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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.""
>That being said, it does seem like MS is trying to wean themselves out of a strictly x86 world
.NET and write a CLR for it.
Has anyone thought that perhaps Intel (being somewhat friendly with Microsoft) has been pushing this initiative so they can finally put x86 instructions to rest? If Intel has a new processor that doesn't allow x86 instructions (because backward compability would slow it down), all they'd need is Microsoft to force everyone to compile with
Of course, this may not necesarilly be a bad thing. Imagine the speed improvements any processor would have if it didn't require backward compability. The downside is that it'd require a fully-compability CLR.
Sam
Just coincidental that Windows XP drops default Java support.
First, Java works fine in XP -- you just have to (automatically) download the VM or get it from Sun.
Secondly, the real advantage of .NET is that you can write in whatever language you want to and use components from other languages in your .NET programs. Those are hardly minor advances. Java has had a six-year head start, not to mention a vast amount of hype, and if it's the better technology, it'll hang in there. If developers like the .NET stuff better, they'll use that. In all likelihood, there will be a lot of different competing languages which will be good at different things. Nothing wrong with that, IMHO.
Well, you can use any language that happens to look very similar to C#, and which has a CLR compiler. Take a look at some of the languages that have been ported to .NET, and you'll see what I mean. They are modified to look like C# with different syntaxes. Example: Smalltalk# (or whatever it's called). Forget about dynamic typing anymore. Basically, you can use any language so long as it's mauled to look like C# (static typing, etc.) This multiple-language thing is not a big win, really.
So basically it's like the Kaffe version of Java. Kaffe supports the JDK 1.1 without AWT (soon with some 1.2 support). And guess what, not too many people use it. Maybe a couple, but most people are using a fully functional implementation with Swing/AWT and 1.3 libraries.
,tweak your pages and balh blah blah. Java may not be perfect, but all the 'SUN certified JVMs' work. If you run your code on the Sun JVM, it will work on the IBM one. If not then you can call up IBM and report a bug. With a 'standard' language/runtime, there is no controlling entity to guarentee compatability.
I think that the whole C# is a standard argument is BS. Look at JavaScript, it's a standard, has been for a number of years now. Why is it then, that I can write 'standard JavaScript' and IE will interpret it one way, while Mozilla, Netscape and Opera interpret it a slightly different way ( maybe it works, maybe not ). Why are web programmers still writing browser detection code into web pages? I'll tell you why, because it doesn't matter if someone makes a standard if nobody follows it. Not one browser follows the standard perfectly. Mozilla (IMO) comes the closest, but even that is not perfect. You still have to go back
But it's not "any language". It's a collection of languages that are nearly isomorphic with C#. In fact, there are currently many more languages, and more diverse languages, targetted to the JVM than there are to the .NET VM. See, for example, this list, which contains about 160.