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:So much...
by
PhysicsExpert
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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
Here at the lab for example we run a lot of mission critical syatems written in Java. Although these systems are ultra reliable they are slow and as such we are severely hampered by the hardware we can afford.
A few months ago we got a.Net system to trial and we migrated some of the apps over to it for evaluation. The results showed that.Net was so much faster than java and the support for multi threaded processes far superior. From a technical point of view we wanted to switch but the university wouldn't let us. Switching to.NET would mean swapping from NT to XP and they just wouldn't meet that level of cost.
If someone would port.NET to linux it wuld become a viable option but until then I think will only ever be a niche product.
-- All that glitters has a high refractive index.
Re:.Net was never clearly defined
by
zero_offset
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You are exactly correct in that most people don't know what.NET really is, and that includes people using it, and Microsoft itself. Once again, Microsoft marketing has screwed the pooch. They were so hot and bothered to tie.NET to the buzzword of the day (Web Services) that they overlooked a great deal of important features and capabilities.
If you ignore the marketing noise, though, it is itself a cohesive strategy, but it's quite a wide-ranging thing and it's hard to get the right perspective on it. The problem is that you probably started looking too early. The first round of books were all written based on the betas (I reviewed many of them for various publishers), and they were all targeted at teaching the world the basics of.NET.
There are now many books that explain the guts in great detail.
To continue with your specific example, there are MANY projects which support or are working to implement CORBA remoting for.NET. A simple Google search for ".NET CORBA remoting" yielded tons of results.
Microsoft marketing is Microsoft's own worst enemy...
--
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Re:Reality is quite nice though
by
CynicTheHedgehog
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
What I like about.NET:
- The way codebehind is implemented, and the ASP.NET page lifecycle - Custom controls - Properties and indexers - Collection and foreach - Events and delegates - app.config and web.config - XCopy deployment - Newsgroup support
What I don't like about.NET:
- Buggy implementation - Crappy file I/O package - DLL Versioning (Pain in the ass. Just deprecate!) - Crappy API documentation - A lot of default behaviors, little of which is intuitive, predictable, or documented - The inability to use classes effectively for things they weren't designed to work for, even though they would be perfect for the job. This is largely due to shortsighted design and access constraints (private methods, un-settable properties, etc)
In other words, I love the CLR design and syntactical shortcuts and hate the class libraries and implementation. The feature set is very wide but not very deep. It's painfully obvious where they've set their focus (ASP.NET, ADO.NET) and where they haven't (file I/O, date/time manipulation, string formatting, etc). You develop like lightening until you reach a point where you want to refine it a bit and make it do something very specific, then you spend weeks trying to figure out what it's doing, why it's doing it that way, and how to work around the default behavior.
It's a good product for small projects, but if you're doing enterprise applications, you're better off implementing a lot of this stuff yourself. A good example are typed DataSets...they manage rowstate and updates and such, which saves a lot of time in the short term, but a lot of the time you want much finer control and a looser coupling between business objects and the data schema. Unfortunately, you can't touch the rowstate directly, which leads to some pretty interesting (and ugly) solutions.
Development good, marketing bad
by
boatboy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
When.NET first came out, our development team took the plunge, and it has greatly improved development time and the quality of our code. Where scripts and hacks dominated our development before, it's now run off compiled, modular code..NET from a programming standpoint is a great tool.
The only problem I see is MS's marketing strategy of attaching ".NET" to everything. This just confused the term. There really was no reason to call "Windows 2003 Server" "Windows.NET Server", and they finally realized that. My guess is that their marketing geeks saw the success of the "development phase" and went overboard.
Whatever the case,.NET development is good, is here, and will stick around. Slashdotters should welcome it too- There's alot of open source momentum building behind.NET related tech. Take a look at the surge of C# projects in SourceForge, and the push to implement it in linux (Mono and Portable.NET).
From what I've read here, most of the objections fall into two categories:
I don't know what.NET is.
I don't like Microsoft as a company
On the first, if you limit the scope to.NET Framework and associated languages, it's pretty easy to grasp what it is, and see why it's good.
On the second, if this is your sole reason, you're being illogical. That would be like brushing off a good idea from a fellow developer because you didn't like his office.
.NET is hurting development
by
wandazulu
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm a Windows developer who in the year 2003 is using a product that came out in 1998. The venerable Visual Studio 6. The first version of VS.net gave absolutely nothing to straight C/C++ developers who were not interested in C# or windows forms or what-have-you, but instead wanted to write good solid code using an ISO-standards compliant compiler for backend work. VS.net gave us nothing new.
VS.net 2003, that's a different story. It does all the things I want to do in a C++ compiler, but apart from the cost, what do you suppose is keeping the bosses from approving it? That's right:.NET. I have told everyone that it actually has a decent C++ compiler, but everybody thinks that it can only be used for.NET work.
So here I am, about to go back to a compiler that has no partial template specialization, a version of STL that I have to patch *by* *hand*, and if I want to look something up? Well, I've got my msdn help files from October 2001 to explain it to me, because that was the last version that integrated with VS6.
By pushing.NET they've done a good job of alienating the core base of people who write the back end code where too-fast-is-not-fast-enough. Maybe it'll come to the point where if you want to write services or databases or anything where speed and size are most important, you'll use a totally different compiler, say, Borland or Metrowerks. But if you're going to do that, why not also look at other platforms, say, Linux?
Slashdot Mirror
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
.Net system to trial and we migrated some of the apps over to it for evaluation. The results showed that .Net was so much faster than java and the support for multi threaded processes far superior. From a technical point of view we wanted to switch but the university wouldn't let us. Switching to .NET would mean swapping from NT to XP and they just wouldn't meet that level of cost.
.NET to linux it wuld become a viable option but until then I think will only ever be a niche product.
Here at the lab for example we run a lot of mission critical syatems written in Java. Although these systems are ultra reliable they are slow and as such we are severely hampered by the hardware we can afford.
A few months ago we got a
If someone would port
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
If you ignore the marketing noise, though, it is itself a cohesive strategy, but it's quite a wide-ranging thing and it's hard to get the right perspective on it. The problem is that you probably started looking too early. The first round of books were all written based on the betas (I reviewed many of them for various publishers), and they were all targeted at teaching the world the basics of .NET.
There are now many books that explain the guts in great detail.
To continue with your specific example, there are MANY projects which support or are working to implement CORBA remoting for .NET. A simple Google search for ".NET CORBA remoting" yielded tons of results.
Microsoft marketing is Microsoft's own worst enemy...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
What I like about .NET:
.NET:
- The way codebehind is implemented, and the ASP.NET page lifecycle
- Custom controls
- Properties and indexers
- Collection and foreach
- Events and delegates
- app.config and web.config
- XCopy deployment
- Newsgroup support
What I don't like about
- Buggy implementation
- Crappy file I/O package
- DLL Versioning (Pain in the ass. Just deprecate!)
- Crappy API documentation
- A lot of default behaviors, little of which is intuitive, predictable, or documented
- The inability to use classes effectively for things they weren't designed to work for, even though they would be perfect for the job. This is largely due to shortsighted design and access constraints (private methods, un-settable properties, etc)
In other words, I love the CLR design and syntactical shortcuts and hate the class libraries and implementation. The feature set is very wide but not very deep. It's painfully obvious where they've set their focus (ASP.NET, ADO.NET) and where they haven't (file I/O, date/time manipulation, string formatting, etc). You develop like lightening until you reach a point where you want to refine it a bit and make it do something very specific, then you spend weeks trying to figure out what it's doing, why it's doing it that way, and how to work around the default behavior.
It's a good product for small projects, but if you're doing enterprise applications, you're better off implementing a lot of this stuff yourself. A good example are typed DataSets...they manage rowstate and updates and such, which saves a lot of time in the short term, but a lot of the time you want much finer control and a looser coupling between business objects and the data schema. Unfortunately, you can't touch the rowstate directly, which leads to some pretty interesting (and ugly) solutions.
The only problem I see is MS's marketing strategy of attaching ".NET" to everything. This just confused the term. There really was no reason to call "Windows 2003 Server" "Windows
Whatever the case,
From what I've read here, most of the objections fall into two categories:
- I don't know what
.NET is.
- I don't like Microsoft as a company
On the first, if you limit the scope toOn the second, if this is your sole reason, you're being illogical. That would be like brushing off a good idea from a fellow developer because you didn't like his office.
I'm a Windows developer who in the year 2003 is using a product that came out in 1998. The venerable Visual Studio 6. The first version of VS.net gave absolutely nothing to straight C/C++ developers who were not interested in C# or windows forms or what-have-you, but instead wanted to write good solid code using an ISO-standards compliant compiler for backend work. VS.net gave us nothing new.
.NET. I have told everyone that it actually has a decent C++ compiler, but everybody thinks that it can only be used for .NET work.
.NET they've done a good job of alienating the core base of people who write the back end code where too-fast-is-not-fast-enough. Maybe it'll come to the point where if you want to write services or databases or anything where speed and size are most important, you'll use a totally different compiler, say, Borland or Metrowerks. But if you're going to do that, why not also look at other platforms, say, Linux?
VS.net 2003, that's a different story. It does all the things I want to do in a C++ compiler, but apart from the cost, what do you suppose is keeping the bosses from approving it? That's right:
So here I am, about to go back to a compiler that has no partial template specialization, a version of STL that I have to patch *by* *hand*, and if I want to look something up? Well, I've got my msdn help files from October 2001 to explain it to me, because that was the last version that integrated with VS6.
By pushing
Just my $0.02