform for writing software [.NET Framework discussed in article] Web services Microsoft Server Applications New tools that use the new development platform Hailstorm, the Microsoft .NET Passport-centralized single sign-on system that is being integrated into Microsoft Windows XP. [now called .NET My Services]

Disclaimer: I work at MSFT but this is MY PERSONAL OPINION not some official claim.

Re:Article is inaccurate.

[DrPizza]

Read the first part of the article more closely. I acknowledge that there's more than just the Framework. But I haven't covered them in this article, as it's long enough already. This is what I meant when I said:

.NET is also the collective name given to various bits of software built upon the .NET platform. These will be both products (Visual Studio.NET and Windows.NET Server, for instance) and services (like Passport, HailStorm, and so on).

A follow-up will talk about such things as, VS.NET, Passport, Hailstorm, and so on. I feel that there are broadly two parts -- the framework itself (your first bullet point), and things that use it or manipulate it (your second, third, fourth, and fifth bullet points). I realize I glossed over them, but I will talk about them at a later date.

Re:I honestly can't figure out

[rabtech]

You obviously didn't read the article.

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 .NET programs.

(Short Version: go back and actually read the article, then try posting again.)

Re:Was that so complicated?

[Corrado]

When your friends ask, just tell them "It's a language-neutral Java knock-off..."

The only problem with that statement is that it's not true -- .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#.

However, I've heard that C# is a pretty good knockoff of Java. :)

Re:Why I won't be developing with .NET: $$$

[overturf]

> Anyone who wants to develop for .NET needs to shell out at least $1,079 for Visual Studio

Or... you can go out to MSDN and download the .Net Framework Software Development Kit for free (*connection charges apply) at this link

From the description:
The Microsoft® .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.

Re:dll hell

[DrPizza]

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.

Re:.NET good, not evil

[mmacdona86]

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.