Microsoft Developers Respond To .NET Criticism

bonch writes "Richard Grimes of Dr. Dobbs Journal wrote an article entitled Mr. Grimes' Farewell, in which he discusses what he feels are inherent flaws in .NET, and how he is abandoning his .NET column. Grimes argues that .NET is merely thin wrappers to Win32 calls (Avalon uses message functions that date back to 16-bit Windows), that Microsoft has abandoned confidence in both .NET and sales of Longhorn, and that the framework itself is too large and poorly implemented, most of it ported from past APIs like WFC and VB. Dan Fernandez, Microsoft's Visual C# Project Manager, has responded in his blog. Richard Grimes appears in the comments to defend his criticism, referencing first-hand disassembly of .NET APIs using ildasm. Scott Swigart has also responded to the criticism of Visual Basic .NET. Apparently, Mr. Grimes struck some nerves."

Comments

Irony

[bigtallmofo]

How ironic would it be if Microsoft eventually abandoned .Net and Mono was the only remaining development environment that supported C#?

Re:Irony

[WinterSolstice]

I think the word you are looking for is "flailing"... as in MS s flailing around, trying to find a way to get a solid grip on a world that is fast passing them by.

IBM did this in the early 90's PC market too, when the clones became far superior to the actual AT/XT machines. I would speculate that it is fairly common among large corporations when they hit a point where sales revenue is not increasing the way it used to.

Let's see... what has MS attempted recently?
Smartphones
Xbox
Pocket PC
Media Center .Net
WebTV
Windows Embedded
Windows "Clustering"
XP ...

Looks to me like they are trying to put a version of Windows into every market that uses processors. Seems to me like they've been right in line with what they said they were going to do. I wish them luck....

-WS

Microsoft pays the bills!

[erroneus]

There are thousands if not millions of people who have built thier understanding of computer systems around Microsoft's operating systems, software products and programming environments. Let that idea settle in deeply for those who see a much larger picture and take it for granted.

This is not only their identity as programmers, but their foundation for career building and therefore their house and car payments, their breakfast and dinner and their hopes for retirement. It's a huge deal to criticise Microsoft for these people. Is it any wonder why it becomes a holy war for so many people? It's no mystery to me at all -- I even have a brother who has fallen into that trap and in order to keep peace in the family, I pretty much keep my "opinions" to myself much of the time.

So while I am glad to see greater use and corporate acceptance of Linux or other alternative operating systems, I kind worry a little for those who aren't allowing themselves to see things beginning to crumble for Microsoft and that if they aren't careful will fall along with them.

VIA forums...

[realkiwi]

recently migrated to .NET. The server admin seems happy but the user experience sucks big time. I never thought I would say something nice about Cold Fusion but the forum certainly was more user friendly running under that.

Re:Already debunked.

[thePjunisher]

Dumbass. Next time, link to a article that supports you claim, not one that contradicts it...

WinFX marks the start of a similar transition, with .NET turning from a wrapper into the native API. .NET need not be a set of wrappers any more than Win32 needs to be a set of wrappers for 16-bit versions of Windows.

Python? Ruby? Squeak?

[leonbrooks]

All "one language, any platform" - even Java bytecode, via JRuby and JPython. So in a different way, "any language, any platform". Same story with Mono. Remind me again: why does .NET exist?

Re:Python? Ruby? Squeak?

[XMyth]

Why do 50+ window managers exist? Why do KDE *AND* Gnome exist when XFCE is so much faster?

Why do YOU exist when I already exist?

Holy stinking jesus

[belarm314]

From some AC responding to Dan Fernandez's blog and referring to Richard Grimes:
At the bottom you'll find that he listed his email, but rather then use a contact me form, or listing it directly, he ENCODED HIS EMAIL address in Rot 13 encryption!! Do you really want to take advice on "usability" from someone who thinks it's a good idea to encrypt their email address?

I'm not sure I really need to comment further on this.

Happens every now and then

[leandrod]

I am old enough to remember the original VB columnist at some high-profile magazine (was it Dr Dobb's itself?) throwing the towel on the column because he couldn't stand the bloating of the language by MS... and the C++ Advisor-or-something-the-like columnist (was it Unix Magazine or what?) quitting the column because C++, being designed by committee, required a language lawyer and was only getting worse.

No news here. If you don't care for elegance, you go awok with evolution. ISO SQL, Perl, there are many many examples.

Now if only people would rethink and take the pain of learning a real, elegant language... a functional (Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, ML) or pure OO (Smalltalk, Squeak) or truly relational (Tutorial D, D4) one.

Instead of just trying to keep extending known languages into unknown fields. C is just structure, platform-independent Assembly; how come people want to create custom applications in it or its Java, C++, C#, ObjectiveC? This comes only as an indictment of the alternatives, or worse still of programmers and their managers.

And BASIC, it was only a stepping stone in learning COBOL. How come it is used to deploy anything more than a prototype? Don't get me started with excuses.

It is high time managers and programmers get real and start using languages designed to do what they want. COBOL, Pascal, Smalltalk, Lisp... each in their niche, they are better than C or BASIC and their overextended derivatives.