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What is .NET?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the funny-you-should-ask dept.

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.""

3 of 505 comments (clear)

  1. Was that so complicated? by JohnDenver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    .NET is a "software platform". It's a language-neutral environment for writing programs that can easily and securely interoperate. Rather than targetting a particular hardware/OS combination, programs will instead target ".NET", and will run wherever .NET is implemented.

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

    Why do people try to make it more complicated? Ok, .NET never interprets bytecode, rather it does JIT compiling. Big deal. Ok, .NET uses SOAP as it's RPC conduit. Yawn. .NET offers Passport for developers who don't want to write thier own user authentication and may want to offer thier users the convienence of not having to enter thier condo's address. *snore* (wipe drool from mouth in a dazed stupor)

    Others like to confuse the application that can be written by .NET (You can write them in most other languages too) like Web Services and equate .NET with Web Services, when Web Services are just one type of program you can make in .NET

    The Platform != It's Applications

    It's Simple: It's a Java rip off!

    --
    "Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
  2. Review misplaces priorities by RovingSlug · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is perhaps a little disappointing. ... But these features are somewhat notable omissions from Microsoft's first release; profiling JIT compilers are becoming common in the Java world, and optimizing native code compilers are becoming the norm, with considerable benefits from their use.

    Stability before performance, every time.

    Or he'd rather be writing, "The JIT produces fast code, but sometimes crashes."? Or, ".NET is vaporware, still three to five years on the horizon."?

    The reviewer should recognize and applaud the focus of the developers. Because you know they were sitting around saying, "Wouldn't it be nice if we did this fancy optimization...". Instead, they put first things first.

    "Premature optimization is the root of all evil," D.E. Knuth. Learn it. Live it.

  3. Actually excited about .NET by Tom7 · · Score: 5, Insightful


    I'm excited about .NET (when I say that, I mean the CLR). I think it's an idea (while not very original) whose time has come. I think that superior technologies exist (for instance, stuff like typed assembly language), but none are really mature enough to be rolled out across the board.

    And really, Microsoft.com is the only one that could manage to make this a reality. As much as I hate the company, I can't help but feel grateful that I'll finally be able to write apps in a nice high-level type safe garbage collected language and have that be the most well-supported method. (And if others start using high-level languages, maybe my computer will not crash so much, or have so many buffer overflow sercurity holes.)

    (As an aside... I fucking hate when people (like the author of this otherwise good article) use the word 'whilst'. Just say 'while'. It's not like we live in Medieval Britain.)