.NETly News

Lots of .NET stories in the news today and yesterday; it's a total coincidence that Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot. BrendanL79 writes: "Peter Wright at Salon.com contributes to public awareness of Microsoft's .NET with this exuberant piece. The praise borders on sycophancy ("Gutenberg ... Babbage ... now Gates") with no apparent tongue in his cheek. Comments?" Reader vw writes: "Active State has just released Visual Perl 1.2, Visual Python 1.2, and Visual XSLT 1.2 as plugins for Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET. Wonder how long it will take for a Mono hack." Numerous readers pointed to several stories about a buffer overflow problem in Visual Studio .NET which was supposed to be immune to buffer overflows - but it had passed Microsoft's stringent new security audit.

Comments

Perl, Python under .NET?

[Ed Avis]

I don't think there's any big deal in ActiveState's visual Perl/Python/whatever editors. They are 'compatible with Visual Studio .NET'. What that means is that they integrate with the Visual Studio IDE - *not* that ActiveState have managed to compile Perl into .net bytecode.

At least, I assume that's the case. If somebody had managed to create .NET compilers for Perl and Python, we'd surely have heard about it by now...

Re:Am I the only person who is hesitent about this

[DutchSter]

No, you're not. I think that the overall concept might have some promise, but I do have a problem with the idea that an entity will running the whole show. What scares me most is that ultimately, we are moving towards zero human contact. No longer do you go to the grocery store and run into your old friend from across town and chit chat for 15 minutes while making your selections.

I'm reminded of the movie Sneakers when Martin and his old friend (the villian) are on the roof and the villian is going on about how it's a new world, it's all electrons, just little ones and zeros. Everything is the information, the information is everything. It's a brave new world for humanity.. Martin's response is 'yeah, and there's nobody there' -- So we'll all have our PDAs and phones and everything, but who is there really to talk to? Get out, get some air, meet some REAL people and have some fun the old way.

Not does the technology have the ability to move our lives into greater convenience, but at the same time, to isolate us from ourselves and each other.

That, to me, is the scary part - not so much some marketer having a profile on me.

Re:Am I the only person who is hesitent about this

[frob2600]

I also agree that the lack of human contact would be a bad thing. First off, we could not drink anymore as popular definition defines someone who drinks alone as an alcoholic. But seriously, I think that we are moving away from personal contact which is very important to mental health. It is true that you can converse with people online but it is not the same as sitting around a table with a pitcher of beer and shooting the sh?t for a few hours.

Although I think that this new technology is going to take away from those accidental meetings I hope that, if it delivers on its promise, it will provide more time to create opportunities for human interaction. But then again, all the technology that we create to save time seems to require more time than we save to keep the technology saving us time. Wordy but true. I don't advocate a return to simpler times... I would die without my connection to the internet. But a week or two where I could just focus on getting to know the people around me while also getting to know more about the earth I am on would be a great thing.

Anyone for a camping trip? If you have 15 km of optical cable just laying around... we could run it down to our site and not miss /. around the campfire.

Peter Wright makes his money from MS

[isaac]

Read the bio blurb at the end of the article - the author has written a pair of books on programming in VisualBasic and has 2 books on .Net coming out this year. Hmmm... might he have some stake in .Net's widespread adoption?

-Isaac

This is not news. Doesn't ANYONE study history

[Maury Markowitz]

Once again I find myself ashamed to be a part of an industry that can't remember anything five years into the past. .NET has been done before, many times. The only news here is the hype, as always.

Let's see, unified runtime, libraries of code with multiple versions, simplified networked object support, standardized metadata...

OpenStep circa 1995.

Sure, OS used plists instead of XML (which didn't exist), a private system instead of UDDI (which didn't exist) and was aimed at C people instead of Java (whichy didn't exist) but the broad strokes are the same:

A multi-platform runtime with standardized libraries, which can exist as multiple versions (with resources) at the same time, with objects that can write themselves out so they can be manipulated as flat data (for storage or network invocation).

The differences are interesting too, .net includes more security features (useful in some contexts) and is multi-language instead of multi-platform. This last issue is a practical one only, at least until Mono is working. And they decided to go multi-language via an IDL, which I consider to be moronic (OpenStep used fat binaries, faster, smaller, better, realistic).

I'm sure other "old timers" will have their own similar systems to include for comparison, but the real point is not that OpenStep did it, but that SOMEONE did it.

And years later no one is using OS (mostly), whereas I'm sure five years from now .net will be one of the most used systems out there. That's the power of marketting. Look how well it worked on the droid on Salon.

Maury

Salon lost major tech and street cred

[coyote-san]

When I read that Salon puff piece last night, I had to check my calendar. Twice. Yet it stubbornly refused to be April Fools Day.

I wouldn't have minded a piece on .NET. I wouldn't have minded, much, a softball piece on .NET.

But that fawning piece of crap was inexcusable. It was clearly written by the marketing department - no tech would ever favorably compare Bill Gates to Guttenberg - but it was presented as a straight story.

Now I'm going to find it impossible to take any other story the post seriously. I will always have to ask who really wrote the piece.

That's a shame - Salon has been a good thorn in the side of the powerful for a long time. Look at the old stories on the "Drug Czar" paying for anti-drug messages in prime time entertainment shows, or their coverage of the RIAA. But now there will always be a loud voice in the back of my head asking if this is another PR piece by the powerful.

.Net as a marketing strategy

[NumberSyx]

First, let's get the myth out of the way. .Net is not a product. It's a marketing term,

This is probably the most telling statment of the whole article. .Net is not about a new way of using computers, cool technology, security or any of the other things Microsoft is spouting. .Net is a buzz word driven marketing push and nothing else. It is not going to solve any problems that have not already been solved, introduce any new technology or bring world peace. Microsoft is going to spend the next several years spending billions of dollars to bring us .Net Notepad, .Net Solitaire and the new and improved .Net Virus.

I capped my karma a few days ago, so feel free to moderate me down, just don't expect me to care.

Re:Am I the only person who is hesitent about this

[clontzman]

I agree that we still need people, but never having to deal with a rude customer service person, distracted airline reservations agent or disinterested store clerk again is a future I can get behind.

At Kroger in Atlanta you can check yourself out with a mostly automated system (you still need a guy to manage every four units to check IDs and whatnot) that allows you to check out without having to deal with lines or bored cashiers.

Let's face it -- there are some things machines do better than people and ringing up groceries is only one of them (booking most airline tickets is another). The only advantage a cashier has over a machine is the ability to smile and ask how my day is, and if he/she isn't going to bother to do that, I'll take a machine any day.

But stackguard is an option.

[Otis_INF]

You can decide not to use it: /GS is the compiler switch flag to turn it on. When I check the C++ project I worked on the last couple of days in VC++.NET, it sets the flag ON by default. (which is ok by me, it saved my already yesterday when it reported the stackframe was corrupted after a bad memset() ;))

Switching it OFF will turn off the stackguard functionality and you can build your code without it, but have to check buffer overflows yourself.

So it's perhaps wise to switch it ON in debug builds plus release builds that are tested, and switch it OFF in release builds that are deployed to customers.

CFR

[istartedi]

Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot.

This simply won't do. We must have Campaign Finance Reform for the IT industry. Because Slashdot is receiving money from MS, they must be corrupt. Therefore, it should be illegal for MS to place ads 60 days before the release of a new product.

In all seriousness, if you only read Slashdot you might think that the DMCA is the only threat to free speech. Peal yourself away from the CRT a little bit and wake up to what a bunch of jerks we have in congress. It's like the constitution just fell of a high-wire, and fell through the first net. Now if the president signs this bill it will fall through the 2nd net, and if the Supreme Court doesn't wack it our freedom will fall into the abyss. You would never know that if you just read Slashdot.

This post paid for by the Radical National Committee to Criticize Politicians less than 60 days before an election.