.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

Yes

[mrmez]

I'm quite pleased to have been able to move from ASP to PHP in the past three years - although at least .Net seems better than the options which preceeded it.

Re:Yes

[xThinkx]

I agree, as a Penn State Student I have worked with both .NET and Unix/PHP/Perl/Apache environments. Without a doubt, the latter of the two was far superior in every aspect, INCLUDING EASE OF USE. PHP has got to be the easiest freakin language ever, and Apache trumps IIS with the ability to do the majority of configuring with one file, instead of having to browse through a maze of tabbed windows with options, checkboxes, pop-up boxes, etc.

Without a doubt, the only reasons to use .NET would be if (a), you already have a Microsoft solution and for some reason you want to keep it, or (b), you fall to marketing hype.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention STABILITY and SECURITY...

Re:Yes

[mingot]

Without a doubt, the latter of the two was far superior in every aspect, INCLUDING EASE OF USE. PHP has got to be the easiest freakin language ever

A lot of things are "easier" than ASP.NET/ADO.NET coded using an OOP language. For simple things you're better off using something like PHP or ASP/VBS. Of course when project complexity reaches a certain point you'll start to find real advantages to going with a modern approach that seperates the presentation layer from the business layer. Of course taking this approach can make writing a simple application seem daunting, but in the long run it pays off.

It has a lot to do with simply knowing what sort of application you're going to be writing and picking the proper tool for the job.

Apache trumps IIS with the ability to do the majority of configuring with one file, instead of having to browse through a maze of tabbed windows with options, checkboxes, pop-up boxes, etc.

Totally. 100% agreed. Much easier to administer Apache via it's text configuration IMO.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

.NET is not about all those programming languages on which Microsoft put the .NET tag on. Its about writing code and applications that can use components distributed all over the network and written in completely different languages - without having to cope with stuff like CORBA. I like the whole concept a lot and have to admit i was really impressed of the whole thing after i tried not to turn down a good idea just because it came out of the realms of the evil empire. Check the docs on the Microsoft web site about what you can do with .NET before starting another ASP vs. PHP flamebait.

Re:Yes

[RoLi]

I'm quite pleased to have been able to move from ASP to PHP in the past three years

Seems like you are not the only one:

stats

Also, the only company I know personally which did use IIS for something more complicated than static pages went belly-up 2 years ago...

If you look at some countries like Germany or Japan, IIS is already de-facto dead there. In those countries it's already quite hard to find a hoster that will even offer Windows, either you have to go to one of the few and very expensive hosters who offer Windows or you would have to do everything yourself.

In the USA, Microsoft's strategy to make their products as incompatible as possible might help them because there are enough MS-brainwashed people there, but everywhere else, their "designed for incompatibility" strategy is starting to hurt them a lot.

In many countries, a server equals Unix, so choosing .NET is just plain stupid because you won't find a good hoster for it. The same scenario is coming along with cellphones everywhere including the USA: Java runs, .NET doesn't. If you might ever want to do anything with cellphones, .NET isn't an option because Microsoft isn't even able to get a foot into that market.

If you choose .NET, you have significantly limited your possibilities and your flexibility. (Do you really know for sure that you won't do anything outside the MS-world in 10 years?)

With Java on the other hand, you have all your bases covered: Desktops, servers, browsers, PDAs, cellphones, embedded systems.

In the long run, Microsoft's refusal to cooperate with other technologies will hurt them also in the USA. In case you haven't noticed, the computing desktop isn't the hot thing anymore. A lot of new stuff comes out for cellphones, embedded devices and PDAs, which means no .NET, sorry.

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:Yes

[alext]

Gosh, sounds like XML-RPC.

Guess which came first?

Re:Yes

[cshark]

Yeah, but platforms aside, I think m$ really alienated their core user base with .net. This should be a lesson to anyone who releases a software product over multiple versions, always implement backwards compatibility.

Being a Winvicate isn't easy, you know.
It takes time and money, and I don't think Microsoft really understands how dedicated you have to be to actually defend their actions and business practices, and continue using their second and third rate products.

My hat goes off to those rich enough, and naive enough to keep the .NET bandwagon rolling!

Re:Yes

[ViceClown]

I think this depends entirely on the coder. I have used lots of Apache/PHP and lots of IIS ASP/ASP.NET and there are pros and cons to both. Obviously Apache/PHP, being free, is very cost effective but they fall somewhat short on some of the advanced features businesses need for enterprise apps. The tools in PHP for seperating code from content are pretty immature. Also, if they they change the xml dom functions one more time Im going to screem. (and they are in version 5) This is unacceptable. As far as IIS goes... it's alot easier to administer a web server from a gui if you're not an expert which 99% takes care of 99% of the people administering web servers. It's just easier to use a gui - not faster but certainly easier. Please don't come back with, "well if you're not an expert you shouldn't touch it yadda yadda." That said... IIS has to runs on Windows which is a train wreck for a server. Don't get me started on security either. Apache on Linux/Unix is leaner and meaner and certainly more secure. That said, Windows 2003 server goes a long way to fixing many of those issues even if it feels a little thick.

Moral of the story - there are pros and cons to both. .NET is actually really nice to program in and I like using C# alot (and I've used them all). It's not revolutionary or anything - it's java for windows basically. So... easy with the broad paint brush strokes, killer. PHP lacks some features that enterprises need... and the ones that are there aren't very well documented or change constantly which is a no no.

Just my $0.02

Re:Yes

[johnnyb]

The fact that it's a marketing bullet point means nothing. When I talk to people actively using it and it making sense and working for them, I'll believe it.

Re:Yes

[TheLastUser]

It's just easier to use a gui - not faster but certainly easier.

Maybe for you it is, personally I find a nice clean xml config file way easier to deal with.

I remember one incident trying to get iis to serve up a file. I had to alter the "security" settings in no less than 3 different iis menus befor the frickin thing would serve it up.

The menus are like a maze that one must climb through. The feature that you want could be anywhere in that maze. With XML and a decent editor you can just do a find.

they fall somewhat short on some of the advanced features businesses need for enterprise apps

Or perhaps just think they need after a bunch of marketing mumbojumbo. There are pretty big sites on the net that use Apachr/PHP, Bravenet.com comes to mind, you could probably find others at netcraft.com I don't use this setup personally, but I see a quite a few large sites that do, and they seem to be making money.

it's java for windows basically

I will never understand why people would write in a "java for windows" when they can write in a Java for all operating systems. C# seems to me like a less sophisticated version of Java that has the added drawback of locking you in to a single platform.

Re:Yes

[iantri]

As far as IIS goes... it's alot easier to administer a web server from a gui if you're not an expert which 99% takes care of 99% of the people administering web servers. It's just easier to use a gui - not faster but certainly easier. Please don't come back with, "well if you're not an expert you shouldn't touch it yadda yadda." That said... IIS has to runs on Windows which is a train wreck for a server. Don't get me started on security either.

I'm going to come back with this anyway. You have siad that "Windows... is a train wreck for a server", and that the security is bad too. But you are saying it is okay for someone who doesn't know what they are doing to use the pointy-clicky tools to administer the server? They'll get r00ted inside of a week. I'm not saying GUI tools are bad -- I wouldn't mind some good GUI tools to configurate the more annoying Linux configuration such as SysV init and network interfaces, but if you have to use a GUI tool to run the server because you don't understand what you are doing, you HAVE no business running it.

Re:Yes

[rushmobius]

Very few companies maintain backwards compatibility for extended periods of time. It is not financially beneficial for them to do so.

The focus is typically to push folks to move up to new technologies, dropping legacy systems, then rinse and repeat.

To make a statement about folks 'rich enough and naive enough to keep the .NET bandwagon rolling' is simply uninformed and very biased.

My company evaluated .NET and J2EE for building a new enterprise wide system.

When it came down to it either technology, as well as many before them, could do the job. Since we are a mixed Win/Unix shop, we decided year one to use ASP.NET on our web servers.

The decision to use .NET was based upon our current hardware for our web servers as well as our existing comfort level with MS tools and languages/libraries.

In the end, the typical arguements for using J2EE had little to no impact for us.

--begin rant--

I really do tire of seeing 'm$', 'micro$oft' et al

Really..is there anyone out there that believes that corporations purely exist to provide services out of the goodness of their hearts?

If not, may I propose the following new company slang names...

$un
Ci$co
GNU/Linu$
$lashdot

--end rant--

First time I've actually posted on /. - so be gentle :p

Re:Yes

[Cranx]

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

So much...

[BigumD]

... for "betting the company" on .Net. I mean, they're still here, right?

Re:So much...

[mgs1000]

"Double or nuthin'?" - Steve Balmer

Re:So much...

[PhysicsExpert]

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.

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...

[Mr_Silver]

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

The main problem with Office and Exchange is that they also tie you to a specific OS. Yet they seem to have done rather well.

I'm sure .Net has many failings, but only being tied to one OS' is probably not the vast majority of companies lists. There are plenty of places out there that are happily MS-centric.

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: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.

nah...

[wza]

Is it time for Microsoft to move on?

nah, it's time Microsoft to move over...

Well...

[Bob McCown]

Is it time for Microsoft to move on?

Yes, its time for them to move on. But they won't. They have an idea, and will force it down everyone's throat until they get their way.

Re:Well...

[chef_raekwon]

try to cram linux down everyone's throat as the be-all, end-all solution to everything

ahhh, Linux. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems....

Re:Well...

[volve]

Wait, so you mean I actually _am_ using Microsoft Bob to do my work, and I've just grown so used to him [it] that I've stopped noticing?!

HOLY CRAP THE END IS NIGH!

-VolVE

Re:Well...

[telstar]

Is it time for Microsoft to move on?

• Yes, its time for them to move on. But they won't. They have an idea, and will force it down everyone's throat until they get their way.

• • Umm... That's called business. When did expectations of a private company become parallel with those of a non-profit?

Seems to me

[Timesprout]

that most of the .Net technology is still there in some shape of form but its the Marketing strategy that has failed miserably

Reality is quite nice though

[mccalli]

The marketing hype surrounding .Net evaporated, true. However as a means of developing for Windows in virtual machine which supports multiple languages, the actually technology is still going strong.

And so it should - it's better than the alternatives which preceded it. It's just important to divorce the .Net marketing cloud from the actual technology on the ground.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[Troed]

... so, you complain about people not knowing enough about the CLR - but you show your own ignorance and lack of knowledge regarding JVMs.

Ehrm. Point not taken.

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[Ooblek]

I would have to agree. One of the problems is that even Microsoft is still releasing products that are based on BizTalk and Commerce Server, which seems sort of counter-intuitive. If you look at some of the new products being released by Microsoft Business Solutions (aka Great Plains), you have to wonder what they were thinking. Their business portal product is based on BizTalk, their .NET CRM application talks to the financial application through BizTalk, and they still have their e-commerce packages that are based on plain-old ASP and COM+.

I will say though that I have recently been working on a project to allow a unix legacy system talk to a web service to do real time credit card authorizations from a COBOL application. Using GCC 3.3, libxml2, libxml++, and libwww to post to a web service, it appears to be transacting quite nicely. I can see a lot of legacy application adapters being developed in this manner in the future. Now if only some of the documentation of these libraries were better....

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[CynicTheHedgehog]

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.

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[FatRatBastard]

Agreed about technology vs marketing hype, but there's something about .NET that has bothered the hell out of me. They technology (or at least the hype around it) is at odds with the business reality at MS.

MS claim that .NET will be open and cross platform, but the only way this can happen is if cross platform means "across *our* platforms."

Currently MS makes the bulk of their money from the OS and Office. If they truely made .NET cross platform (or let something like Mono take hold) then that starts to eat into both their server and desktop base. I mean, why would anyone pay MS $$$ for each desktop / server if you could choose between *BSD / Linux / VMS / Un*x / et al? For instance, if I had cycles to burn on an IBM mainframe it would make sense to host my .NET services on it, assuming it was truely cross platform.

So basically I fail to see how MS could inplement a businees plant such that .NET would generate more money than the potential loses from the hit they'd take on server / desktop licenses.

Again, MS makes (prints???) money by selling OSs and Office (everything else is just a rounding error). You can be damn sure they're not going to do anything to threaten that cash cow. The interesting thing will be how MS ties .NET to its own OSs. The big draw about web services is that they're supposed to facilitate easier communication / data sharing between disparate systems.

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[uradu]

> it's better than the alternatives which preceded it

From Microsoft! Because there have been better alternatives on Windows for a long time--both in terms of MUCH more flexible and expressive frameworks for C/C++, and in terms of different programming languages. But as far as Microsoft products for developing for Windows are concerned, yes, .NET is their best effort so far.

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[Glock27]

See, you linux junkies don't really know crap about MS, do you?

Far too much, in most cases.

In most cases, the CLR out-performs native Win32 because of better heap management, caching, and other little things here and there.

Said heap management, caching, etc. couldn't have been implemented in a pre-compiled language?!? Sure.

And there will be cross-platform compatibility once linux developers finish Mono.

So long as Microsoft sees fit not to exercise it's massive patent portfolio. I'd sure bet my business on Microsoft playing nice...not.

If anything that runs on a VM is slow - it's Java. It has to JIT everything before running it while the CLR JITs on demand and it even does that faster!

That would depend on which Java implementation you're talking about. There are fully pre-compiled Java systems available, however the VM based versions are very competitive. They are certainly neck and neck with the CLR...and are available on many platforms, now. Even enterprise class platforms. :-)

Java has tremendous momentum - which .Not has largely failed to affect.

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[pmz]

Their business portal product is based on BizTalk, their .NET CRM application talks to the financial application through BizTalk, and they still have their e-commerce packages that are based on plain-old ASP and COM+.

This is one big problem with Microsoft. Each time some VP gets all horny for an idea, it seems whatever preceded that idea becomes somehow irrelevant from marketing and, eventually, support standpoints. I would bet there are many many millions of lines of commercial code out there tied by thier guts to COM, BizTalk, and whatever, leaving those Microsoft customers mystified about why they put forth all that effort only to have their vendor spit all over them and push them into the mud. Microsoft has absolutely no sense of being committed to their customers, which, IMO, is a big no-no in pretty much every other industry ever dreamt up by humans. This three-to-four year turnover in technology from them just needs to slow down (hell, the last major inventions elsewhere, UNIX, the WWW, Lisp/Java/VM-stuff etc. are all pretty darn "old", now, but evolving rather than getting uprooted and mulched).

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:Reality is quite nice though

[Hard_Code]

I agree. I am a full time Java developer. I love Java. But I ALSO realize .NET is really cool stuff. Or rather, the CLR, which is basically a more generic VM, is cool stuff. If you are a windows user, and have been using windows update, poke around and you will find that you have ALREADY downloaded the .NET runtime, and that various things are already based on, and use it (e.g. IE 6). .NET/CLR is there, you just don't see it. Which is the way it's meant to be anyway. The "Web services" side of .NET of course has been hampered because web services adoption is slow, but the CLR side of .NET is still strong, and I think is a great step up from C/C++/COM/ActiveX/PotLuckAPI.

Re:Reality is quite nice though

[Chester K]

They technology (or at least the hype around it) is at odds with the business reality at MS.

MS claim that .NET will be open and cross platform, but the only way this can happen is if cross platform means "across *our* platforms."

.NET is about interoperability, not cross-platform execution. The big reason Microsoft is behind .NET is to get Windows a foothold in shops currently based around Unix.

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.

Only 3 years...

[sc00ch]

I'm not pro .net at all and i don't really know much about it to be honest.<br>
But i think its crazy to judge something is big as .net in this way.<br>
If something doesn't 'take off' in 3 years time it's now a failure? Lets not be silly...

Re:Only 3 years...

[tlianza]

If something doesn't 'take off' in 3 years time it's now a failure? Lets not be silly...

I agree with you, and I would also argue that .NET hasn't been around for even close to three years. They just released the server platform for .NET a few months ago. I personally wouldn't start the clock ticking when the first person uttered the word ".NET". It takes a while to get the development and platform software built before you can get the rest of the world developing with the stuff.

The birth of an idea and the release of a platform are two different things. Although if you think life begins at conception, then maybe this 3-year viewpoint is consistent :)

In Soviet Russia...

[gowen]

it's called .nyet

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[Em Emalb]

You've had that one waiting in the wings for months now haven't you?

Heh. Dr Pepper tastes funny after going through your nose. Yuck.

You are kidding, right?

[PhysicsGenius]

If you use Linux you obviously won't see the benefits of .NET, maybe that's why you guys haven't seen it. But the improvements have been manifold, let me give you some examples from my own network, which is .NETified:

1) We have single-source logons for all users, even if they migrate workstations.

2) Users can access their apps and data from anywhere on the network, even offsite.

3) Ping times have halved.

4) You wouldn't believe our uptime, sometimes we go for weeks without rebooting.

5) The TCO is 1/10th of what it was and we've been able to reduce our IT staff (maybe this is the real reason the /. readership hates .NET?).

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?

[linuxci]

Sounds like MS Marketing BS, but 1 and 2 are possible on most UNIX systems, Linux and pre-.net versions of Windows, so that's not new.

Why would .net affect ping times? If it did, was this compared to older versions of Windows, Linux or Solaris?

A few weeks uptime is nothing to brag about.

As for total cost of ownership, it's always a case of your mileage will vary, it depends on where your staff has most skills. Personally I consider maintaining unix systems a lot easier and a lot less effort so that would cut down the TCO in that case. Get a bunch of McSE's and the results would be different, as would getting someone with an equal balanced knowledge in windows and unix.

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.

Re:You are kidding, right?

[mgs1000]

I would love to have a .net enabled ping utility!

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:You are kidding, right?

[Michael Hunt]

You, Sir, are a troll :)

Albeit, a very good troll in that you ALMOST had me going until I read point 4. Upon rereading your other points:

1) 'Single-source logons' are a function of AD/Kerberos under 2000/2003. In a corporate environment, they give you all the benefits you're claiming that .net does. The '.net passport' stuff hasn't really taken off (is anybody apart from hotmail and msn using it?)

2) How does this have anything to do with .net? Remote access is a function of authentication (AD/KDC as above in a 2000/3 environment) and security (leased line or 'VPN'.) .net has nothing to do with the latter part of the equation.

3) Since the various .net RPC mechanisms use a more verbose protocol than traditional MS/DCE RPC calls, I fail to see how this could be the case, unless you're using the 9/10 of your TCO saved in (5) to buy bigger pipes.

4) My windows 2000 servers at work usually only get a reboot when someone installs a hotfix. Since the patch lifecycle is test->uat->production, we have ample warning for this. Uptime, on average, is around 5-6 months. These machines are everything from AD controllers supporting thousands of users, to RDP/MS TS boxes with 50-odd users each.

5) correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't .net more expensive, being subscription based? I realise that this isn't the whole of the TCO equation, but windows servers are windows servers, and no amount of point and click window dressing is going to reduce the amount of manpower required to run systems well.

I'm no Windows apologist (check my posting history,) but surely your argument is bunk :P

IHBT. IHL. HAND.

Re:You are kidding, right?

[MosesJones]

1) We have single-source logons for all users, even if they migrate workstations.

Then you don't have AS400s, Legacy applications or Unix then ? .NET is certainly improving the Windows world, but this is a limited part of the .NET vision.

2) Users can access their apps and data from anywhere on the network, even offsite.

All their apps ? Or just the PIM ones in Outlook and the new development. Is that offsite access transactionally secure (i.e. not using Web Services)

3) Ping times have halved

This one confuses me. Are you telling me that the network traffic has been REDUCED by using .NET ? This is strange as .NET is more network intensive. Or do you mean response times ?

You wouldn't believe our uptime, sometimes we go for weeks without rebooting

Oh hang on its a troll isn't it by a Linux dude... I mean come on, anyone who can't keep a Windows box with a mean-time between failure of over a month is a cretin.

5) The TCO is 1/10th of what it was and we've been able to reduce our IT staff (maybe this is the real reason the /. readership hates .NET?).

Then they should REALLY hate AS400s and OS/390s and Sun's N1 architecture which have a support cost several hundred times as good at a fraction of the price. .Net DOES have some great features, and DOES have some points to recommend it. The Mobility area is one part that MS have clearly thought about.

But in comparison with J2EE it suffers on several levels, the biggest of which is that J2EE is a standard adopted by all of the other big guys, and is the one that most enterprise vendors are moving towards, SAP for instance. .NET is an expansion of the Outlook/Exchange model that has served MS so well (as an aside, the thing that MS probably fear most is a really good open source version of Exchange). .NET is not crap, but the reasons you have given are not the reasons.

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:You are kidding, right?

[AstroDrabb]

1) We have single-source logons for all users, even if they migrate workstations.

Been there done that without .net.

2) Users can access their apps and data from anywhere on the network, even offsite.

Same here. This has been a feature of Unix/Linux for many years.

3) Ping times have halved.

Man, you must have had a really bad network. I don't see how just switching you applications to .not will increase ping times. Also, Linux with samba surpasses MS at their own SMB game.

4) You wouldn't believe our uptime, sometimes we go for weeks without rebooting.

Umm, come into the world of Solaris/*BSD/Linux and YOU won't believe our uptimes.

5) The TCO is 1/10th of what it was and we've been able to reduce our IT staff

How does using .net decrease your TCO? I guess you are not factoring in all the application fees, OS license fees, retraining costs, etc. The license fees alone will completely offset ANY benefit of moving to .net.

(maybe this is the real reason the /. readership hates .NET?)

Why would someone on /. hate .net if it truly is a great product? Most people hate it because of WHO it comes from. We all know how that company works and their main goal is to be the ONLY provider of all OSes and appliactions and they use every means possible to lock you in and ensure NO migration paths.
Sorry, all .net does is lower the bar for sub-par programmers to produce mediocre solutions that will put you on the "MS Path", which is a path of constant updates, upgrades and expenditures that MS tries to keep at an 18 - 24 month cycle. MS's main goal is to have you upgrade your solutions every 18 - 24 months. They are not in business to provide you with long lasting solutions, otherwise where will there revenue stream come from if everyone doesn't upgrade every 2 years or so? The only thing you get from MS is a band-aid to be applied for an average of 18 - 24 months.

New MS project announced!

[Dark Lord Seth]

It's called "Microsoft Passport"! I thought it sounded familiar but when I asked, they waved their hands at me and said "This project is new..." so it has to be! Can you imagine the advantages? Logging into hotmail automagically using MS Passport, using Passport as some sort of all-round login system... Heck, you can even use MS Passport as an instant messenging system! Wow!

Yesterday's news

[TopShelf]

MS already is moving on - note "Windows Server 2003" (no .NET), and the broader term "web services" has taken over...

Time to move on?

[bgarcia]

Is it time for Microsoft to move on?"

Yes. After 3 years, they should be coming up with some new innovative idea that they will bet the company on <rolls eyes>.

Emperor's New Clothes test...

[jkrise]

Kid: But there's nothing on .Net!!!
Joe ServicePack: I think only wise folks can u'stand .Net
MCSE: .Net rocks
GNUist: .Net? .Not..
Microsoft: We're betting our ass.
IBM: Your ass is grass.
Sun: Java's the way.

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

Re:Emperor's New Clothes test...

[finkployd]

Well, this search returned quite a few hits on some good Redhat configuration tips and a (oudated) Linuxcare certification for a few distributions. It looks like if nothing else, Redhat 7.x is reputed to work well on it. The problem you are describing (something getting messed up after a few weeks of running it) is something I have never seen in Linux on any hardware.

If nothing else, Linux is known for being pretty rock solid stable once it is configured and running. Have you ruled out some kind of hardware problem? I had X locking up on me all the time for a while (windows ran just fine) and it turned out to be a bad memory chip. It was under warranty and after getting a new one it has worked without a problem. You might want to run memtest86 on it and see if that is what is happening to you.

Finkployd

Re:Emperor's New Clothes test...

[finkployd]

x86 *is* the majority of hardware, despite the fervent wishes of the dwindling band of Alpha users or the fanatical Apple-huggers.

Try leaving your little underpowered desktop world for a little bit and look at the rest of the computing world. There are giant Unix servers and Mainframes everywhere. McDonalds is probably the majority of restaurants as well, but that doesn't make it important to the culinary world.

Finkployd

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.

NO tolerance for standards wars

[mekkab]

GM's Scott issued a strong warning to Microsoft, Sun and the other players in the Web services industry, that enterprises will not tolerate the standards wars of the past. "We have no appetite for it," he said

Exactly, so he and everybody else is sitting back and waiting for a clear winner with mature functionality to materialize.
In other words, he's saying "Screw .net, let some other schmuck take the cost of developing it. WE got screwed on ISO networking and Token ring! Twice bitten, 3 times shy!"

Re:NO tolerance for standards wars

[zero_offset]

And again, the part everyone fails to understand about .NET (mostly due to Microsoft's crappy marketing) is that remoting in .NET is a fully pluggable artchitecture. So whatever standard emerges, you can still use .NET. Just handle your remoting in a reasonably abstract way, then switch the damned thing on the fly.

Hell, some of the basic tutorials that came with the .NET beta (and probably with the release version, I never got around to looking at them again) showed you how to do this. A local binary component communications channel was transparently switchable to an HTTP-based protocol using policies which were controllable by an administrator... re-programming and re-compiling not required.

Fight all the standards wars you want, then just plug in the winner and get back to work.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

virtually none of the promised advantages have come true

What nonsense. I use .NET every day and it has delivered all of its promised advantages.

whats to see?

[chef_raekwon]

Is it time for Microsoft to move on?"

move along...nothing to see here.....

It takes insight to notice these things take time.

[Sheetrock]

Very few of today's Internet standards were recognized even within three years as standards. Usenet took seven before it became ubiquitous, IRC took at least four (with DCC still not part of the spec), and even the WWW took six. Remember, it was fundamentally a revision of Gopher technologies, which in turn were an iteration of something else (Archie?)

Most of .NET was puffery, to be sure (I read a piece on MSDN more or less admitting this), but that's largely because it was a working title given to a number of next-generation technologies that may or may not pan out, many of which haven't been released. You can't really consider C# or Hailstorm to have been around and competing for three years, can you?

fun with fud.

[x0n]

Woe betides us once more: brace yourselves for another flood of misinformed, biased and downright incorrect assertions from both sides of the fence. Please, no "c# is java", ".net is slower than java" or other such empty statements. If you've worked with .NET for 6 months plus (remoting/asp.net/interop/ado.net), great. We welcome your comments. Perl monkeys need not apply.

Likewise for you "java" programmers out there who in actuality have only ever compiled one applet, and it was a recompilation of a decompiled shareware scroller that you removed the copyright notice from. Well done. On the other hand, if you've solid experience developing beans, rmi and other such projects, we also welcome your comments.

The rest of you shut up and learn.

Rant over.

- Oisin

Hyperlinking frenzy

[palad1]

Hi,
I am all for html hyperlinks but I think I can find Eweek's website, as well as microsoft's website and its dot net section, especially after three years.

Of course I know, I wouldn't be bothered if I didn't try to read the article. Who reads the articles on slashdot anyways?

What about Linux

[fudgefactor7]

All the Linux vendors out there pretty much said that they were going to take over about 3 years ago too...is it time for them to move on as well?

Re:What about Linux

[wza]

I think it's safe to say that Linux has been doing a very good job in taking over considering the fact that it went from a joke to a threat for the Redmonds during the last three years...

Re:What about Linux

[leomekenkamp]

Except for Lindows (and SCO), I think most linux distributors are quite realistic. Can you provide urls to back your claim?

all about the Benjamins

[AssFace]

say the words "dot net" and you get to add so much to the cost of projects that it immediately makes it worth it to switch over.

that is the only reason I could see why .NET might ever catch on.
I'm not saying it is a useless bit of technology, I'm just personally partial to using any number of existing technologies that do the same thing and are cheaper to implement.

my current employer is retarded when it comes to computers and they paid someone to do a very basic web project in "dot net" because there was a general misunderstanding in the difference between the domain and the programming structures.

In the end it cost them a ton and now it is costing them more to maintain. I am trying to get them to port it all over to a much lighter system (php on linux or freebsd), but they are currently not interested.

's GOOD

[joynt]

I'm not afraid to admit it, I like .net. My job has become a whole lot easier, taking projects that could have taken weeks and turning them into days. ADO .net was my best friend last month and c# was my mistress. My company is re-doing just about everything as a web service and .net is making it that much easier. The fact that Visual Studio makes everything so easy just takes the load off of our extremely tiny R&D group which is relied on for every single technical question/project/advice. Maybe .net isnt all that it could have been, but it is great tool for any developer... unless you dont have windows, then I guess your just screwed.

.Net a complete success

[tanguyr]

.Net was (and still is) a marketing ploy to counter the sudden gains in mindspace being made first by Sun with J2EE and later by "web services" in general. Judging from the fact that most PHBs have heard about it it seems to have worked quite well - the fact that they (or, it seems, almost anybody) have no idea what it does it besides the point. As long as MS is still getting column inches ("comparing .Net to Crack Cocaine" or whatever) then it's working for them just fine, thanks. This isn't anything new - MS practically invented the word "vapourware" back in the 90's. I'm not saying .Net does nothing, i'm saying that the engineers got there after the marketing department and the advertising budget.

/t

What did you expect?

[Advocadus Diaboli]

I mean, did in all the years of Microsoft history ever a promise come true?

Microsofts business model is based on not fulfilling the promises they make, otherwise nobody would ever need to buy a new product. And of course its much easier to have a vision than to make this vision become reality.

And is there anybody that really remembers the promises they made 3 years ago? People are so used to get screwed by Microsoft that they don't even memorize the things that will never come true. All I personally remember of that .net thing is that even 3 years ago people were saying that this is just a big vapoware thing.

It can do most of what they say...

[ClubStew]

The only problem is that they've made the damn IDE too simple and now every Tom, Dick, and Sally thinks they can program. Writing code and actually developing applications are vastly different.

With XML Web Services (granted, not MS proprietary) and Remoting, .NET make remote procedure calls somewhat easier.

If Mono ever finishes, the platform-specific CLR can run most code. Even though Java's done it for a long time, you're tied to one language: Java. The .NET class library can be used by any language that targets the CLR - and that's quite a few; so any developer can write for .NET.

If the industry could actually start hiring good developers again instead of brain-dead code monkeys who's jobs at McD's got too tedious and their sole purpose for coding is more money, the field of .NET - not to mention a lot of other projects on any platform - would be much better. Who's to blame is all those middle managers out there that hire two code monkeys for the price of one good developer. At least they get what they pay for.

Re:It can do most of what they say...

[GrantZ]

Absolutely!

I am a software engineer and have written apps in Java, VB, and PERL. I have a friend who has been an M$ developer for about 5 years, and just called me a month or 2 ago to let me know that there is this thing called "design patterns" ... just for .Net. There is some M$ website that apparently broke the lid open on the concept of patterns this year (don't know URL). Of course, so did Christopher Alexander in the late 70's, and over 100 others since then... but M$ didn't endorse them until this year. My friend is cool and all, but the general software engineering ignorance was staggering.

Re:It can do most of what they say...

[goodviking]

If Mono ever finishes, the platform-specific CLR can run most code. Even though Java's done it for a long time, you're tied to one language: Java.

I'm not sure how many times I've seen this single point refutued, but your not tied to a single language to use the the JVM. Want proof, here you go. That's COBOL to Eifel with all the good bits in the middle.

The question is, what do you mean by "Java". There is the programming language "Java". There is the Java Virtual Machine. There is the set of standard class libraries, etc... This is where I think the confusion comes in.

Re:It can do most of what they say...

[zero_offset]

I'm not sure how many times I've seen this single point refutued, but your not tied to a single language to use the the JVM. Want proof, here you go [tu-berlin.de]. That's COBOL to Eifel with all the good bits in the middle.

JVM language "flexibility" was added after the fact, and it often introduces some fairly ugly things to existing languages (not that .NET compliance won't).

Most people don't understand that the .NET intermediate langage (IL, which is what .NET programs compile into unless you use the native-compile switches) was intentionally designed to be language-neutral (it can do a few things that C# can't), and whereas the JVM bytecode was designed to be executed (e.g. it is structured so that it is easy to interpret), IL was designed to be compiled (e.g. it is structured so that it is easily JIT-consumable).

.Net

[Anonymous Coward]

At least it's doing slightly better than GNU/Hurd.

Question

[pubjames]

Has anybody worked out what it is yet?

Re:Question

[__past__]

A cheap trick to get around the limitation that there are only 17576 TLAs.

Re:Question

[Sven Tuerpe]

Has anybody worked out what it is yet?

The result of a bug in Word. It was supposed to be .NOT but Word autocorrected it and nobody noticed.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I have. I'll summarize it for you.

.NET is the next generation of Windows system services designed to brig innovation and other advanced technology to the web services and distributed dynamic application runtime deployment industry. It also allows middle tier application service providers to deliver their solutions in a timely and innovative fashion. In addition, it is a game platform designed to revolutionize the ability for developers and end users alike to interact with their systems in a dynamic and innovative way.

Now do you understand?

Re:Question

[Schnapple]

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

Re:Question

[Drakonian]

I couldn't figure it out until I read this Ars technica article on .NET. Highly recommended.

.NET was a success, Microsoft-style

[shoppa]

By announcing .NET as vaporware, Microsoft prevented any other vendors from doing anything similar. Not only that, but because ".NET" was going to be The Next Big Thing, they prevented other software houses from making any sales of existing working software while everyone waited for .NET to come along.

This is hardly a new strategy for Microsoft. And in the .NET case they succeeded on a collosal scale.

Re: .NET was a success, Microsoft-style

[Black Parrot]

> By announcing .NET as vaporware, Microsoft prevented any other vendors from doing anything similar. Not only that, but because ".NET" was going to be The Next Big Thing, they prevented other software houses from making any sales of existing working software while everyone waited for .NET to come along.

> This is hardly a new strategy for Microsoft. And in the .NET case they succeeded on a collosal scale.

Yep. In particular, .net was launched at the height of the .craze to prevent people from switching over to Sun, who promised the same things MS did with .net.

Those with memories three years and one day long will remember that right up until the day MS announced .net they were ridiculing Sun for suggesting the very same thing. Some of us called attention to it at the time.

Classic application of vaporware, folks. And Sun didn't jerk the carpet out from under MS's feet, to chalk .net up as a rip-roaring success, even if no-one uses it.

Speaking for myself

[m00nun1t]

As a pretty experienced web developer, I've worked at some level (some more than others) with most of the popular platforms: ASP, PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP and ASP.NET (very little perl, which I've always regretted if just for completeness).

From that perspective, ASP.NET just totally rocks my world. I can debug more easily. Performance is better. It encourages good architectural practices. And my productivity has gone through the roof - I haven't done any formal tests but based on personal experience I'd say I can develop at *least* 30% faster with ASP.NET compared to any other platform, possibly more. The difference is most pronounced in more complex systems where it really shines. For less than, say, a thousand lines of code it probably doesn't save as much time, but I rarely work on that anyway.

So, maybe .NET has "failed" and maybe not, but for me, ASP.NET has improved my working world radically. Don't knock it till you've tried it.

Re:Speaking for myself

[pubjames]

From that perspective, ASP.NET just totally rocks my world. I can debug more easily. Performance is better. It encourages good architectural practices. And my productivity has gone through the roof - I haven't done any formal tests but based on personal experience I'd say I can develop at *least* 30% faster with ASP.NET compared to any other platform, possibly more.

I absolutely agree. Since discovering .NET my life has changed! I can concentrate for longer, I'm more confident with girls and my armpits have a wonderful spring morning freshness. .NET, because you're worth it!

Re:Speaking for myself

[truthsearch]

Other than Cold Fusion I've also worked with all of these. The largest learning curve definitely goes to ASP.NET. My overall preference is easily PHP. One factor is many things can be done with far less code in PHP than ASP.NET. The only advantage ASP.NET has over anything else is the tool, VS.NET. It's not the technology that's saving development time. It's the tool helping to write the code and debug that's the real time saver. So from a business point of view it may be the right choice since the tool's good enough to make up for some overly complex platform requirements. But if you get good at manually typing PHP it's far and away superior based on my experiences and from others I've read.

Re:Speaking for myself

[m00nun1t]

You are right about the IDE being a big part of the advantage of ASP.NET (and I should have mentioned it), but it certainly can't take all the credit.

IMHO the biggest thing in ASP.NET that leaves PHP for dust is the separation of code from layout. The other big one (and closely related) is easy componentisation. These two make life so much easier, and speak to much of the architectural niceties I mentioned in my original post. Not only can it be done, but it's easy to do and the flow *encourages* you to do it. I love a tool that makes it easy for me to do things the right way.

I do agree ASP.NET has a steeper learning curve than PHP (or any of the others listed, with the possible exception of JSP). Based on my experience, it's a price well worth paying.

For a small project, PHP would usually be my first choice, but anything medium to large, IMHO, ASP.NET is just miles better. Not trying to start a religous war as I do respect PHP, but I thought this was interesting, a comment from a respected member of the PHP community: http://www.edwardbear.org/blog/archives/000189.htm l

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:Speaking for myself

[gh]

ASP.NET does not force the developer to use those features. You can very well write pages much in the same way one use to write pages for ASP/JSP/PHP. The IDE, Visual Studio.NET, pushes the concept of code behind pages and using controls.

Regardless of the tool involved, you do not have to work with those features.

Re:Speaking for myself

[m00nun1t]

Hmmm, I thought you said you'd used ASP.NET? It doesn't force you to use those features. It's certainly the default way of working if you are in VS.NET, but if you want to do inline code like old style ASP, be my guest, you can do it with ASP.NET, no problems.

I've heard that the free editor MS provide, Webmatrix, defaults to inline code but never used it myself. I wouldn't be surprised as that's aimed at low end developers, inline is conceptually much simpler than code behind.

Re:Speaking for myself

[sheldon]

Without using frames I just wanted to dynamically change the controls within a page.

Huh? There are multiple ways to do this, at the simplest level you throw a number of controls on the screen, possibly grouped with panels, and then change the Visible tag accordingly to display the one you want.

On a more complex level, you can create a number of controls which all inherit from a base class, and then instantiate the one you need into the main page. I've been working with the Dotnetnuke framework, and this is the entire basis of how it operates, as custom controls inherit from PortalModuleControl and are loaded dynamically at runtime according to database criteria for the page.

We gave 3 others a chance at it, two of them full time and true Microserfs.

Microserf? What is this, a contest to see who can act most like a child?

Since then I've tried other things and come to the same conclusion.

I guess it's nice that you came to a conclusion, it's just unfortunate that you are trying to extend your technical incompetence onto others.

ASP.NET has rocked my world as well, and I am barely even scratching the surface of functionality.

.Net was never clearly defined

[cait56]

Three years in and I believe it is fair to say that most people do not understand exactly what .Net is -- other than a vague "trust me" monolithic solution.

Which I believe is the core of its problem. While there are some fools who will buy anything that fill in the name of their favorite supplier offers, more of the market wants to make decisions for themelves.

From the little I've had time to study .Net, there were a few aspects of it that were indeed superior to what had proceeded it on the market. But the information to make a cohesive strategy was just missing. What if I liked the characteristics of the run-time engine, but needed to stick with CORBA interfacing?

The most telling flaw in the strategy, for me, was that you could find entire racks of books on .Net. But absolutely none that explained the basic wire protocols used. They were all "How to Program a .Net application inside one box using language Y".

When I'm designing a system, the language used on each box is the last detail that I consider. I want to understand the interactions of the remote systems, how dependent they are on each other, how they evolve seperately, how the failure of one will affect the others, etc.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[zero_offset]

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...

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[johnmckeon]

Three years in and I believe it is fair to say that most people do not understand exactly what .Net is -- other than a vague "trust me" monolithic solution.

It seems to me that this has been a problem whenever MS introduces a new technology (COM, COM+, ActiveX). I can find plenty of people using these terms, but no one can give me a two or three sentence summary of what they are. Unfortunately, it seems like .NET is having the same problem.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[RoLi]

Three years in and I believe it is fair to say that most people do not understand exactly what .Net is -- other than a vague "trust me" monolithic solution.

No matter what the MS-bootlickers say, .NET can be summed up easily:

.NET is like Java, only incompatible with everything other than Windows. The only added feature is language-neutrality (you can use more than just C# to code .NET objects) although that exists under Java, too, although to a lesser extent (There are many compilers that take many non-Java programming languages as imput and put out Java bytecode, however those are not very widely used and supported)

To sum up, there isn't a real reason to use .NET over Java. The Microsofties who have overrun Slashdot already will crucify me for doubting the invincibility of Microsoft, but Java is *the* standard programming language, and the only language that runs on every major and most minor platforms.

75% of webservers don't run Windows. 100% of cellphones don't run Windows. 60% of PDAs don't run Windows. Let's face it: .NET is just a desktop solution, nothing more.

Using .NET and artificially chaining yourself to one vendor and platform and shrinking your target market is a stupid idea.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[OneEyedApe]

Actually, I think C is a language that will compile and run on damn near every platform. Yes, given the appropriate runtime environment, Java will run on an amazing number of platforms, but C fits into far more strange platforms.

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:.Net was never clearly defined

[cait56]

On a point-by-point comparison, .Net frequently is superior to Java. It falls short on the fundamental points you raise: interoperability, and more importantly seperability. Using Java you know exactly which technologies you are embracing, and which you are leaving out. Java/XML, Java/RMI, Java/Corba... It's all your decision.

The other feature that .Net has is superior native execution, it was designed to be translated to native code. The .net virtual machine is better defined than the JVM is. But I agree that on whole, the tradeoff is not worthwhile.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[buckinm]

Let's take all the cellphones, PDAs, and webservers that run java... that's less than the number of windows xp boxes Dell sold in the last half a year. Now who's looking at a small market?

Two points here:
(1) The overall size of the market is different from the actual opportunity in the market. So, yes, there are a bazillion windows desktops. On the other hand, everybody else, including Microsoft, is writing software for them already.

(2) The possible future size of the market is important too. pda's, cellphones, and webservers usage is growing. The pc market is starting to drop off.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[HeadDown]

The language-neutrality is just a lure. MSIL is essentially highly-compressed C# code (much like Java .class files are pretty much highly-compressed Java source files). Any language other than C# must go through awkward hoops to match its model.

Multi-language is not all it's cracked up to be -- would you allow people in your team to just pick the language of their liking 'because it all compiles to MSIL anyhow'? Of course not. You'd have a humoungous support problem, peer-review would be a mess, etc.

What is going to happen is that people will get on board because they can keep their fav language, and after a while everyone will migrate to C# because it will simply be better supported, and hey, it's a pretty decent language.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[IamTheRealMike]

.NET is going to be used heavily for Windows desktop apps anyway. People will use it, and love it.

The fact is that Win32 is a steaming cowpat of an API. This is rammed through my head time and time again whenever I am forced to use it. It has some of the most braindamaged behaviours in the world - it's so bad that practically nobody uses it in fact. It's kind of sad, but it's not really possible to write Windows programs without a (usually expensive) IDE and wrapper library to help you.

Well, .NET is mostly just Microsoft creating yet another wrapper, albiet one that doesn't suck quite as much as their previous attempts did. That's just as well, perhaps one day the sheer hell of Win32 will be banished forever, much the same way that nobody pokes the BIOS anymore to print stuff to the screen. To be honest, I think that'll happen more because of Linux than .NET replacing Win32 entirely, but only time will tell.

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:.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:.Net was never clearly defined

[RoLi]

Let's take all the cellphones, PDAs, and webservers that run java... that's less than the number of windows xp boxes Dell sold in the last half a year. Now who's looking at a small market?

First of all, while there are surely more desktops than Java-capable devices, the figures are not as out of proportion as you suggest. There are millions of Java devices already out and soon almost all cellphones will run it which means BILLIONS of devices.

Secondly, for desktops, allmost all the software already exists and there isn't really that much to develop. So for a developer, Java sure as hell is the more interesting platform than .NET.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[alext]

.Net has is superior native execution

I'd be interested in some benchmarks. My experience in fiddling with some numerically-intensive code is that Sun JVM 1.4.1 is about 4 times faster than a Dotnet release of 18 months ago. I haven't tried a more recent version.

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!

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[AndersDahlberg]

The other feature that .Net has is superior native execution, it was designed to be translated to native code. The .net virtual machine is better defined than the JVM is. But I agree that on whole, the tradeoff is not worthwhile.

Mod parent up as overrated... The java virtual machine was designed to be *both* interpreted and just in time (JIT) compiled to native form as this is the best performer. You maybe don't believe it - but most of the time methods only used one or two times during an applications life time they are actuallay faster *not* to compile to native form (insert long CS hardware and virtual machine explanation and proof here). The .NET CLI have the problem that it was *not* designed to be efficiently interpreted - thus any dynamic language will perform very bad on it (i.e. compare benchmarks of python.net python on java (jython))

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[imtheguru]

The most telling flaw in the strategy, for me, was that you could find entire racks of books on .Net. But absolutely none that explained the basic wire protocols used. They were all "How to Program a .Net application inside one box using language Y".


This brings to mind something mentioned by a professor, Dr. Puder, in a seminar/discussion i attended about .NET. The questions addressed were:
-- what is .NET
-- what problems does .NET solve
-- haven't technologies such as CORBA already addressed these issues.

The discussion was preceeded by a presentation by another professor (a .NET zealot IMHO).

During the critiquing of .NET, Dr. Puder mentioned that a distributed architecture should offer transparent, well documented access to two interfaces. The first interface is the Horizontal interface, better known as the API. The second interface is the Vertical interface which documents the protocols being used over the wire.

In the specific case of .NET, the vertical interface is documented (to some extent), which is what the mono team are using as reference. However the horizontal interface (API) is horribly obscured and a vendor of a .NET environment may choose to hide some of the APIs from the programmer. The primary reason for this obscurity is product lock-in. A vendor can choose to lock u in by providing or not providing some of the interfaces that other vendors provide.

To address the question put forth by the parent post, .NET uses XML encoded messages sent from the service requester to the service provider. This is typically done to keep the messages simple and human readable(?) -- however CORBA sends code (binary) in its communication protocol and achieves the same task with a large reduction in the number of bytes actually transmitted. From examples i have seen it is it is typically between 25:1 and 40:1.

Dr. Puder is a CORBA Demi-God and an author of MICO ( M ICO I s CO rba). MICO is an open source, fully compliant implementation of the CORBA standard written in C++.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[cait56]

Yes. .NET uses XML. Use of XML as peer-to-peer protocol remains, IMHO, a very stupid idea. It is very nice for documents. But binary encoding of wire messages, such as is done by CORBA, is clearly superior. I remain opposed to definition of "new" XML services that merely duplicate existing CORBA and/or RPC solutions with the sole benefit of consuming more bandwidth while circumventing network security by pretending to be a "web" protocol.

But saying that .NET uses XML is like saying NFS uses RPC. Neither is complete documentation. I found available open specs on *how* .NET uses XML, and how to generate your own compatible messages, to be conspicuously absent, or at the minimum insufficiently indexed and highlighted.

Clearly, the developers of the documetation did not believe that "typical users" would have to be "burdened" with these details. (Which, I suspect, is the most charitable interpretation likely to be found on /. for these actions.). Personally, I do not like the "convenience" of being locked into a single solutions provider.

Re:.Net was never clearly defined

[LPetrazickis]

I fail to see a contradiction between proposition
A: .net will bind you to MS until the universe collapses
and proposition
B: the universe will not collapse

If I am not mistaken, logic dictates that .net will bind you to MS forever.:P

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.

That's what they said about Windows CE

[cloudscout]

Remember when Windows CE had been out for a couple of years and everyone was declaring it a failed technology? Look what happened after that...

Now, I'm not saying that .NET is still bound to be a success, but it's still too early to count 'em out. We're not talking about BOB here.

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.

.NET = Windows API 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

.NET has little to do with anything .NET. It's a new Windows API designed to turn Windows into a virtual machine like Java so it can be architecture independent. That's what CLR and C# and all the rest of that stuff is about. It's about MS getting off x86-32 and into a larger world of ia64, amd64, and maybe even ppc64. CLR is the new Windows runtime. Once the move is complete, Windows will be able to run on anything and apps will not have to be recompiled at all. This will make Windows more portable than *nix.

Re:.NET = Windows API 2.0

[blakestah]

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

That statement is a laughable sham, and I am sure M$ is glad you brought it up. Windows controls the hardware, and not the other way around. It has been this way for a long time - Windows killed Alpha, for example. .NET is all about providing a web programming interface that fits better with Windows than Java, to force lock-in on the operating system AND the network interface. It is like Java without platform independence, so that Microsoft can make even more money. Predictably, the developer tools are so simple even a Visual Basic monkey can make a web application. Predictably, the bytecode interpreter is buggy and insecure - this is not what will win the battle. Microsoft will make life REALLY easy for developers, they will make development costs low for web companies, and .NET will attempt to throw Java out the window.

I wonder if Redhat and Sun's attempt to open source java will have any impact on this emerging battlefield??

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:.NET = Windows API 2.0

[maraist]

Sorry to be a repeat post. But a quick summary:
1 MS wants to be a monopoly on software

2 MS needs to squash all other forms of hardware (including hand helds) to accomplish 1.

3 Cross platform stands in the way of 2. Thus must be squashed.

4 In accordance with 1, MS buys/recreates most/all forms of software especially compilers.

5 In accordance with 4, there is a MS java compiler/environment. To facilitate 3, the MS environment squelches cross platform capability through market share of ms-specific tweaks for applets / java applications.

6 SUN doesn't allow MS to enhance the java language (instigated by 4), thereby thwarting MS's efforts to obliterate cross platforming.

7 MS realizes some benifits to a common API (a la MFC / java.*), and sees a benifit to customers if they only have to learn a single API, but can share code between different developer types (simple ASP / VB, corporate C++). Moreoever, COM is too complex on the C++ side. MS's particular solution to a common environment was to literally have a shared execution space between differing programming widgets. This makes a simpler replacement for COM.

8 MS already has a working and somewhat industry proven java-engine, so only a few minor tweaks are needed to make it CRL/.NET. It is likely that the decision to make CRL was in the middle or possibly even the beginning of the MS java initiative.

9 With the release of .NET, they now have a new product with which they can innovate to the same degree as COM/DCOM, or any other nifty MS technology that I've happily ignored for over a decade.

10 .NET will run slower and consume more memory than well written c/c++ code, and with .NET (a la java.*), it's likely that people will write highly inefficient C# / VB code which will formulate the bulk of our future application bases on the windows platform. Thus hardware requirements will go through the roof, thereby instigating hardware upgrades. All of which require new licences of MS Windows and all other MS software, thereby continuing More's law.

So there you have it.. A completely logical motivation chain. As you can see, cross-platform is in violation of some of the steps, so you are very likely to see frustrations in the independent porting process. Moreoever, with somethink is centralized as .NET, it's even more likely to have back-doors known only to the MS camp which provides unfair competition. If you make a good IDE (to compete against Visual Studio), or a word process, but use C# (I'm assuming we're not crazy enough to consider VB.NET), then MS can easily add to the next version of .NET some purposeful slowdowns for the competing software... Unlike some previous issues (DR DOS having issues with win 3.x thanks to explicit breaks in their code), .NET can simply forget to activate certain optimizations for competing software at intermittant times with hardly a notice to the developers.

If Sun didn't invent Java would .NET exist?

[wukie]

If Apple didn't implement Xerox's windows would Microsoft have created a version?

If Apple hadn't invented multi-media for micro-computers would Microsoft have it's own implementation?

Microsoft haven't done any (apart from Word for Mac, then later Windows) inventing of their own, and what they have done, has always been a poor copy! .NET is a perfect example.

Re:If Sun didn't invent Java would .NET exist?

[the_rev_matt]

Word was preceded by WordPerfect, WordStar, and probably dozens of others. Microsofts innovations have always been and will always be in the arenas marketing and licensing.

They must be doing SOMETHING right

[chia_monkey]

Think about it...for three years they've been talking about this amazing .NET thing. And every year the masses go "what the hell is this?" and each year it gets a feature here dropped and a feature there dropped. And yet, after three years, people still talk about it. People still want to develop for it. People are still holding out from developing with any of the other options because of .NET.

So...it may not DO anything just yet, but in terms of stalling development on other platforms and continuing to put MS in the news, I'd say it's a success.

Re:They must be doing SOMETHING right

[jsab]

For a long time my general MS antipathy kept me from checking out c# and .Net, but then I discovered Mono and realized that MS had created something great that everyone can benefit from.

The existence of Mono really allows free software coders(in Gnu/Linux) to use mainstream(or emerging mainstream) development platform for the first time. Whether the "software as a service" model works out for MS, the .Net framework has a very bright future as a development platform in both the commercial and free-software worlds.

Re:From "Great" to old ideas

[zero_offset]

C# is too inspired by Java? Java syntax was inspired by C. Big deal. C# is still a better language. The devil is in the details. Show me boxing in Java.

.COM is not "included in" with the CLR in any way. The CLR supports something called COM-interop, but that's just backwards compatability. You can make a fully compliant CLR on another platform which never goes near COM but still runs full .NET applications.

And finally... "ASP.NET is lauging out loud"? What the hell does that even mean? I personally don't like ASP.NET, but at least it's far more consistent than PHP is or probably will ever be.

Return to class, you obviously have some catching-up to do.

In my Experience . . .

[Badgerman]

The results are really odd. .NET adaption went slower than I expected. It was crammed down our throats . . . and no one really seemed to care.

Then, recently (last year) I've seen a real explosion in .NET. Literally I think 75% of Microsofts pushing the tool was useless or even backfired. Time seemed to be needed.

As a developer who has worked in a variety of languages, OVERALL, .NET has some good ideas mixed in with some unexpectedly lame ones. In general I'm able to develop faster and more efficiently (In some cases I've developed ASP.NET applications over twice as fast as ASP, yet with far less ASP.NET experience), but there are moments of strange and odd roadblocks.

Do I think .NET will rule the world? Not really. It's just one of many options. Web development and related technologies seem to be in a phase that's a mix of overcautious and overenthusiastic, and I don't think anyone is sure where things are going right now.

Will Microsoft give up on .NET? I don't expect they will - too much of an investment, too much behind it. It'll get altered and poked and prodded and integrated, but it'll be around in some form for awhile.

.NET Proof Of Concept

[Ilan Volow]

.NET proves without a doubt that it is possible for an entire industry to fake an orgasm.

Re:.NET Proof Of Concept

[Dumbush]

are you sure it isn't premature ejaculation?

I think you've got part of it

[Badgerman]

First, let me note that I actually do develop in .NET and feel there's a lot of good things there.

However, I think you're onto something here. By pushing .NET, Microsoft really did get everyone to pay attention. Even if people wanted to move on, if they weren't sure what to move on to, they at least stagnated and didn't move on, maintaining some status quo.

I think they got the best of both worlds - a decent product they paired with FUD. That's a pretty tough combination.

.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 :)

Re:From "Great" to old ideas

[OpCode42]

http://www.myphonegames.co.uk/nokia-3510i-xtreme-b oxing/

There you go. Boxing in Java. Don't see your problem... ;)

Heck no they shouldn't be moving on....

[Asprin]

There are some compelling advantages to .NET -- REAL compelling advantages. The thing is that it's takes a boatload of time for a new development platform to get to the mainstream: You're looking at two or three years to get the developers comfortable enough to start working with it, then another two or three years to get their apps ported over and another year or two to roll those out to customers.

I figure we should start seeing real concrete examples of the advantages of .NET in, like 2005-06.

Don't believe me?

USB.

Or even better, how about Win32? We *still* have at least two industry-specific Win16 apps that are under a current maintenance contract. Hell, most of the non-MSOffice Win16 crap was just replaced around four years ago with the Y2K upgrades, so we're still in the process of depreciating it!

All of MS's apps will be .NET in November, but contrary to what the open source community believes, MS Office will only get you so far -- it is by far not the most important piece of software we run. The developers are the key, and MS understands this. You need to get **THEM** interested in developing on a new platform (.NET, MONO, Java, LAMP, ELF or whatever) about five years before you want anything to happen.

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.

Microsoft Marketing Machine

[quark2universe]

The MMM (Microsoft Marketing Machine) does not waste time, money, and resources on something they don't need to market any more. For example, MS Office, they have done any real marketing for it in years because THEY DON'T HAVE TO. It is now monopolized to the point that it markets itself.

The same applies to .NET. They no longer need to market it because it is now the default development platform for a WINDOWS environment. They accomplished their goal of getting everyone to believe that it is Microsofts internal development platform for all their products (whether it is or not is now irrelevant). That's enough for 90% of the bozo^H^H^H^Hmanagers out there to say "We should use .NET. MS uses it internally. No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft." What a pity.

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.

Three years is just the beginning.

[Simon Hibbs]

For a start, the article itself isn't as negative about .NET as the slashdot post blurb implies. Yet another example of a slashdot post missleading us about the article beign referenced.

The fact is that the .NET is a developer thing, not realy an application thing. This automaticaly means it's goign to take several years longer than an application level technology to make an impact because all those developers need to get skilled up before they can even begin developing the apps.

Microsoft's own apps are only just barely beginning to integrate the core .NET technology of the .NET VM and the associated web services and XML capabilities it enables. The core Longhorn services are all being built on .NET so anyone who thinks it's time to Microsoft to move on from .NET fundamentaly has no clue about Microsoft's development strategy.

The best comparrison is probably Java. How logn did it take before Java rocked the world, er, well some of us are still waiting for it. Actual it did have a big impact in some areas, but generaly not the areas it was orriginaly aimed at. Where are all the Java thin clients now? Perhaps the same will happen with .NET and it's ultimate destiny may lead it in different directions than Microsoft or anyone else can currently imagine. If Mono realy takes off, that could be one of the catalysts for disruptive technological change.

Simon Hibbs

.NET vs. Java and Free Software

[Joey Vegetables]

.NET does not offer much of value over Java or Free Software alternatives, except a fairly nice IDE.

.NET is significantly better than previous M$ offerings (VB6, ASP, VBScript), although it shares the weakness of being more or less Windows-only and is somewhat hard to learn.

Web Services were a good idea that showed up at the wrong time. If not for the dotcom bust we would be seeing a lot more. The beauty of Web Services is that they allow for genuinely distributed computing using open standards and protocols. I have no doubt that M$ would have polluted this idea eventually, but, also thanks to the bust, it really hasn't had the chance.

I always recommend free, cross-platform solutions wherever possible (PHP, Perl, Python, Apache, Linux or *BSD, Zope, wxWindows, etc.), but if you have a lot of legacy VB and/or ASP stuff, .NET almost certainly is better than what you have now.

What .Net REALLY is

[Trolling4Dollars]

To misquote David Byrne, its, "...same as it ever was..."

Microsoft is simply taking what they already have and making some changes in the way these components work together and within the context of the internet. The end result should be a computing experience that is fairly smooth to the end user and provides a lot of what's already out there but with different names and faces. This is why they claim to "innovate". Innovation is taking existing "stuff" and using it in new ways. That's not exactly what they do though. Instead they take existing stuff and use it in the same ways they are already used but call them something else.

Examples:

In UNIX we have daemons
In Windows they have "Services"

This provides enough of a distinction that the less technically inclined person is going to thing Services are somehow different. But they are really no more than daemons or backgrounded apps.

In X Window System we have "Window Managers"
In Windows XP they have the "Theme Service"

Don't believe me? Go stop the theme service in XP and tell me what changes. Just the Window widgets and borders and the look and feel of the Start bar.

In UNIX we have "mount points" for file systems.
In Windows 2000/XP they have the ability to mount a drive in an empty NTFS folder.

Microsoft is very good at taking these existing concepts, renaming them and then claiming them as their own innovations even though they haven't changed how the technologies are actually used. They've only renamed them. .Net is no different. It will be internet services integrated into the OS with all the "new security" that Palladium will bring and a big happy Microsoft smiley face on the front.

Unix = Here's the internet. Go learn some stuff and have fun.

Microsoft = Here's .Net. It's all ready to go... have fun! :)))

Personally I prefer the Unix approach, but that's just me.

Oh, I almost forgot:

In Soviet Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was pro da. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

-- Yakov Smirnoff

Development good, marketing bad

[boatboy]

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.

I'm convinced

[TheZax]

What nonsense. I use .NET every day and it has delivered all of its promised advantages.

OK, AC, you have me convinced with your insightful argument.

I use .NET, AND.ORG/.COM/.EDU every day, and I agree 100%.

Re:I'm not buying it either

[finkployd]

Exactly, which is why it takes forever to develop and so many OSS jobs fails - it doesn't make any money! That is the point of business now, isn't it? Or have we finally switched to a utopian society, because that's what it's going to take for most OSS companies (ex: linux vendors) to profit).

Remember, open source came about and was very successful long before it became a buzz word on wallstreet. Most of us could care less if anyone makes money on OSS, just like before. If the Johnny-come-lately corporations figure out how to make a buck on someone else's work, more power to them. If not, no skin off my back, I'll keep working on OSS and using it. So will, I suspect, many others.

Everyone tries to measure the success of OSS by corporate standards. OSS will live with or without corporate support. Sure the corporations have made it more "legit" in the eyes of some larger companies, and have certainly raisied awareness by bringing the concept into the open. But hey, if they all pack up and leave tomorrow you think OSS will go anywhere? Sure it will be smaller. It will also again be primarily comprised of folks who genuinly care about what they are doing and enjoy it, and well no longer have the wannabe coders and con men just trying to make a quick buck.

Besides, Redhat seems to be doing ok (considering the economy right now). Mandrake filed for Chapter 11 but appearently they are back on the right track and just signed a large deal with HP. IBM is...well IBM. What is changing is every yahoo that thinks they can write a general utility (or internet client, or database, or whatever) and make it rich off of that is getting a rude awakening.

OSS software in many cases is not quite up to par with commercial offerings. However the rate at which OSS software is improving is staggering. The commercial world seems stagnant. I don't see much improvement or innovation coming from there at all. Most just seem to be reinventing existing tech or adding useless eye candy.
Microsoft Active Directory? I liked it back in the 90s when it was called DCE and Kerberos. .Net? A common runtime library for multiple languages? OS/390 has had that for a good decade as well also. SOAP? gee we haven't seen RPC with discovery features before. And let's face it, there is almost nothing that commercial software can do that a determined OSS coder (or team) with enough free time cannot duplicate. Baring some kind of global ban on the concept of Open Source, I just don't see it going away or losing momentum.

Finkployd

.NET is hurting development

[wandazulu]

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?

Just my $0.02

I have to agree

[uradu]

I don't know how much platform independence has been a consideration, but they probably just got sick and tired of plain old Win32 and MFC. If nothing else, it gave them a chance to finally bring out a decent framework, just like everybody else already has. Must be so liberating for them to finally be able to code a dialog box dynamically without having to fool with resources and message map macros. Microsoft have finally discovered proper OOP and class frameworks. Welcome to the '90!

It's all about the Pentiums

[Joe U]

We're all missing the real point of .net

The true reason behind the .net push is to create a bunch of easy to use high level languages to compile down to basically the same code, then let that code run on Win32 platforms and Win64 platforms without making changes.

When the 32 to 64 bit switch starts, the .net apps will be ready to go. The win32 apps will require a translation layer.

Combine that with the fact that the Windows (NT/XP) kernel already supports multiple architectures, win32, posix and os/2 are the 3 common ones. I'm willing to bet that .net will show up in the kernel in the next version of Windows.

Three years?!

[uradu]

Since when has .NET been available for three years? Wan't v1.0 only released officially beginning of last year? Or is this one of those articles meant to justify employers requiring 3+ years of .NET experience (and no older than 12)?

Re:It actually outperforms J2EE by a lot

[Inf0phreak]

Consider this: Microsoft's EULA states that you may not publish a review of .Net's performerance without their explicit written permission. Now tell me if you really think that there will be any negative reviews of it?

MS knows it's a dog. It's as simple as that.

Re:From "Great" to old ideas

[goodviking]

Show me boxing in Java.

OK. Boxing, Typesafe Enums, ...etc. It's a fun read.

When Java was first released, umpty squat years ago, it introduced a lot of good concepts to the wider programming community (yeah yeah, smalltalk blah blah blah). The good news is, the language is adapting and evolving based on a community input process, and real world feedback. There are some things that maybe should or could have been done in different ways, but all in all, I keep comming back.

Re:It takes insight to notice these things take ti

[pmz]

You can't really consider C# or Hailstorm to have been around and competing for three years, can you?

With Microsoft, yes, we can. Anyway, I was suprised to read that it's been three years already. This means we're due for .NET's replacement next year. Perhaps, this time around, we'll see a microkernel architecture with XXML (extensible XML, yea!) all implemented within a web services-based virtual machine. With that in 2004, I can't wait for 2008!

Silly

[Overly Critical Guy]

It is far from time for them to move on. Longhorn will be entirely .NET based. The latest betas already have explorer.exe running as .NET managed code. The old, crufty Win32 that Slashbots loved to bash is finally being replaced, and all Slashbots can do is find new ways to complain.

This is just Slashdot getting its weekly naysaying in. .NET is coming and will be here to stay with Longhorn, and enough people like .NET to have started work on a version for Linux.

That's fine with me.

[LiberalApplication]

I feel pretty much the same way. I've been in the industry and absolutely inundated with marketing-speak, advertisements, and all manner of evangelical whatnot, but it never seemed like anyone was attempting to sell a well-defined strategy. No matter the source, it seemed that the "monolithic" aspect of their sales-push was so pervasive as to make all of the information presented seem hokey.

In the end, that's fine with me. I'll not support any switch to a .Net framework. Hokey is hokey. If they maintain this approach with promises of e-panaceas and superbright futures, then it will only encourage the skeptics (largely, "us") to stand their ground.

ASP.NET

[BladeMelbourne]

I find ASP.NET rather difficult to work with - and avoid using it if there is a better alternative.

The amount of code required to output [X]HTML to the browser is in the order of magnitudes more than using ASP. More typing for less output is bad for productivity and deadlines. ASP can be adjusted with any txt editor, and does not need compiling.

The ASP engine in IIS6 has been rewritten for performance - so legacy applications will continue to run.

The features that come with .NET and not ASP can usually be accomplished in PHP, which is smaller, well documented and cross platform.

I can't give my opinion of .NET applications that are not hosted on a web server - they may be better than earlier technologies.

service httpd start

Mike

Re:J2EE

[Get Behind the Mule]

If its time from Microsoft to move on from .NET then its time for Sun, IBM, Oracle, etc to move on from J2EE.

That's one company with the one technology, and three companies plus "etc." with the other. Wouldn't it make more sense for Microsoft to drop .NET and join everyone else with J2EE?

Re:Not all your base belongs to us

[nick_urbanik]

Your sig (you may change it in response to this, I hope):
chown -R us ~your/*base*

Sorry, but I think that you may have meant by your sig:
find ~your -name '*base*' | xargs chown us

The problem with your sig is that you only change the ownership of the base immediately below ~/your home directory, not all your base in directories more than one level below. The problem is that the shell will only expand the *base* in the home directory.

I hope you can further develop your base chowning skills further, so that all of it belongs to us.

Re:java

[toriver]

The controversial Java extensions ... otherwise known as "breach of contract".

And history is irrelevant to the current state.

Re:It takes insight to notice these things take ti

[Smartcowboy]

Archie was a protocol to contact search engine for FTP. Realy usefull at the time. Some Archie servers are still online but you need a special client to do your search. In fact, it ressembles something like Kazaa if you replace the P2P thing by standard FTP.

Veronica was a tool to do search in the gopher space.

Jughead stand for "Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display". I don't have a clue of its purpose.

get a load of this quote

[golgotha007]

Rob Helms, research director for Directions on Microsoft, says this:
The .Net platform itself has been hampered by immature Web service standards.

excuse me Mr. Helms, but what's wrong with the world not wanting to standardize on proprietary web services? just because web services are 'open' doesn't mean they're immature.

This is obviously just a cheap shot at open standards.

Re:get a load of this quote

[reverendslappy]

No, it's not a cheap shot. It's the truth. Though I can agree with you about the world not wanting to standardize on proprietary web services, the standardization efforts behind web services have been an absolutely assinine circus.

The issue is evidenced here, and here, and here. (I think /. might have had a article on it too, but I can't find it...) Those are just the first articles I was able to find, and I recall reading many others. This has been a pretty widely-reported and well-known issue.

You can debate who's to blame, but the SOAP standard has taken a long time in coming. Version 1.2 was FINALLY released like a week ago, but the W3C has been running around like idiots with it for half of forever. I can tell you from personal experience that corporations want to use web services now but are really hesitant to start using web services to build enterprise apps without real standardization. What it comes down to, in my view, is that as a developer, I need these tools now, and I've been waiting for them for far too long because Tim Berners - Lee has been stroking his Semantic Web pipe dream for more than like 3 years.

What Mr. Helms had to say wasn't a cheap shot at open standards. It was a shot at some serious problems with the drafting of these specific standards, and he has a lot of well-documented history to back him up. IMHO, calling the web services standards "immature" was pretty gracious of Mr. Helms.

You should really read up on the topics you post about so you have some better knowledge of what you're saying before you start taking "cheap shots" at someone simply because of where they're employed.

(Mods: "Interesting"?!? Come ON...)

It's great

[markclong]

I've programmed in Java and C# and I have to say that I love C#. Java can't even come close to the ease of use you get with Visual Studio and C#. When I started with Java I would spend hours trying to figure out paths and dealing with all that nonsense. I tried the IDEs but they never seemed to work right. I fire up Visual Studio and it works great. There were bugs in the original IDE but most of them have been fixed.

Right now I am working on a multi-tier business application for the Fortune 1000 company I work for and the amount that two developers can get done with C# and .NET is staggering. We wrote the eCommerce site for the comapany and it does over $600,000 a day in revenue on Windows server and C#.NET.

If you are interested in developing web applications but don't want to buy Visual Studio give WebMatrix a shot. It is a great looking and totally free IDE. A lot of people here would fall in love with C# and .NET if it had come from anywhere else other than Redmond. It's a shame since it really is a great platform.

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

Technical Stuff

[Joe U]

Just to clarify, win32, posix and os/2 are not kernel archetictures, they are API's for the kernel. (There's a document somewhere I read about 6 years ago that explains it better)

x86, alpha etc are the platform archetictures. At the moment, x86 is the only one in use since Alpha, MIPS and PPC seem to be non-viable, at least to Microsoft, but I expect to see some new ones as time goes on.

My point was that .net should be a native API in the next rev of Windows. .net on Win32 will only be around until the older Windows revisions become obsolete.

Windows95 all over

[MGrie]

Did anyone else get the idea, that Microsoft is in effect pullig the same management/technology stunt it did with Windows95/98/ME all over?

E.G. Win95 mostly served the purpose of creating a middleway between DOS and the Windows Api. All DOS apps ran more or less, and all apps build in the "new" windows api worked a lot better (ofcourse). Then, after 5 years, when even the last software vendor had switched over, they could introduce Windows2000, that ran these Apps better than anything before it, and was build upon actually usable technology.

So... think about .NET and it's primary feature of machine independent code.
Could MS be planning to have programmers create all of the smaller, not that speed dependent frontend apps to the .Net runtime, so they can finally drop the ever aging 80x86 architecture sometimes down the road?

Re:It actually outperforms J2EE by a lot

[Hezaurus]

It's not the JRE improvements it's the code.

• The java version had transactions on every freaking operation
• MS code had transactions on only the most critical places
• The java version used JDBC (which in itself is very good) but the statements were not using prepared queries! So the oracle db had to 'reinvent' the wheel on every query
• MS version used highly optimized stored procedures
• Java version was built as a 'demonstration' or school book implementation which used lots of meaningless (and performance killing) design patterns
• MS version was built by MS to destroy the java version

So ask yourself this: A few programmers write a petshop demo app that shows one possible way of building such app. How hard it is for any given company X to best that performance? Hey don't believe me - the sources are there (theserverside) for all to see. Grab both versions and do some comparison. You'll learn that it was a total waste of time to put those two implementations to test.

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?

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

.NET a definite upgrade, good competition for Java

[shodson]

If you've been building Windows apps for a while you have welcomed .NET because it makes building Windows apps much simpler than the complexities of VC++ and rescues us from having to deal with the hoakiness of VB. As a long-time Java developer as well I am glad to have a full set of OOP features in a VM-like environment like there is in Java available to me. If Java supported the Windows desktop more elegantly and efficiently then .NET wouldn't matter as much, but Swing is dismally slow and cumbersome for Windows apps, though JDK 1.4.2 is supposed to be better. But look at the rift IBM's SWT has caused in the Java/desktop community.

And I don't agree .NET is just about desktop apps. It makes building distributed apps easier as well, if you want to use web services. I do believe, however, J2EE is still a stronger alternative for large-scale distributed apps. But let's face it, nobody cared much about web services until .NET. Not that a lot of people care too much now, but it's seen as the future of distributed computing, from an internet-scale basis, by just about everybody. What else is there, CORBA? RMI? EJBs? Puhleeze. Firewall unfriendliness is the biggest challenges for these protocols. And the Java camp has been working feverishly to add web services support to their platform and developers have been demanding it. See J2EE 1.4, Apache Axis, Sun's WSDP, BEA's "as-easy-as-VB" WebLogic Workshop IDE for building web services, etc.

The best thing .NET has done perhaps is light a fire under the pants of those in the Java camps. Since .NET's release Sun and the major Java vendors have been scrambling to "answer" some of the advantages of .NET and the cool features of C#. The JCP is trying to respond more quickly. The upcoming JDK 1.5 will have most language changes since 1.1 (generics, foreach iterations, attributes) in an attempt to meet or beat some of C#'s strengths over Java, etc. And the prospect of open-sourcing Java is becoming more of a reality as Sun's stranglehold on the standard has slowed the pace of Java's improvement and started to cause some splintering among some previously strong supporters of Java (aka, IBM, creating SWT, not showing up at this year's JavaOne, etc.)

What did you expect

[dot niet]

While I'd agree that in its entirety .NET has been confusing, my experience has been those of us that drink the MS kool-aid are pretty impressed with the development tools. I've personally think web-services on any platform have been overplayed, so criticisms of that effort are probably warranted as well.

I haven't seen anyone mention (forgive me, I haven't read all 522 responses) the features of Java in the upcoming major release as revealed by Sun are essentially in lock-step with C#. Yes, its a leap-frog game and Java was there first, but it certainly discounts wholesale rejections of .NET language features from the Java crowd. Sun has even hinted that they will put more effort into providing (*gasp*) usable IDEs for Java development and have specifically cited MS' DevStudio as a forerunner in this category (although MS was certainly not the first with decent IDEs - props to Borland, et. al).

Finally, it should come as no suprise that .NET is targeted to Windows. Let's face it, Office and Windows are cash cows for MS and it only makes sense to highlight your platform when providing tools. Even with some of these drawbacks, if you are developing to an MS platform, .NET development tools are far and away the best that have been available to you and I know of more than a handful of situations, anectdotal as they may be, where they have proven to provide real productivity benefits, and that is huge for developers. So I guess my point is, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, tying the OS (Win svr 2003) and Office and consulting services (and, and, and..) to .NET may have been confusing, but the development tools are top notch and solve more problems than they create.

No!

[haraldm]

Is it time for Microsoft to move on?

No, it's time for the users to move on.

Sure, I use .NET on vacation...

[Demodian]

... to get the .FISH out of the water...

Re:.net web services

[ClosedSource]

"One of Java's strengths is that it doesn't allow multi-lang other than JNI. Sure, there's a learning curve, but language standardisation is good."

Isn't that a bit like saying that one of the strengths of VB is that it doesn't allow you to run your applications on different platforms so you can standardize on one?

There is always a trade-off between standards and flexibility. This issue isn't exclusive to Sun or MS.

Defense applications

[master_p]

I am glad I work for the Defense sector. Mostly C++, some Ada, some Java.

There are still a bunch of guys like us that want our application statically compiled, with direct access to memory, source-code compatible in Unix and Windows, and easy to program for with standard libraries for gui, database, io, strings etc.

But we are still waiting for that language (perhaps D ?).

With C++, we have static compilation and direct access to memory, but a lack of everything else.

With Java, we have standard libraries, but it lacks the speed due to the VM.

Mono Will Be Useless When Finished

[Vagary]

Currently Windows.Forms* is supposedly 56% done, and yet it is completely usuable to everyone but the developers. Why? Because to use it you must install a two-month old version of Wine, patch it with an obscure third-party patch, and then get the configuration just right.

As someone who's interested in doing some .Net development on Linux, this kludge is completely unacceptable. The Mono team made a grave mistake by tying the success of their project to the notoriously unreliable and difficult to configure Wine libraries. If they had have done the GTK interface layer first, then Mono would already be useful for something more than Miguel's monkey spanking.

* The reason Windows.Forms is so important is that there are already plenty of ways to make trivial console apps cross-platform. In order for Linux to tap into the Windows app market, we need the GUI, godamnit!

Yes, but what the hell is it?

[dacarr]

You know, nobody has made it totally clear on what exactly .NET was. To this day, my boss thinks it's a programming language and is the greatest thing since sliced bread - but then that's why he's the boss, because he knows how to sell.

Every dog has it's 15 mintues of fame.

[Viduliya]

For everyone that thinks .Net is the best thing since sliced bread, here is a reality check: .Net IS NOT Gods gift to programming! (unless, you consider Microsoft to be God?)

How can anything that requires MS Windows on both client and server possibly hope to replace Java ever?? I am not saying that Java is perfect, there is no such thing.

Can you really make a .Net application to work on anything other than Windows?? And No, the whole world is not using Windows and IE nor do they want to.

Yeah, I know about Mono but it's not ready and will not never be given any real support by Microsoft to become usable every time they change .Net, Mono will have to try and play catch-up. Have Microsoft ever made a truly platform independent software? It is not in their interest. It is in our interest to NOT support such things. If Micro$oft is involved in something sooner or later they will try to own and set the standards for it (Example: HTML/DHTML W3C or Micro$oft?).

I would not want to work/develop on any system where Micro$oft dictates all the standards. I'd rather stop using a computer and resort back to using an abacus for computing and carrier pigeons for networking. If I am not alone then .Net days are numbered and Java or something better is surly going to replace it. In the meantime if you are out of a job pick up a .Net manual and do some light reading and try to make some money off it.

Re:Not all your base belongs to us

[nick_urbanik]

Oh dear, doesn't Slashdot value humour?

VA software - hello Java, goodbye .Net

[kshkval]

The Department of Veterans Affairs is a large and influential health care entity... a lot of health care organizations look to the VA for software leadership. Last year, VA programmers started to develop the latest generation of new apps for the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), probably the most widely distributed and multifaceted GUI-based medical record app in the U.S. The coders worked for about 6 months with .Net and then junked the whole thing for a variety of reasons, adopted Java for the newest and most innovative apps and have not looked back. Of course, many of the VA programmers are still in love with MUMPS, but there are not many MUMPS programmers graduating anymore. Bailing on .Net and adopting Java has got to say something about the relative ease of programming w/ Java or at least the cost of software development.

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:.net web services

[Sanction]

I think I can comment very easily, with or without using it. How about: I have enterprise customers, I need to deploy on Solaris or AIX, .Net is not portable, therefore any other perceived advantages to .Net are irrelevant.

For a lot of people, there are legitimate reasons for dismissing it out of hand. It is an incredible environment for developing apps on Windows, but beyond that problem space, it is not particularly useful.

Re:.net web services

[cfish]

(repost: cookie was lost so previous post became anon.)
I have developed specifically in C#.Net for 5 months until our funding ran out. My group did just about everything: Com Interop, XML, SOAP, WinForms, MSHTML, Web connectivity stuffs. Now I have no job but i don't feel any bad about never having to code in .Net again. Let me tell ya, it's very frustrating. Anyone who raves about .Net probably havn't coded extensively with it.

First of all. Why is everybody raving about .Net being used in multiple languages? because most of the time we C# developer have to read documentation/postings/tips from VB.Net code. What kind of advantage is that?? I'm sure VB.Net people find it irritating to read C# code, too. And why is a primitive non-OO language like VB anything to do with the OOP style structure of the .Net framework anyway? cross development is supposedly supported in god-aweful COM.

The most terrifying thing by far is the fact that .Net framework is very incomplete and poorly documented if at all. A lot of things(such as setting TCP timeouts) are simply not possible. you need to use the COM Interop and know COM. And COM interop is a terrible thing. In fact, COM is terribly complicated thing and .Net developers are forced to read cryptive COM related postings.

And then you have the bugs and lack of documentation. When developing with MSHTML lib, there's ZERO documentation in .Net framework. So basically we have to guess our way through what the wrapper does. This happens to just about everything we tried to develop with perhaps one exception of Winform.

Now Winform is nice and fast but not without problems. For example, MS insisted that the damn transparancy bug is a "intended feature." (a transparent form shows it's parent, but not other things that might be stacked under it.) And refresh problems, too.

"The wonderful Visual Studio .Net" that we subscribed thru MSDN is giving us lots of griefs with bugs, too. Once the binary project file is broken, it's a flipping mess.

To conclude, I believe that Microsoft have made a mistake for marketing hype of a technology that is simply not ready for prime time. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth for many developers. If you consider how fast MS dumped COM+, it's pretty scary to think that maybe .Net will be wiped out all of a sudden and we are again hijacked to learn another brand new broken system.

Why MS doesn't just flat out tell us that .Net is an effort to imitate/beat Java is beyond me. I guess the great thing about .Net is that you don't have to deal with MS's horrible COM interfaces. But .Net cannot stand on its own without COM, and .Net itself is simply not done yet.

Re:Zope...

[TomV]

Well, Zope is object oriented, has excellent seperation of presentation and business layer possibilities and once you know how it works, is very easy to get stuff done. Oh, and it is free.

free can also be achieved with .net. If you're prepared to deal with the EULA for the .net Framework SDK, then you can run with a variey of open sourced / Free IDE's or do the whole lot from the command line if that turns you on. Here's enough no-charge stuff to get you into a position to have a serious play with .net and get to know it:

• Framework 1.1 redistibutable (23MB) The minimum requirement to get anywhere with .net, but you might prefer the rather more comprehensive:
• Framework 1.1 SDK (106.2MB) All the commandline tools including the compilers for C# and vb.net, documentation as well as the framework libraries. If you don't want an IDE at all, this download is all you'll need.
• Web Matrix (1.3MB) Free ASP.net IDE which fits on a floppy, requires only the redistributable rather than the whole SDK, and includes a working local-only webserver derived from:
• Cassini Web Server (217kB) Open sourced, very simple web server for running ASP.net apps provided as a code sample. Only works on calls from the local machine but rem out one line of code and (if you're brave/foolhardy) this no longer applies. If you'd prefer to keep if Free as well as free (apart from the SDK of course), you could look at:
• SharpDevelop (8.3MB source or 5.3MB executable) An open source GPLed IDE for C# with a little bit (so far) of VB.net support

That should be enough to get you straight in there (assuming you've got a windows box to run it all on of course, but if not, then why even think about it?).

Now personally, I'm very very fond of Visual Studio.net, but for running up a quick, not-many-pages data-driven web app, the Web Matrix can sometimes be the superior tool (the major difference is that VS.net pretty much enforces code-behind and has multi-file projects, whilst the Web Matrix works with inline code and a single file at a time.
Certainly, the adoption has been slower then Microsoft would have liked, but then, my personal interpretation of the 'what is .net?' question is, at the moment, 'the win64 API, currently in preview on top of win32', and since the move to .net is essentially a move to a new platform, it's going to be no faster than the move to win32 from win16 before it. All .net questions seem to end up at 'it's the Common Language Runtime'

Give it a try, have a play around (esp. the web Matrix) and see what you like and what you don't. If nothing else, you'll learn to love some of the details of your favourite environment more than you did before.

TomV

It doesn't matter

[NullProg]

Not that Microsoft has done anything wrong,(IMHO I think the language neutral VM is great), but has anyone besides myself looked at the object files the compiler creates? My mother codes in VB (Excel) it doesn't make her a programmer, just a accountant who uses the tools provided.

It all still boils down to x86 machine code. With .Net you may loose the ability to choose the best optimizations for your program. Of course thats true with any assembler. Has anyone besides myself look into the MS IL layer? Good, but not great.

From a embedded programmers perspective, .Net stinks. Too much overhead on low CPU/Memory systems to be usefull (Although Microsoft is selling the licenses dirt cheap). HP's Chi (tea) comes close, but no cigar. IBM's Java offering also comes close, but again no cigar. With embedded computers you still can't beat assembler and 'C'.

Not to start a flame war, but as developers I hope most of us realize that .Net still wraps around my favorite API, Win32. Just look at the DLL's that are loaded when you lauch your IL hello world program My test program loaded (GDI, GDI32, CTL3D, WIN32DLL, etc) and are all win32 libraries.

Enjoy,