Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the where-do-we-go-from-here dept.
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?"
Re:You are kidding, right?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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.
Troll explained
by
metamatic
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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.
-- GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Re:they have ZERO chance
by
Malc
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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...
by
finkployd
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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
by
blowdart
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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:)
Re:So much...
by
Randolpho
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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.
-- "Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised." -Marilyn Manson
Re:Speaking for myself
by
scrytch
·
· Score: 3, Informative
.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.
-- I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Re:.Net was never clearly defined
by
scrytch
·
· Score: 4, Informative
.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.
-- I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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
You have GOT to be kidding me...
by
tenchiken
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
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
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 :)
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
.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).
.NET, which is a platform, whereas PHP is simply a language.
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
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
.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:
.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.
.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.
* the
* The
* 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.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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
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:
.NET to get paid....)
.NET. Longhorn's new features are all managed code.
.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).
.NET, it's about 90/10. That last ten can be a bitch, but no less then Java's 25%.
.NET make web services insanly simple (maybe to simple, new developers may use them too much).
.NET. Not just platform (mono is doing a great job) but also interop based on the WS-I stack.
.NET until Longhorn, but it is out there in the hands of extremly productive developers.
.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.
.NET, more powerful in .NET.
.NET, clearly there is some new and cool features here to get the ever slow sun to actually change their precious language.
(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
1) Microsoft has completly committed to
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
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
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
6) Interoperability rocks in
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
8)
9) Reflection, Inspection, Attributes and Events. Simpler in
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
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