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

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.