Nothing of .Net in Longhorn?

turnitover writes "We've been waiting for Longhorn before we really get on the .Net train, but should we bother at all? According to Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch, Longhorn won't be based on .Net at all. Foley, who's usually right on target, calls this MS's 'dirty little secret'." From the article: "We're guessing that Microsoft will maintain that nothing has changed-that no one ever promised that the .Net Framework 2.0 would be the foundation for Longhorn. But developer types we've been chatting with seem to find this update a newsworthy revelation."

Comments

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[professorhojo]

from microsoft's official page on preparing for longhorn, i quote: "Preparing for Longhorn - Longhorn builds on existing security and Microsoft .NET Framework knowledge. Use the resources on this page to understand why it is important to adopt these concepts today, and discover how they will apply to Longhorn tomorrow."

the key here is the word knowledge: "longhorn builds on ...NET framework knowledge"

which could possibly be construed differently than "longhorn builds on ...NET framework".

who knows? maybe i'm reading too much into it..

Re:So Why .NET?

[Proc6]

Is .NET another Microsoft vaporware?

Huh?

Well no. If it is I've made a pretty good living the last 2-3 years building functional web and GUI apps for clients using vaporware.

OLE! Viva .NET!

[Doc Ruby]

I remember when Microsoft was getting us ready for Win95, back in 1993, telling us we were going all-OLE. Programming would mean sending OLE messages among a universe of interoperable COM objects, reusable in any combination we pleased. Then we got Win95, and a COM that didn't do that, and a *lot* of other stuff we needed to do, then COM+, then DCOM, and on and on. And it was never as easy as they'd promised.

These MS technologies are promoted for the sake of promoting Microsoft. Every generation produces something that would be great, but the marketers and engineers are never on the same page. Microsoft succeeds by putting the marketers in charge, but they wind up baiting developers with great tech, then switching us after we're hooked. Maybe the engineers are too busy making all the legacy almost-happened technologies work at all, rather than switching to the new framework that finally sets us free.

Re:c++

[Dasein]

C++ will continue to be the 'crown jewels' of microsoft.
You misspelled C.

Re:So are dumbasses

[swillden]

Nope, I have, except that logic dictates that code that constantly executes under a VM will be slower than code that is JIT compiled and then runs as native code.

All major Java JVMs do JIT compilation, and then run the result as native code. Even better, most of them (especially Sun's) do run-time execution analysis prior to JIT compilation so that when they compile to native they can make better optimization decisions than a static compiler or "normal" JIT compiler can do.

.NET has no advantage over Java in this respect. I'd expect Java to have the advantage, actually, given the maturity of its JVMs.

Re:So Why .NET?

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

OK, here is the best I can do with the .NET strategy question while keeping it concise ;-)

.NET is the name MS gave its goal of making interoperable systems very simple so you can easily and seemlessly have multiple systems on any platform all working together. This isn't just a MS goal, but .NET is the name they gave it. Besides such an abstract statement, you can look at SOA and XML web-services. Again, these aren't technologies unique to MS but they are examples of the implementation of the .NET strategy.

Now why call this .NET? Thats a good question ;-) Many will say .NET is just marketing, and its very true that naming it .NET was marketing. However, .NET is not JUST marketing. The name is marketing, but the underlying strategy and goals are very real (and you can see plenty of implementations today).

The other issue was MS didn't really have any way to accomplish this ".NET strategy" when they came up with it. Luckily, I've never had to try SOA or web services with the VS6 family of tools, but I know those who have and said while it is possible, its one of the more painful things to try. So they needed new tools to enable this strategy. Hense, the .NET Framework. The .NET framework is more than JUST making SOA/web service stuff easier (they really needed to update thier stuff anyway so did that as part of .NET Framework). The .NET Framework does do a good job of making this type of interoperablity very easy. Next they needed tools to build applications for the .NET Framework. Thus, VS.NET was born. VS.NET is simply a very productive set of tools to allow you to build .NET applications.

As part of the .NET Framework was also the CLR/CLI, this allow you to program in basically any .NET langauge (cobol, vb, java, C#, etc, etc, etc). I assume when you talk about "language similar to Java", you mean C#. That is basically an answer MS needed since they REALLY needed a new modern langauge, but hopefully from the above description you can see that C# is just a tiny little spec on top of the whole .NET platform.

Re:So Why .NET?

[ChicagoDave]

Forget the original marketing push to have everyone buy into the application as a service model. That was a bit grandiose and given MS's stature in the overall development community (monopolies are not our friends), that was hardly going to fly.

What .NET is _today_ is a different way of doing application development. It took Microsoft a long time to externalize their own best practices, but they finally realized that they needed to push their Visual Basic audience up a notch into thinking about object-orientation, messaging, services, and overall best practices in architecture.

There was no way to do that with VB6 and there was no way to make C++ pretty enough to get people to mass-adopt it. Let's face it, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. (No offense to all you C++ geeks, it's just that for writing a screen and a report for the accounting department, C++ is a bit of overkill).

Anyway, the folks at MS were working on some third-generation messaging stuff and also saw the benefits of managed code in the Java world. So they're not stupid and they spend $5 or $6 billion per year on doing new suff. Out of this came the CLI, the CLR, C#, and in parallel, web services.

Now the lights started going off. They knew they had security problems and they also knew that the business world had moved past the point where adhoc VB6 systems were acceptable. The business world was adopting Java because it came with serious thinkers and sound architectures (stable, secure, and fast).

So as MS does, they adapted to the needs of the business world. They pushed their new toys to that end. But the thing that makes .NET successful and useful beyond any of the underlying architecture is the IDE. Visual Studio .NET is by far the most useful tool for developing web and windows applications. And in the next version, 2005, it gets even better. A lot better.

This is why Sun failed to steal the VB6 crowd away from MS. They never understood that if you create a great IDE, developers will come. Eclipse has proven this theory, although too late to damage .NET's growing market-base.

In summary, .NET is just a productive platform for developing web and windows applications, along with enterprise architectures, that were previously locked in the C++ world.

At the end of the day, I can say that my job is vastly easier now than it was 5 years ago.

That's what .NET is.