Microsoft Drops .NET Name For Next Windows Server

metamatic writes "C|net is reporting that Microsoft is dropping the name "Windows .NET Server" and going back to "Windows Server 200x" (where x is currently expected to be 3). Other products with .NET in the name are also being evaluated for renaming. Analysts are being quoted as saying that slapping .NET on so many Microsoft products has confused people as to what .NET actually means. Or could it be that customers know what it means, but nobody wants to buy it?" Obiwan Kenobi points out a similar article at ENT News

Comments

Full of Holes...

[akiy]

A net, by defition, is full of holes...

Re:Full of Holes...

[Anonymous Coward]

defition

Yes, that's right. A net is where you put "de fish in".

Re:Full of Holes...

[msheppard]

new name = Sieve Server 2003

M@

Re:Full of Holes...

[rbolkey]

No, that's not the net they are talking about. The net they're talking about is short for network, which is something fishermen do with nets.

Re:Full of Holes...

[Trick]

Well, yes, but a DOT net has very small ones.

Re:Full of Holes...

[skinfitz]

Well, yes, but a DOT net has very small ones.

Is that NetBIAS?

is it time?

[smack_attack]

Is it time to start callng it Microsoft bob.NET?

Confusion?

[_ph1ux_]

I agree with the bit about confusion....

I was very confused (and still am) to exactly what .NET is - and palladium for that matter. I asked here on slashdot what they were and the major differnces between the two.

Someone posted a link to an MS page that supposedly explained what they were - but it still was very vague and didnt help much.

So - anyone out there clear on what .NET is and maybe palladium for that matter who would care to expound on the merits of this wonderful technology?

Re:Confusion?

[larien]

.NET is their buzzword compliant strategy including SOAP, XML, Web services and their latest plan to crush competitors. Somewhere in there is the ditched Hailstorm/Passport plan for world domination.

Palladium is the DRM, sorry, secure platform where the idea is that a Palladium enabled OS will only run signed apps, presumably adding security by not running any viruses, worms and any haxxor tools. Of course, this means any open source will not work in a Palladium OS because of the difficulty of getting an open source app signed.

That's my understanding of the two, but I'm not 100% sure; it's been difficult trying to work out exactly what .NET really means...

Re:Confusion?

[arkhan_jg]

.NET has already been answered fairly well.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html is a good faq (in english, not geek ;)

A sample ----

2. What does TCPA / Palladium do, in ordinary English?

It provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with the vendor. The obvious application is digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a Palladium platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.

TCPA / Palladium will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software. Pirate software can be detected and deleted remotely. It will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buying it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created. For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: Palladium could be the answer to his prayer.

There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists. Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.

There is a downside too. There will be remote censorship: the mechanisms designed to delete pirated music under remote control may be used to delete documents that a court (or a software company) has decided are offensive - this could be anything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders. Software companies can also make it harder for you to switch to their competitors' products; for example, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor.

Re:Confusion?

[Arethan]

Everyone is complaining that Palladium will kill open source on Win32. I can't help but agree, but there is another angle to this as well. What happens to the small programming shops? I can think of plenty of times when one of my previously employing companies wrote small (sometimes throwaway) apps for clients. Sometimes it was for data massaging, sometimes it was a quick front end to something normally complicated.

The cold fact is that I can't see small businesses providing custom software solutions for clients surviving if Palladium is released. The cost to have throw away apps signed (not to mention the time delay involved) will utterly destroy them.

Unless of course the application signing is much simpler than that. Simply trusting a company as a whole, rather than a particular application. Trusting an entire company will allow small businesses to sign their own code. Of course, that also means that the DRM is pointless because a single hacked network will result in signed viruses.

If MS goes ahead with Palladium, I'll be keeping my eye out for the first virus to fool the OS into rejecting every app, regardless of signature. Perfect DOS attack. Can't do anything but reinstall from the installation media, if your DRM bios will let you that is...

Re:Confusion?

[nelsonal]

One of microsoft's test sites was a shipbuilder, the .Net features allowed the managers to setup MS Project schedules, and foremen could fire up their PocketPC handhelds and see what their teams were working on that day. Other examples would be allowing you to check on flight status with your cell phone or PDA.
Its really just a buzzword laden branding strategy, that MS is using to try to convince people that web services, are all that and a bag of chips. Web services seem to be a fancy name for using xml to provide more useful data to end users of the data.

Re:Confusion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this all true? I was under the impression that .NET was a different four things:

1. Developers

2. Developers

3. Developers

4. Developers

At least, that's what that Ballmer guy said.

Re:Confusion?

[Proc6]

I write C#.NET stuff almost every day. All .NET is is a framework. A collection of programming objects that let you build apps by fitting them together, and writing the glue, rather than re-inventing the wheel everytime. If you know what the Java classes are, or MFC, .NET is very similar. .NET objects can be accessed by writing command line apps, windows GUI apps, and ASP web-apps. It makes it very nice to be able to know the same language for all 3, at least to me. I liked Perl for CGI, but couldnt use it to make a GUI app very easily. VB was queer, but worked for GUI apps, but not very strong for complicated apps. .NET framework includes a bunch of objects for dealing with everything from I/O to Databases to XML and Webservices.

Re:Confusion?

[NetFu]

What was the app? I've been working with .NET development for about 6 months and everything I've used on every hardware from 400MHz Celeron's to 3GHz P4's has run very, very fast. And IMO, C# is incredibly easy to program simple stuff in -- reminds me of when I started programming on that Commodore PET in 1979-1980 (hmm, from PET to .NET? cool...)

Also, what language was it in? ".NET" could be practically any language supported in Windows -- C, C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, among others. Also, you know there's a separate .NET Embedded, right? Probably more tuned for a phone, I would think (not to mention that any program developed for a phone would have to be different in some way from the desktop version -- not a straight port).

Anyway, I'd love to take a look at any .NET app that ran slowly -- it'd be a first for me to see that...

Re:Confusion?

[archen]

Those were my thoughts as well until I realized that microsoft is going to have major problems for one reason: scripting. Are they just going to say "No Scripting" on windows? I really don't see any practical way to ever "trust" a script of any sort. So I would imagine Microsoft will be putting "untrusted" applications in some sort of sandbox (and probably a disadvantage as some sort of penalty).

Small time apps will always be there no matter what MS wants. What Microsoft will eventually find is that their lack of open / free development tools is going to be a continual drag on windows development. I couldn't even begin to name all the development tools / languages you can use on Linux. On windows there is only a handfull and most if it is controlled by MS and is far from cheap. All this "trusted computing" stuff is just going to make Linux development more appealing.

Re:Confusion?

[JohnFluxx]

Also note that even if the OS allows unsigned apps etc, your unsigned app sure won't be allowed access to the data that you want to manipulate, since that will probably be in some signed database program.

Re:Confusion?

[esarjeant]

TBPH, I think Microsoft is attempting to conquor the elusive remote object invocation problem.

At first, it seemed like some version of RPC might solve this problem. And then a little bit later, developers were promised that CORBA was the future. Somewhere in there OSF/DCE made a lot of promises. And then Microsoft threw COM out there, and tried to spruce up some security issues with COM+...

Eventually EJB took hold, and now we have yet another way to remotely invoke objects via SOAP.

While things are looking up, I think most developers are fairly frustrated at this point. After grappling with IDL's and disparate RPC mechanisms, IUnknown and VisualBasic... I think unless there is a conserted effort by the industry to address remote object invocations (including a robust security model) then all of these attempts will continue to flounder.

Re:Confusion?

[mrkurt]

If .net is really about trying to solve the problem of remote object invocation, why do it in pretty much the same manner that Java does it-- with a language runtime that, as it turns out, will run only on Windows, which slaps another layer on top of COM and essentially abandons DCOM? Why not instead just extend Visual Studio 6 COM/DCOM and make it easier to use XML, SOAP, and other web services protocols to do remote method invocations? As it is, it seems like .net imposes a performance penalty on Windows machines-- applications are slow.

The only answer I can come up with is that .net is about locking developers, and therefore enterprises, into Windows. I conclude that .net is about a specific technology, and other object technologies (RPC, CORBA, SOAP) are about standards. In a perfect world, standards win every time, but MS will always see its best interest in forking away from standards to uphold its market share. I have been a Visual Basic developer up to this point, and I appreciate having COM as an object model and bus. I have been giving other object platforms a serious look, though, as well as the open source tools associated with them, to see if it makes any sense to adopt one or the other.

Re:Confusion?

[NineNine]

Sounds like .Net = COM objects. If that's the case, why don't people just describe .NET this way?

Re:Confusion?

[ConceptJunkie]

It provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with the vendor.


Sounds good so far...

The obvious application is digital rights management (DRM):

Which, of course, is only of value to the seller.


Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a Palladium platform, but which you won't be able to copy.

Which means I have to buy new hardware to play the new media. This is consistent for a company that will only sell their old movies "for a limited time" to artificially and capriciously drive up demand.

The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap.


Yeah, but I'll need a computer to play them. No listening in the car anymore... unless I buy more new, expensive, and needlessly complex hardware.

They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able
to play three times, or only on your birthday.

No they won't. I would never buy such a product. Of course, the analog hole still exists. I've got a video capture card that does great analog audio capture. I've used it to make nice digital copies of casette recording I made as a kid.

All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.

Especially given that companies will deceive, if not downright lie to you. All kinds of new ways to screw the consumer. Of course, all these new electronics gizmos you will _have_ to buy will be complicated to use and prone to malfunctions (at least as first, but always harder to use than their pre-DRM counterparts). You don't need a degree in UI design to play a Victrola, but how many people can use all the features of their stereos or DVD players these days? How much fun will people have when not understanding your hardware prevents you from playing your media? ("I bought this 3-use DVD from Disney (a subsudiary of Evilco) but I only watched the first 30 minutes three times, because my mother called, the power went out, one of the kids wet his pants, etc, etc. Now I can't finish it...")


TCPA / Palladium will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software.


So much for software development, one of my hobbies. So much for Open Source software. Oh you say I can become a licensed software provider? For a "nominal" annual fee? Whoopie! I'll pay for that! NOT!


Pirate software can be detected and deleted remotely. It will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buying it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created.


So now companies can take over your computer and arbitrarily delete things. I'm sure that will _always_ work correctly and _never_ be misused, because everyone is completely competent and honest. We should always take every opportunity to give complete strangers control over us, because they know what's best.


For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: Palladium could be the answer to his prayer.


Not if they keep using Windows 2000 on existing hardware. Recall that these days the primary driving force for selling the latest and greatest hardware is 1.) Microsoft's (and others) increasingly bloated and inefficient software, and 2.) gaming. I use c. 400 MHz processors and don't feel like I'm missing out for 90% of what I do.


There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists.


Remember that joke about the dumb blonde photocopying her monitor to print out her document?


Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.


And that will _never_ be compromised, because it's never happened in the past.


There is a downside too.


No, really?

Sure, there will be some benefits, but as with everything in modern life, the trade-off will be much more complexity and hassle to do things that were formerly simple, and still more aspects of your life will be subject to being screwed up by the ineptness or malice of a complete stranger.

Sign me up!

Re:Confusion?

[shyster]

Mod the parent up. He's the first one with half a clue on what .NET is, rather than what MS is positioning on what .NET can do.

Don't forget, however, that the .NET Framework also means that (theoretically, at least...and in reality for the most part) you can write in C#.NET, VB.NET, etc. and still have access to the same objects...so you can keep the language you're most familiar with.

Also, .NET allows multiple versions of shared libraries, ending "DLL Hell" (which really hasn't been a problem for around 5 years, but whatever). It's also allows for granular and inheritable permissions on program's actions (Program X is allowed to access the network, therefore Component Y called by Program X is allowed to access the network)...though it requires a good development team that knows what they're doing and does it properly (so it probably won't work out too well).

SOAP, XML, and Web Services are really just applications and languages of .NET...and a vision of MS's future program services (where your program can call on another program located on your server, or halfway around the world, to process data and return it...sort of like a global #include)...but it's not really living up to the hype yet.

If you're not a developer or system admin, .NET means very little to you. If you're a developer, you probably should look into it, unless you're into Java. System Admins can probably wait a year or so before playing with Windows 2003 Server and some actual .NET applications.

Re:Confusion?

[tftp]

foremen could fire up their PocketPC handhelds and see what their teams were working on that day.

I worked with architects and construction people, this should be close to shipbuilding. I *guarantee* that no foreman would even *think* of getting any usable info from a Palm Pilot. A foreman has heaps of A0 drawings (if you don't know what A0 size is, check it out), and most of those drawings are already in his head.

A foreman does not *need* a computer. It is too slow, and has too low a resolution. Each drawing has tens of thousands pixels across, and we used all of those pixels - a building is long, and each room and each wall have their dimensions, and these dimensions must be readable.

Also, a foreman does not need to check his Palm Pilot to know what his team is doing. That is because he is right there, with his team, running from one work site to another, checking the work and giving instructions all the time. That's what his job is about - not "checking his Palm Pilot".

Frequently a foreman needs to talk to an engineer who oversees the construction. Then he reaches for his walkie-talkie, or walks to the office, usually with drawings in hand. Then he sits with the architect, who then draws sketches for him to explain this corner, or that insulation layer. A computer here is mostly useless, since pen and drafting paper are much faster. Pen is also easier to use, especially if a foreman does not have a university education.

Computers are widely used as drafting tools, and they do this job reasonably well. But computer manipulation of drawings is not something that even an architect is good with. Most architects prefer pen and paper, and they all draw very well. Maintenance of the drawings is something that only draftsmen do.

Re:Confusion?

[Malcontent]

"Some .NET programs already run on other platforms - namely Mono enabled *nix."

Yes trivial hello world ones and maybe other non gui apps which don't connect to a database. I guess that maybe somewhere around .001% of apps run on mono. I guess that means some to you. Mono is not even close being a mature product what is it's version number? .17. You point to a version .17 CLR and say that it runs some windows apps and expect me to take you seriously?

".NET runs in a virtual machine; its entire standard library is documentated, and it uses standardized plain text formats for communication. "

Documented and open are different things.

" Apparently working at MS makes one very adept at wordplay.

You never quit do you? Are you this rude to all total strangers?

1. Some .NET programs already run on other platforms - namely Mono enabled *nix.

2. .NET runs in a virtual machine; its entire standard library is documentated, and it uses standardized plain text formats for communication.

3. There are no technical barriers that are impossible to overcome which prevent .NET apps from running cross-platform.

"4. The only barriers that exisit are in fact legal. We will have to see how they turn out."

Given the past behaviour or MS I think we can take a fair guess at how this is going to turn out.

"Satisified now? Or are you just going to continue to be an asshole?"

I think I will continue to be an asshole as long as MS trolls like you get modded up so high here on slashdot.

Listen cross platform languages are hard but they are not rocket science. Open source developers have written PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby, and a ton of other languages and toolkits that allow you to write cross platform applications. Of course somehow Sun managed to write java which does the same thing too.

Either MS programmers are very very stupid and can't manage to write a cross platform CLR or MS does not want to. My guess is the latter.

Re:Confusion?

[shyster]

I'm not sure you understand here. The .NET Framework is a collection of objects (similar to the Win32 API's) that all .NET managed code has access to. Managed .NET code must be written with certain constraints, however.

C++ is not designed with these constraints in mind. Managed C++ is, basically, C++ following those constraints (and is a mess). C# is a new language designed around those constraints, using similar syntax to C++ and Java (to make it easier to learn). VB.NET is a rewrite of Visual Basic that gives it a lot of the power of C++, but retains some of VB's simpler syntax (to make it easier to learn). They're not different only in syntax, though...there are differences in rules and functions as well. Sure, you can write programs that do the same things in VB.NET as in C#, but some things are easier in one than the other...which has pretty much always been the case with different programming languages.

Standard C++ can be compiled with /clr and will be compiled to IL bytecode, therefore using CLR. You can not, however, use standard C++ to access the .NET Framework...that requires managed C++ (or another .NET safe language).

But, C# and VB.NET aren't the only languages out there. ActiveState has Python.NET and Perl.NET, there's COBOL.NET, Fortran.NET, Forth.NET, and even Pascal.NET (and many others).

But, managed code is a new addition to .NET that requires some adoptions in the programming languages. Why didn't MS port C++ or VB6 to .NET? They pretty much did...it's called Visual C++.NET and Visual Basic.NET.

Like I said, if you're not a Windows developer (which you don't seem to be), then this largely means nothing to you.

Re:Hmmm

[filth grinder]

When does Micro$oft plan to drop the $ from their name?

oh wait...

Dot Net

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill: Nobody wants dotnet!
MS Marketing : Let's rename it and fool the bastards
Ballmer: * grin *

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This is hardly news...

[MonTemplar]

Actually, I think it's more like what they did when they changed Windows NT 5.0 to Windows 2000 - hoping to ditch all the bad news (mainly delays in getting to a working product) associated with the former name.

Wired Article

[bahwi]

There's a blurb about it at the bottom of this Wired Article.

One quote "Microsoft also is re-evaluating the ubiquitous name's use on other software." adds another dimension to this than just taking it off of the Windows 2003 Server.

For a very detailed explanation...

[NickSD]

check out The Ars article on .NET

What is .NET?

[r]

i've been able to find at least three distinct meanings of the .NET tag:

1. in the web development circles, it's used for next-generation tools and services for writing web applications. for example, ASP.NET, SOAP RPC, and various other web- and XML-based services
   
   
2. in the web customer services domain, it was going to be a secure roaming account scheme, a.k.a. the Passport .NET
   
   
3. most interestingly, in the windows application development domain, .NET is also used to describe the .NET Framework, a new set of libraries that's meant to slowly replace the standard Win32/64 libraries (see articles at ars technica for really detailed info). the framework is basically a cleaned-up, garbage-collected, language-agnostic version of Win32. it's great. but hardly anyone thinks about it when they hear .NET-this or .NET-that. :)
   

in any case, the semantic shift of the label .NET has surely caused MS much grief. it's about time they cleaned it up.

Re:What is .NET?

[harvardian]

ASP.NET is "a compiled .NET Framework-based environment" (from gotdotnet.com) -- so basically it's a subset of the Framework with its own quirks like .aspx files that automatically compile. To illustrate this point, Response.Write() from ASP has turned into System.Web.HttpResponse.Write() in ASP.NET. So all of ASP.NET's functionality is in the global namespace, and ASP.NET can access the rest of the namespace hierarchy like any other program.

Also, the entire .NET Framework is designed with XML-based services in mind, not just ASP.NET. Most (all?) classes can be serialized and passed around to be discovered by reflection.

Not just because it was on every product.

[fireboy1919]

Rule #1 when creating technical terms is
"Don't reuse a term that is already in use in a similar domain."

This is pretty much exactly what Microsoft did. Putting a "." before a three letter word has become synonymous with meaning the webpage that displays the product. It is likely that some managers heard of visual studio .net and immediately checked "visualstudio.net" to find out what the name of the latest version of visual studio was.

Plus, "net" is short for internet. That's nuts. We live in a world where a great many people don't know the difference between a webbrowser and an operating system. There's no way these people would be able to distinguish an internet api called "internet" from the internet.

Its probably because they weren't really getting their corporate message across to consumers. I hear that the new API that they're building into all of their products is to be called "Owns You!"

Re:This is hardly news...

[DaytonCIM]

Good point. Going one step farther... I believe that Microsoft never got behind .NET. Sure, there was a mild push last year, but then *poof* no more push.

They had really pretty sections in most book stores for the VAST number of .NET books, but really there was never a "Microsoft type" marketing push. Maybe because there wasn't a "product" to push? .NET RIP 2003

from what I understand

[greechneb]

.net means that when some clutz driving a forklift makes a mistake, the price of wine in china goes up?

That's all I got from the commercial
</sarcasm>

ActiveX

[Iamthefallen]

I've said it before, but I'll repeat myself, MS is run by lawyers and marketing people who don't consider any technical aspects of what they're doing. MS messed up bad with the ActiveX craze and maybe this influenced the move away from the .Net name. Very few still understand what .Net actually is, and MS isn't helping. I really wish they could have some of their techs/programmers sit down and write a coherent explanation/introduction, without lawyer/marketing influence. It took me a looong time to get a grip on it, simply because any MS material is so filled with buzzwords and marketing terms.

For those that still don't know what .Net is, it's like an MS version of J2EE, not Java, J2EE. It's a architecture with among other things a large class library and a cross platform runtime that all .Net languages can run under.

Ok, so it's not 100% accurate, but close enough.

Re:This is hardly news...

[silicon_synapse]

From the article:
Analysts are being quoted as saying that slapping .NET on so many Microsoft products has confused people as to what .NET actually means.

Your comment:
They are changing the name because people are getting confused about what .NET really is. It was a bad idea for Microsoft to try to add ".NET" to every single product they sell.

Where's +5 Insightfull coming from?

Much misunderstanding about .NET

[Junks Jerzey]

I've seen a number of posts trying to clarify what .NET is, and they're missing the point. .NET isn't just about web services and so on, which in itself is a good reason to change the name. .NET is a major attempt to shed legacy Windows problems and modernize both Windows itself and Windows application development. If you read the .NET and C# documents, you'll see this. For example, if you want to write a GUI application for Windows today, you have to use one of (a) raw Win32 API, (b) MFC, (c) a cross-platform toolkit like WxWindows, or (d) a tool like Delphi or Visual Basic. By a large margin, the last of these is the cleanest and least stressful--if you're only concerned about Windows that is (of course you can get Delphi for Linux in the guise of Kylix). But .NET is bringing the GUI building features of Delphi and Visual Basic to the OS, so there's support for this from the ground up. Ditto for technologies like DirectX 9. No more do you have to deal with arcane C++ interfaces to COM, you can use a pretty little C# component.

In short, Microsoft is deprecating most of the Win32 API, making .NET the preferred method for developing Windows applications. If don't like C#, that's okay. Microsoft has been getting indepdendent language developers to port their own languages to .NET, including lesser used languages like Smalltalk, APL, and Mercury.

As much as I hate to say it, .NET could be a huge win. No more struggling with Petzold books, just use the much simpler .NET components. No need to hang onto awful legacy frameworks like MFC, which even Microsoft employees hate. No more having to choose between C++ and much slower scripting languages like Python for application development, just use C#.

Re:Much misunderstanding about .NET

[Herkum01]

NET is a major attempt to shed legacy Windows

HEY that is Linux's strategy! They cannot come with ANYTHING on their own anymore!

Re:Much misunderstanding about .NET

[MeanMF]

Pardon the ignorance, but what exactly is/are the differences between C# and C++ ? Is C# meant to replace C++?

Just think of it as MSJava without the trademark infringement. C# is actually more of a threat to replace VB than C++, since C# and VB are both run completely inside the .NET runtime and have just about the same features. C++ is still the language of choice for lower-level programming such as system utilities and device drivers. C++ offers a lot more flexibility to the programmer at the expense of additional complexity.

Re:This is hardly news...

[HiredMan]

when they changed Windows NT 5.0 to Windows 2000 - hoping to ditch all the bad news

Actually I think this was also the first real push made by M$ to go to leased software.

Naming your Word Processor or Office Suite after the year makes no sense at all unless you plan to release a new one every year like they do cars. They get rid of the Y.X naming - which actually provides information to the consumer if you use it correctly - and start getting people used to naming like "Word 2000".
That way it seems more natural when you pay for Word 2003 and then pay again for Word 2004 then next...
Cause it better you know... the numbers bigger...

=tkk

Win XP has something to do with it

[avandesande]

One thing that really differentiated the difference between .net applications and win32 ones was their appearance, which is different much like the way java apps look different. When Win XP came along with all the skins, this difference has evaporated. WinXP and .net apps have definitly taken some hints from kde/gnome world.

Re:This is hardly news...

[squiggleslash]

You know what Java is? Language, virtual machine, libraries, etc? Create apps that will "run anywhere", and an environment which is a kind-of networked execution infrastructure?

.NET is an attempt to do the same thing. Not a clone of Java, but like DOS and CP/M, or Windows and MacOS, etc.

If I were in marketing, I'd say both .NET and Java are attempts to build operating systems for the Internet (as opposed to operating systems for computers.)

Re:what I don't understand...

[Proc6]

If .NET was really a bet-the-business proposition, they might as well call the product what it is.

Which is exactly what they're doing. .NET Server was a misnomer, as it is strictly WindowsNT/2K code with the latest IIS and .NET Framework installed.

A real .NET Windows will appear when the entire OS runs as managed code along with the rest of .NET. This next server OS is exactly what they've renamed it to, Windows 2003 Server.

Re:No no no....

[kliment]

Nah, they can't do that, they'd be infringing on EA Sports' patented game naming scheme

haha

[autopr0n]

From the slashdot blurb:

Analysts are being quoted as saying that slapping .NET on so many Microsoft products has confused people as to what .NET actually means.

The entirety of your comment:

They are changing the name because people are getting confused about what .NET really is. It was a bad idea for Microsoft to try to add ".NET" to every single product they sell.

And you got modded +3 Insightful! Not +5 yet, but just wait. All you did was change the wording around, and not even that much!

what happened to the days would at least try to add tons of superfluous fluff around their restatements of the article when trying to karma whore.

Thank GOD!

[divide overflow]

I'm *SO* happy Microsoft is dropping the .NET from the server name. Every time a client would ask me what .NET was I would think:

"Well, let's see...I can confuse him, anger him, or put him to sleep. Maybe I should fake a heart attack right now...."

heh

[autopr0n]

What's funny is that Java's networking API is called java.net. You know, like Java.io, java.util, java.awt.image, etc.

I've coded in java for years, and done lots of networking stuff in it, using java.net. But even then, during the height of the .net marketing push I was looking through the API for the first time in a while and saw "java.net" and it immediately made me think of .net, and made me wonder why there was .net support in J2SE. Then I came to my senses :P

Re:This is hardly news...

[AKnightCowboy]

Actually, I think it's more like what they did when they changed Windows NT 5.0 to Windows 2000 - hoping to ditch all the bad news (mainly delays in getting to a working product) associated with the former name.

Hey, I have an idea. Now, this is going to sound kind of crazy and I know I'm a little ahead of my time, but what if we were to simplify the name and give it a meaningful version number? We could call the next released version Windows 7.0. Microsoft Windows 7.0. It could be a HUGE media frenzy! "No XP, no 2000, no .NET.. just 7.0. The added benefit is that when a new upgrade comes out we can name it Windows 7.1 and people can tell that it is a NEWER and more advanced version!"

Re:Passport dead?

[Tim C]

Passport still exists, but I think that take up has been much slower than MS wanted (ie virtually nonexistant). In fact, to order evaluation copies of Windows XP Professional and Office XP, I had to sign up for a Passport. To sign on to Hotmail (in IE 6 only?) or MSN Messenger, at least, you have to associate a Passport account with your XP user account, so no, Passport is not exactly dead.

.NET My Services, formerly Halistorm, is (currently) dead. The computing industry and target clients essentially told MS where to shove it.

Re:This is hardly news...

[freeweed]

I thought that's what C# was all about - cloning Java.

Re:This is hardly news...

[squiggleslash]

C# is analogous to the Java language. The CLR (or is it CIL? Or CLI? I can never quite remember) is analogous to the Java byte-code, etc. .NET is basically the all-encompassing name for the whole thing.

Remember that Java is a language, a plug-in, a virtual machine, and half a dozen other things. Ironically, Microsoft's difficulty at explaining what, exactly, .NET is, is despite the fact that they've done a better job of breaking it up into seperate, easily named, modules, unlike Sun who have generally called the whole thing "Java" (well, ok, they've called different Java bundles things like J2EE, J2SE, J2ME, Java2, JavaOne, etc..., but that's another story.)

Maybe someone should go the extreme opposite and create a language/VM system called "*grunt*".

"What's the VM called?" *grunt* "Well, ok, what's the language?" *grunt* "Ok, what's the marketing term for this?" *grunt* "Geez. Ok, what's the classname for a window?" *grunt*...etc... you get the idea.

Puzzled.

[miguel]

I am puzzled that a project rename would generate 298 posts in Slashdot. I guess everyone had an opinion.

Re:This is hardly news...

[rseuhs]

.NET is like Java, but it only runs de-facto on Microsoft platforms (in theory it will run on BSD too, but important parts are missing)

Re:This is hardly news...

[Schnapple]

but really there was never a "Microsoft type" marketing push. Maybe because there wasn't a "product" to push?

Well there was the .NET framework, the free C# and VB.NET compilers, and Visual Studio .NET - four products. All but one free. And of course there were the ECMA ratified C# and CLI standards. .NET is "something" and if you still don't get that Windows .NET Server was not all ther was to .NET you clearly haven't been reading some of these highly moderated comments.

Disturbing encounter

[djupedal]

I walked into the dimly lit room and looked around. It seemed something was trying to gain my attention, but in the darkness, everything seemed to blend into one shapeless form or another.

As my eyes adjusted to the low light, I began to make out a scribbling on the far wall...dot not....dot nut....dot nat....dot nit....dot net??? I couldn't make it out and it worried me. Dot what?

I walked over and traced the ragged letters with my finger tips, trying to imagine who did this...and why. The scrawl was halting and labored. The only thing I could be sure of was that, whomever wrote this message, they were clearly in pain.

I backed out of the room and tried in vain to clear my head...what where they trying to say? Who was behind this cry? Was it a warning to stay away or a dieing request for help?

I went on about my rounds...the day shift would be on soon, and I'd have to return to the future. I'd let them work on this one. I'd heard they had another new open source tool that was made just to analyze these. It was too early and too much for me to consider yet another message from the other side...from the past. The last one took part of my soul, and I need the few little fragments that are left...

Re:This is hardly news...

[JWSmythe]

Imagine that. If you're using say an OS called Microsoft Server 0.1 for your servers, and Microsoft Workstation 0.1 for your workstations.. Then if you saw that MS Server 0.2 was available, you'd know it was the next logical step in the upgrade path..

I'm still a wee-bit confused by the currently available OS's..

Windows 2000 (Professional|Server|Advanced Server|DataCenter Server)

Windows ME

Windows CE (CE||.NET)

Windows XP (Professional|Home Edition|Media Center|Tablet|Embedded)

Imagine if they just had workstation and server, with nice numbers. I'm still not sure what I'd be running all my servers on, if I went to MS.. Luckly, I don't have to decide. I put the same version of Slackware on everything, and just install the parts I need.. Funny, it all fits on one CD, and I don't even have to pay outragous licensing fees for each version, or packages I add on. :)

I'm just sad that Slackware hasn't released a distribution for handhelds.. But lucky, "familiar" works on my iPaq.

Every software I've seen uses logical version numbers, except Microsoft.. And they used to even do it.. Well, kinda..

Win3.0
Win3.1
Win3.11
Win95
Win98
Win2000

The jumps in numbers are just too big.. Forget the subrevisions. Build numbers. SP numbers.. I feel sorry for the Microsoft techs who have to take tech calls from people who only know "I use Windows." When friends of friends call me and tell me that, it's like pulling teeth to find out if it's Win98 or XP.. "It came on the computer, how am I suppose to know?"

Excellent "What is .NET" Whitepaper at ARS

[nazgul000]

I see many "What is .NET" posts here. The best single whitepaper I've seen on .NET is by the Ars Technica folks:

Microsoft .NET at Ars Technica

cheers.

The Real Del

[Bird Watcher]

Ultimately the meaning behind any marketing term is somewhat arbitrary. When Apple came out with the Apple name, it initially didn't mean anything. Over the years it came to mean a lot in the minds of many people. That's kind of what a brand name is all about, right? .NET is the same thing only MS has done a very bad job defining it. Re-naming the Windows .net server is (perhaps) a step in the right direction. If you look at the leaked Q&A from the announcement, it seems very clear to me what they're doing. I'll try to explain in simple terms.

1. In the beginning they announced .NET as a web services initiative - basically a way of writing software that uses XML, SOAP, WSDL etc. to allow apps to interoperate. A poor mans COM.

2. The a bunch of marketing goofs started attaching the name to lots of things - most importantly the .net framework.

3. The .net framework is - for all intensive purposes three things. First, it's a new programming model for Windows based on the common language runtime that makes it much easier to write secure, stable Windows appps. It also includes a new version of ASP that makes building web-based easier. It also includes facilities that for building XML web services and a bunch of new class libraries for Windows and web apps.

4. The big mistake they made was putting .net into the name of the framework because it confused everyone. To people who can't read the tea leaves, it suggests that any appliacation built ising the framework is a ".net app." In reality, most of the apps built using the .net framework today are just better, more secure Windows apps or ASP/web-based apps.

With the announcement they said in clear terms that the .net brand is about Web services interop. They obviously still want people to build Windows apps and are making it easier to do so than it has been with Win32/MFC etc. So they're building web services capability deep into their platform -into Windows, into Office I'm sure and into all of their server apps.

For developers this is a beautiful thing. They can take it or leave it. They choose to build on Windows based on its merits. Market opportunity, ease of development or whatever. Some may ultimately choose to build on Windows because Windows has good XML web services support.

I think MS's strategy is to continue to make Windows as good as they can and compete with J2 by providing superior support for web services. The theory (just a theory) is that if web services mature then developers can choose whatever platform they want and rely on web services to stitch things together across platforms. This could be a good strategy because it undermines the Java-only argument. No need to build apps on a single platform (middleware platform in this case) because web services provide good cross plat interop.

So, the bottom line is that MS is narrowing what .net is to web services/interop. The .net framework programming model/CLR etc is, fundamentally a Windows thing. No surprise, right?

That said, MS is taking parts of the .net framework/CLR programming model and porting it to other platforms. That way they can try to lure ISV's to build "Windows apps" that run on other platforms. I know. Sounds confusing but I think this is accurate.

This is way MS, IBM and other companies are so excited about web services and why others - particularly SUN, have been a little slow on the uptake. Although this is overly simplistic, Sun/the J2 crowd basically want everything to be Java/J2. IBM will sell anything to anyone. MS wants to make Windows the most attractive platform.

Gosh, this almost sounds like good old competition to me.

Sorry for the ramble but, mark my words, this is the correct interpretation.

Nothing new here - remember ActiveX

[TekPolitik]

They did this with ActiveX too. For a while, everybody at MS said their project was part of the ActiveX initiative. Then they scaled back the use of the term

This sort of thing is not uncommon in software companies - they have a new project that becomes flavour of the month, and everybod will try to reclassify their project to fit within the new project. If the new project has attributes A, B and C, a project with attributes C, D and E will claim to be part of the trendy project because of the overlap at C, when the real value of the trendy project is the combination of A, B and C.

The other thing that happens with new projects at software companies is that the entire sales force will want to be selling the new project and ignoring everything else. My theory here is that the salespeople have such tiny brains they can't deal with more than one project at once. The other projects languish for a time, which creates another incentive for them to reclassify themselves into the trendy project's area. This can be a real problem for the company because their staple lines stop selling as much since the salespeople aren't pushing them, and the new trendy thing is either not ready or hasn't built enough following to take up the slack.

This really sucks

[slickwillie]

Now I have to stop saying "Just say .NYET!".

Re:This is hardly news...

[plover]

and you just missed a golden opportunity to enlighten us all...

Fine, then I'll do it.

.NET the "language" is an intermediate language bytecode called IL (Intermediate Language). You can produce it from any .NET compiler. The bytecode that is "JITted" (Just In Time compiled) at runtime as needed. The runtime environment is a process called the CLR (Common Language Runtime.)

.NET the framework also contains the system class, which exposes all of the available platform functionality. Those of you who use the Win32 API, Platform SDK, DDK, etc., know just how big this class is. It's fairly well organized.

The biggest advantage to the platform for develpers is absolute type declarations with full knowledge at the object interface: if you write an object method in VB.NET that takes two Integers, a String, and an array of Dates and returns an Integer value, then you can directly refer to that method in your C# routine. There is no conversion needed between types, not even between languages, which has historically been a problem with Microsoft code ever since OLE.

.NET also fully supports exporting and importing these objects via SOAP.

Visual Studio .NET is a development IDE for all the Microsoft .NET languages: VB.NET, C#, and others. It's similar to Microsoft's Visual Studio 6.0, but all the separate components are better integrated. All languages compile together to produce a single "package", which you then ship to your customers. There are no "installations" as the package is self contained. And it still includes a native C++ compiler which can still emit code for any Windows platform (except for .NET...)

Microsoft says the combination of the above puts all languages on an equal footing: developers can code in whatever language suits them. (Since it's interpreted bytecodes, I think it makes all languages equally second class, but that's just me.) So with .NET language is not a barrier to function calls. You want to call method "Foo" on an object called "Bar"? You just do it in your working language, however that language invokes methods on objects. You don't know when you're writing it what language it will be called from. You don't worry when you're calling it what language it was written in.

That's the developers' carrot in a nutshell. And so here's the developers' stick: Everything is shipped as bytecodes in that package, and the supplied decompiler already spits out source code that's only missing some of the documentation. I asked the guy during the .NET product introduction "How is intellectual property protected if anyone can just decompile the code?" The answer started out evasive, but boiled down to: We [Microsoft] will be serving up our meat-and-potatoes functionality via the web, so our code is hidden behind our firewall. Come, join us. You do not know the power of the dark side. (OK, so maybe the guy didn't say that last line, or at least not out loud.)

On the whole, I was semi-impressed at the product introduction. Having strong type safety is really a good thing to me, because I do spend time fighting code that has been carelessly cast, and I also spend time converting from VARIANT arrays of UI1 to STD::strings. Automated garbage collection and automagic reference counting is also really nice. But interpreted languages haven't been exciting to me since GW-BASIC. (Sorry, you Java weenies, but I'm too old to think wasting cycles interpreting bytecodes in front of a user at run time is ever a good thing.) And C# is not C++, nor is it Java. I don't like that IL will only do its own random-time garbage collection and can not support destructors, not even virtual destructors. There are times when I want to garbage collect at a specific point in time (examples such as cleaning up scarce resources like database connections or sockets come easily to mind.)

But I really, really don't like that .NET is ultimately just a facade to hide the movement of software to the subscription model under Palladium. Want to print that Word document? Did you tithe Microsoft this month? Nope? Too bad. Are you still offline? Too bad, you can't run PowerPoint.NET until you're back online and we can check the status of your subscription (or at least check the status of your Visa card authorization.) .NET will make Palladium viable, since the CLR is a trusted software container (read: sandbox.)

So, on the whole, .NET has too many really huge negatives to get me going. It even caused me to ditch my MSDN subscription because it had become "Nothing but .NET" Literally.

Difference is...

[SuperKendall]

C# is Java with the capitalization Gone Wrong.

C++ is C++.

C++ under .Net is C++ with "crippled" syntax - no templates, for example.

I'm not saying that .Net and C# are nessicarily all bad, mind you. What I am saying is that in .Net, all roads lead to C# and other languages under .Net are really C# training wheels. You can choose to use the training wheels as long as you like, but if you want to really do anything you have to take them off someday...

Part of that is because .Net is, like Java, very heavily library based (in that most anything you want to do involves a number of library calls from a fairly rich library) - and those lbraries are most naturally accessed in C#. When using other languages, they will have varying ranges of ease to access these libraries but C# is always there at the end of the curve beckoning you closer.

For perhaps something more like what you were looking for, you might want to read Ten Top Traps in C# for C++ Programmers.

Re:This is hardly news...

[Jugalator]

.NET the "language" is an intermediate language bytecode called IL (Intermediate Language). (...) .NET the framework also contains the system class, which exposes all of the available platform functionality.

.NET is the platform and more like the "thinking". There's no ".NET, the language", since .NET is just a concept. There's no ".NET, the framework" either; its title is simply ".NET Framework".

Microsoft describes what .NET is:

".NET is the Microsoft solution for XML Web services, the next generation of software that connects our world of information, devices, and people in a unified, personalized way. .NET technology enables the creation and use of XML-based applications, processes, and Web sites as services that share and combine information and functionality with each other by design, on any platform or smart device, to provide tailored solutions for organizations and individual people. .NET is a comprehensive family of products, built on industry and Internet standards, that provide for each aspect of developing (tools), managing (servers), using (building block services and smart clients) and experiencing (rich user experiences) XML Web services. .NET will become part of the Microsoft applications, tools, and servers you already use today--as well as new products that extend XML Web service capabilities to all of your business needs."

There's nothing more to it than that, really -- .NET is Microsoft's platform that directly supports and allow creation of XML-based applications and web services. Also read this, it might clear things up.