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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. Re:I honestly can't figure out by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    >That being said, it does seem like MS is trying to wean themselves out of a strictly x86 world

    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 .NET and write a CLR for it.

    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

  2. Re:Mod parent up by clontzman · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Microsoft is trying REAL hard not to make it seem like they are re-inventing Java, whereas in fact they are reinventing Java.

    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.

  3. Re:I honestly can't figure out by Steveftoth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 ,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.