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.

Was that so complicated?

[JohnDenver]

.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!

Re:I honestly can't figure out

[Anonymous Coward]

>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

Review misplaces priorities

[RovingSlug]

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.

Re:Mod parent up

[clontzman]

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.

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: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.

Actually excited about .NET

[Tom7]

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.)

Re:I honestly can't figure out

[Steveftoth]

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.