.Net:... 3 Years Later

Ashcrow writes "EWeek has posted an article on Microsoft's .NET initiative. It's been three years since we were first introduced to .NET and virtually none of the promised advantages have come true. Is it time for Microsoft to move on?"

Comments

Re:You are kidding, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously moderators have no clue what .NET even is because it has nothing to do with what he is talking about. The only part of .NET that exists now is the programming framework. I highly doubt that his "ping" times have been halved because he use C#. Even a moderator with a slight knowledge of computers will realize that ping time has nothing to do with the OS.

Re:You are kidding, right?

[AshPattern]

Huh. Sounds like 1) yp, 2) xwindows, 3) lack of outlook viruses, 4) linux or bsd, and 5) open source

Good thing to know MS technology is on the forefront of innovation.

Troll explained

[metamatic]

1, 2 and 4 are things UNIX has been able to offer for years.

3 is highly dubious. What's the connection between SOAP, virtual machines, and ping times?

5 is pure Microsoft marketing--look at their ads. Fact is, time after time independent analysis shows that TCO is lower for non-Microsoft solutions, both closed and open source.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not buy a book on .NET Remoting, then? Or Web Services, if that's a better solution for you? Or use your old COM libraries to interface to CORBA if you really must? All this stuff is simple to do and there are many many books on it.

Re:You are kidding, right?

[Verteiron]

PhysicsGenius is known for these sorts of posts. He posts brilliant, well-written trolls. But they're still trolls. Read his posting history sometime.

Re:they have ZERO chance

[Malc]

Have you actually developed ASP.Net pages? It doesn't sound like it. It's certainly not restricted to rebranded Visual Basic. It's language neutral. I've worked with some developed with C#. Visual Studio .Net is an excellent tool too... it's fantastic for debugging multiple binary and scripting processes, and stepping almost transparently straight in to database stored procedures and then back out to the web page. PHP4 might be good, but the current ASP.Net and its supporting tools are pretty good too. You have to pick the right tools for the right job, and sometimes that means ASP.Net rather than PHP4.

Re:Emperor's New Clothes test...

[finkployd]

A fairly stable OS that will run on a majority of hardware

I'll give you fairily stable (2000 and XP are pretty good) but majority of hardware? Sure, you can have any processor you want as long as it is x86 (or StrongARM if you want winCE). I can't run Windows on Sparc, s/390, PPC, Alpha (well, NT 4 could), IBM's new 970, etc. Sure it supports the majority of consumer devices, but there is much, MUCH more to the computing world than Mom and Pop's PC. Windows is very small outside of this realm.

I have yet to find a distro of linux that won't mess up on my IBM laptop after about 2 weeks of running or will recognize all of my USB stuff on my desktop properly on install

Which laptop and which distros have you tried? I have run Redhat 7.3 and 9 on my T23 and have never had a problem (including using my USB devices). I might be to help you out or at least point you to some docs if you interested in getting it running.

Finkployd

.net web services

[blowdart]

Microsoft did a bad job marketing .net. First it was web services, then came SQL.net and Windows.net. Even now article like the quoted eweek one talk about .net as it it's simply web services. Add to this the weenies that talk about passport as if it's the be all and end all of .net.

So what have they delivered for the developer? (what follows is my opinion, as someone who has used it and is still using it)

Well there's Visual Studio, an excellent IDE for those that use IDEs.

There's C#, VB.Net and an architecture that has allow Python.net, Perl.net, Fortran.net, Cobol.net and others. The multitude of languages comes into its own when you realise that objects written in one language are easily used in every other language, so you can have 1 developer using Perl, another using C#. Try that in Java. Try any cross language development in Java.

There's the .net framework, an nice OO library which is, of course, available to any .net language.

There's ASP.net which makes development of event driven sites a hell of a lot easier than embedded your own hidden frames and attaching page loads of those frames as javascript events trigger.

There's WinForms, yet another forms interface, but as it's usuable in any language there is no more bodged MFC.

Of course you do have web services, easy SOAP libraries, really nice XML support, remoting and other funky stuff.

Should MS give up? Hell no, they've produced a wonderful environment for developing for windows. Developing more than web services.

I don't think you can comment on .net unless you've used it. Journalists need not apply, nor should MS marketing people :)

It's not in-line compiling that's slow

[DrSkwid]

I use Inferno and it does (optionally) just in time compiling, the speed difference is discernable but not inhibiting.

If you are interesting in VM design you might enjoy this light read :

The design of the Inferno virtual machine
Phil Winterbottom Rob Pike Bell Labs,
Lucent Technologies {philw,rob}@plan9.bell-labs.com

NOTE: Originally appeared in IEEE Compcon 97 Proceedings, 1997.

Re:.NET Opinion

[BigGerman]

Respectfully:
1. C# JIT to latest Java JIT - about the same speed. Now, in some cases (encryption for example), c# is 100 times faster than Java (native libraries maybe?)
2. Java garbage-collects automatically as well. gc() simply forces the garbage-collection to happen.
3. "Doing anything" requires you to leave "managed" code and go native. Even for simple things - like opening the "Open folder" dialog.
4. Exception handling is there for reason. Makes larger projects much cleaner.

Having said that I do believe that c# is very good language and I use it personally for the reasons you stated.

Re:You are kidding, right?

[darnok]

The government body I'm working at for now has had all sorts of problems with .NET. People who've been around for longer than me tell me that Microsoft Consulting Services have convinced the CIO and his immediate advisors that .NET is the universal solution for everything IT, and it certainly seems to have been implemented with that in mind. .NET seems to be a good fit for Web Services, but that's only a very small part of the set of applications that are being developed today. In particular, for anything with fairly rigid and auditable security requirements, .NET simply isn't a good fit, and nor is any competing Web Services model at the moment. When you consider that government bodies need to be paranoid about the security implications of any data that floats around their servers, .NET just isn't appropriate for a hell of a lot of situations without a lot of supporting "legacy" infrastructure alongside it.

You need to treat .NET as Just Another Piece Of The Puzzle.

As with Trustworthy Computing, MS seems to categorise .NET as "The Great Silver Bullet" when it comes to doing IT. As with Trustworthy Computing, MS is probably right if you consider the problem from a purely-MS perspective; both Trustworthy Computing and .NET position MS to sell product into markets that it previously couldn't touch, even though any end-user benefits seem highly debatable at best.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[Raven42rac]

It is supposed to be some sort of "Java alike" for the internet, a sort of universal programming language, and by universal, I mean Windows boxes. But universally accessible over the internet, I have actually seen two websites use it, www.microsoft.com and www.vue.com (the test registration site), other than that it really has not caught on like MS thought it would. When you have 90% of the world's computers running Windows, that is a pretty big built in group able to use it, but the developers (developers, developers, developers, developers) are not buying into it, and are just sticking with Java.

Re:So much...

[Randolpho]

The main problem with .Net is that it ties you to a specific OS which makes it a pain from a business economics point of view

Um.... MS is currently developing the .Net framework for *nix, at least according to this article (2nd to last paragraph), but until it's finished, there's the DotGNU Project, or Mono to tide you over.

Re:So much...

[HeadDown]

Try GCJ on your java sources. It does impose some restrictions, but it is capable of creating native binaries from Java source. At the XWT project we cross-compile Java source to Win32 and Linux binaries (both from Linux). The native binaries are markedly faster than the Java bytecode version. That said, there's a lot you can do to tune your JVM for your particular setup. Browse around java.sun.com and www.java.net for tips.

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[HeadDown]

You mean what you like about ASP.Net. There's more to .Net than just websites, you know.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[Lord of the Wazz]

100% of cellphones don't run Windows

What about the Orange SPV?

Or the O2 XDA?

Re:Speaking for myself

[scrytch]

.NET and php are orthogonal. There's one effort underway to port PHP to .NET, for one. I recommend getting some understanding of the ASP.NET architecture before making statements like this, because it's like saying "php is better than fastcgi" (considering you can run php as a fastcgi).

The main problem I have with PHP is that it's not OO. Objects are syntactic sugar for grouping functions, but objects are by default copied by value, and worse yet, always compared by value, not by identity (so when $a === $b at one point, it might not later, even with the same objects, because they got the implementation so wrong). PHP5 is supposed to fix that, though things like its error handling still leave much to be desired (try eval'ing code with a syntax error -- your script will die, and you can NOT stop it. sort of defeats the purpose of eval, don't it?)

But that's all off the topic of .NET, which is a platform, whereas PHP is simply a language.

Re:Yes

[erasmus_]

With Windows 2003, one can now administer IIS using a text file without having to stop and start the server. And instead of a proprietary file layout, it's pure XML, so is extremely easy to manipulate programmatically. IIS may have other issues, but this is certainly one complaint that they seem to have addressed.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[scrytch]

.NET is the new ActiveX. ActiveX by itself was this nebulous definition, but what it boiled down to was nothing more than COM. .NET boils down to three things behind the marketing umbrella name:

* the .NET Virtual Machine: Basically the same idea as other bytecode compiled languages, like UCSD Pascal (ooh you thought I was going to say JVM, well sun didn't invent the idea). Write once, deploy anywhere where windows (or mono) is. It has some features not seen in JVM's, like cached JIT code, so it doesn't have to rerun the JIT every single time you run the app.

* The .NET Common Language Runtime, including the system library: This is intended to replace the Win32 API with something as easy to use as most Visual BASIC libs, getting rid of HWNDS and HRESULTS and __farcall lpzsFoobletch and so on.

* Web services: Really just the first application of the first two, but Microsoft is plugging this SOAP-based stuff like the second coming. I somehow don't see it replacing RPC for communication with system services, but there it is.

Re:It actually outperforms J2EE by a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats standard benchmarking approval requirements in the EULAs. Nvidia have them other people have them. Not because they suck.

Re:So much...

[TheRaven64]

Check the date on that article. MS have released a basic .NET runtime for FreeBSD (although it doesn't support forms or some of the optimised memory allocation stuff). Corel were supposed to be porting the whole of the .NET runtime to FreeBSD, but then didn't. Last time I spoke to one of the Mono developers he said that it was unlikely that they would ever fully support .NET under *NIX, since some of the paradigms used do not mesh well with X, and the overhead of adding another abstraction layer would make it unusable.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[johnnyb]

Actually, ActiveX is a self-registering COM object. Notice how a slight variation gets a whole new market-drive name!

PHP and OO

[tolan-b]

When we use PHP (which we use for projects that we need to get out the door faster, amongst other reasons), we always write in OO. Given the choice we work in J2EE because of it's strong typing and enterprise features such as distribution, transactions, scalability etc..

While PHP4s OO support is far from all it could be (no default pass by reference...), you can still seperate out into nice data abstraction / business logic / presentation layers just as well as most other OO languages. Hell we even use the J2EE enterprise patterns in PHP4.

PHP5 is looking set to fix most of the annoyances with PHP4s object model, adding unified constructors, method argument hinting, interfaces, pass by reference by default and so on.

My point is, although a lot of people see it as such, you shouldn't write off PHP4 as a purely procedural language

Re:.net web services

[AndersDahlberg]

There's C#, VB.Net and an architecture that has allow Python.net, Perl.net, Fortran.net, Cobol.net and others. The multitude of languages comes into its own when you realise that objects written in one language are easily used in every other language, so you can have 1 developer using Perl, another using C#. Try that in Java. Try any cross language development in Java.

Yes, I usually use java and python (www.jython.org) - both which run excellent on the java platform. The .NET languages have some problems though - the only one actually working as it should is C#... Cross platform languages is a red herring (even more so than cross platform virtual machines) as the important part is the API's! What good is python.net to python programmers if they can't use their own api's?

Re:Emperor's New Clothes test...

[admbws]

Wrong, ARM is the best selling architecture by a clear margin. Used in cellphones, PDAs, gaming consoles, DVB/DAB devices, and well, just about everything you can think of, the x86 isn't found much outside of the desktop and low-end server markets.

You have GOT to be kidding me...

[tenchiken]

It's posts like this that make me want to abandon Slashdot after 5 years of faithfully following, commenting and posting stories. Let's set some things strait:

(before anyone accuses me of being Microsoft marketting, I have no links to the company, and am a huge fan in OpenSource. I have both a windows and a Linux box, and I spend more time hacking on Linux for fun, and hacking on .NET to get paid....)

1) Microsoft has completly committed to .NET. Longhorn's new features are all managed code.

2) Microsoft's most profitable Business Aplications are being ported as we speak. BizTalk, Office, and the OS all have managed serviced components now, and the next version of SQL will have extremly rich CLR support.

3)My experience as a Technologist is the reverse. We have gone from no .NET projects (all perl and Java) to four this year, and my guess is that we will see as many as six or seven next year (smallish shop).

4) The knowledge curve works for you. My experience is that in Assembly 10% of stuff is "easy" the rest you need to look up, in C, 40% of the stuff is easy, the rest you need to look up, in C++ it's about 50/50, in Java it's closer to 75/25. In C# on .NET, it's about 90/10. That last ten can be a bitch, but no less then Java's 25%.

5) Having strugled with AXIS and several other varients of Web Services for Java, I have to say, they pretty much suck rocks (GLUE excepted, although at least the last version I was playing with still equired source access to code to generate services). On the other hand, the extremly rich API and Metadata abilities in .NET make web services insanly simple (maybe to simple, new developers may use them too much).

6) Interoperability rocks in .NET. Not just platform (mono is doing a great job) but also interop based on the WS-I stack.

7) Java is at best a niche platform. When was the last time you saw any non server/specialized software written in Java? Of the top ten software software packages (Windows, Office, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, SQL, Quicken, Quickbooks, TaxCut, Microsoft Money) how many of them are actually written in java? 0/10. Microsoft owns 90% of the CPU market. Microsoft has decided to slip .NET until Longhorn, but it is out there in the hands of extremly productive developers.

8) .NET has only been released in a non beta form for about 1 year. Since then Microsoft has already done a major upgrade to the development platform, and a major release of the CLR. Whidby will add more features.

9) Reflection, Inspection, Attributes and Events. Simpler in .NET, more powerful in .NET.

10) ASP.net is a solid step up from ASP. Seperate of presentation and business logic is much more solid, the rendering pipeline is more powerfull, and the security features rock.

11) ADO.net makes simple database projects (CRUD) easy. Will anyone use Datasets for a large enterprise application? Probably not, but it is still there and powerful.

12) Sun fails the Dogfood test. Number of critical applications in Solaris that are or are being ported to Java? None, ask Sun why that is (not scalable, not fast). How much of Windows is being ported? The whole Shabang (see Longhorn). I will be happy to re-examine Java seriously for ongoing work when Sun's rm6 utilities (including the command lines) are written in Java.

13) Not only that, Sun is now lifting features from .NET, clearly there is some new and cool features here to get the ever slow sun to actually change their precious language.

14) Compact Framework. Share code between WinCE devices and your platform. Tie them together via Webservices with a single click of the mouse.

15) Rich clients. Have the interoperability and accessability of the web without stateless programming enviornment and pretty graphics.

16) Integrati

Re:.NET = Windows API 2.0

[DuncMan]

It's a new Windows API designed to turn Windows into a virtual machine like Java so it can be architecture independent.

[snip]

It's about MS getting off x86-32 and into a larger world of ia64, amd64, and maybe even ppc64.

Windows NT was billed as cross-platform, portable, Windows. Microsoft dropped platforms, even DEC's excellent 64-bit Alpha, until they were down to just Intel's pedestrian 32-bit 80386. If your claims are true then explain why Microsoft woudl repeat something they already tried and abandoned?

This will make Windows more portable than *nix.

Er... *nix can be, and has been, ported to pretty much anything which has a C compiler and a pulse. I find it very hard to believe that;

• Microsoft care at all about portability (beyond their prescribed platforms)
• Windows can ever be as portable as *nix.

Apropos all this, if the world is so desperate for 64-bit CPUs- or Windows on 64-bit CPUs- why did everyone walk away from Alpha? A perfectly good 64 bit platform which was available around a decade ago.

Re:Yes

[Cranx]

You don't need .NET to separate content from presentation; using Ruby with HTML templates do the job quite well.

Re:Not all your base belongs to us

[nick_urbanik]

No, it is much more efficient than -exec ... {}, since it calls ... much less often than once per file, as -exec .. {} does. I use xargs a lot in my sysadmin work.

Okay, my hair used to come down to my waist, but I do not wear daipers!

Re:Question

[Schnapple]

If you can tolerate a Tripod popup, I have an article here.

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[bat'ka makhno]

You might want to take another look at the MSDN I/O stuff. To get you started, have a look at the FileStream and BinaryReader classes, which have the functionality you're looking for.

Good luck.