Building Intelligent .NET Applications

Bill Ryan writes "Sarah Morgan Rea's "Building Intelligent .NET Applications" is a book for those that get easily bored with mainstream development topics. Essentially, it's an in depth discussion of 3 niche technologies that came directly out of Microsoft Research (Microsoft Speech Server, Microsoft Analysis Services and Agents). The majority of the book is comprised of discussions of the first two technologies with roughly 12 pages being dedicated to Agents. It's finished off future Microsoft technologies "Avalon" (now known as the Microsoft Presentation Framework), Indigo, WinFS and Longhorn. Fortunately, since no one really knows when Microsoft will deliver each of these and what they will ultimately look like, she spends under 10 pages on them." Read the rest of Bill's review. Building Intelligent .NET Applications author Sara Morgan Rea pages 270 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9 reviewer Bill Ryan ISBN 0321246268 summary

One of the things that makes this book great is that each of the areas discussed receive very little discussion elsewhere. If you want to use Microsoft Speech Server, you are essentially confined to using the SDK documentation, the MSDN newsgroups or an occasional blog post out there. Analysis services has a little more documentation but if you were looking to do any serious A.S. development, you're still pretty hard pressed to find comprehensive resources on how to use it.

These two areas comprise roughly 80% of Sarah's book. The discussion on Speech Server comprises a little over 100 pages and does an excellent job showing you how to get Speech Server up and running and how to use it. She starts out slowly and walks you through the Speech SDK, then moves on to creating Grammars, creating Prompts, creating Transcriptions and Extractions, using the Telephony modules and debugging/performance tuning your applications. Another nice touch is that she spends a good bit of time discussing more agnostic elements of speech and telephony development, S.A.L.T. in particular. Within the discussion throughout, there's a good bit of attention paid to configuring Speech Server and the problems people are typically confronted with when they create speech enabled apps. However she does a pretty good job of balancing the introductory material with more advanced topics for although she does spend a lot of time on setup and configuration, she also goes as far as showing you how to use Speech Server from a PDA.

As far as speech (the topic goes), it would be helpful if the reader had some familiarity with the core concepts involved (such as SALT, Grammars etc.) but even if you didn't, this book would still help teach you a lot of what you'd want to know. The intended audience is clearly intermediate to advanced developers but newbies will definitely find quite a bit of valuable information in it.

The next section discusses Artificial intelligence in the context of Analysis services. If you aren't familiar with relational database concepts, then it's probably a little above your head, but most people buying this book aren't running into relational database theory for the first time.

Chapter 5 starts with using Data Mining to create predictions. It starts with getting things set up, moves onto building the data mart, and then finally 'training' the model. This discussion is pure gold in my humble opinion.

The next chapter moves on to applying those predictions. Not really much to say here without getting overly technical but essentially this chapter is a walk through of what you'd do after you had your data mart built and trained, essentially, how you'd maintain it and continue to refresh the information.

This is followed by a chapter titled "An Evolving Database". Again, this is pretty technical in nature so it's hard to describe without bogging you down in jargon. Suffice to say that everything about this section is cool++; .

The book then discusses Agents, which are cool but probably don't have that much applicability in most people's day to day lives. If you want to learn how to use them (as well as the Background Intelligent Transfer Service), then she provides everything you need.

Finally things wind down with a discussion of Microsoft's upcoming technologies, Microsoft Research, Artificial Intelligence in general (as well as many resources on where to learn more), a glossary, bibliography and finally the index. Discussing any one of the areas that she touches upon here (neural networks, Fuzzy logic, natural language processing, machine learning etc.) could comprise an entire book. That's where the beauty of this book comes in - instead of discussing the subjects one at a time, she creates a series of walk through examples where she creates specific scenarios and shows you how to address them using each respective technology.

If you're bored and want to dive into some really cool subject matter, this book is a must have. If you want to learn more about Speech technology in general and Microsoft's implementations of it in particular, this book is a must have. If you're interested in artificial intelligence again, you'll find this book to be superb. If you just want to learn about subject matter that's been discussed over and over again, like creating Winforms or drawing with GDI+, then this book probably isn't up your alley."

You can purchase Building Intelligent .NET Applications from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

more like .nut! haha

Re:.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, a very INTELLIGENT joke, if I may say so, Sir.

May I congratulate you for getting the "FRISTY PSOT", as I presume it is called around here?

So .net is used for things other than ATI's CCC?

[ZipR]

I had no idea!

Speech Server

[James Earl Ray Jones]

I'm glad Microsoft Research comes up with such brilliant innovations. I'd be impressed with a Speech Server if they developed the speech technology. However, Microsoft bought up the Lernout & Hauspie company and improved speech since. Slapping an RPC interface onto a speech synthesizer = research? I LOL at the future of American research!

Re:Speech Server

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Somebody should mod the parent up "moronic M$ basher". In fact, Microsoft has had an active speech research team for more than a decade. (Doubt me? Look at the Proceedings of ICASSP if you want evidence.)

Re:Speech Server

[AKAImBatman]

I'm glad Microsoft Research comes up with such brilliant innovations. I LOL at the future of American research!

There is only one purpose to Microsoft Research: To hire off all the computer scientist before they can invent something that would compete with Microsoft. (Or make them irrelevant.) All one needs to do is look at how few technologies produced at MS Research have actually seen the light of day.

I also suspect that Microsoft uses MS Research to launder technology they've stolen or copied. But I can't prove that, so I'll just label that my personal conspiracy theory. ;-)

Re:Speech Server

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Microsoft bought up the Lernout & Hauspie company

Are you sure about that??? I was doing some work in voice recognition software at the time and am pretty sure Lernout & Hauspie was bought by ScanSoft (now Nuance I think). Now I guess MS may be licensing some of the Lernout & Hauspie tech from them (I've seen no evidence of this), but I'm pretty sure they didn't buy L&H.

Re:Speech Server

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only one purpose to Microsoft Research: To hire off all the computer scientist before they can invent something that would compete with Microsoft.

Funny, I thought that was Google's plan; not Microsoft's.

Maybe though, Microsoft should be likened the Empire and Google likened to the Sith? After all, Google builds thier apps for Windows first then ports to other platforms.

Re:Speech Server

[AKAImBatman]

Microsoft licenses TTS technology from Lernout & Hauspie. (Now Nuance, like you said.) Microsoft has their own Speech Recognition engine. However, that engine can be replaced by third parties via the SAPI. Microsoft had an 8% share in the company at one point, though I don't know how much of it they currently hold.

Re:Speech Server

[external400kdiskette]

There is only one purpose to Microsoft Research: To hire off all the computer scientist before they can invent something that would compete with Microsoft. (Or make them irrelevant.)

Of course, no way would MS want to hire smart guys to invent stuff to improve their own software, why would they want to improve their stuff, or you really want to moronically argue that they never care about improving anything and 2k was no different from nt4, xp no different from 95, whatever?

I use a lot of open-source and free stuff and enjoy it but if you truly believe in your moronic personal conspiracy you have serious problems.

Re:Speech Server

[Musc]

Microsoft research publishes a great deal of research papers every year.
These innovations are free for everybody to read and learn about.

Whether or not microsoft actually gets around to using any of these ideas in their products is beside
the point: research is being done and the results are being published.

Re:Speech Server

[AKAImBatman]

Of course, no way would MS want to hire smart guys to invent stuff to improve their own software

One would think so. But find me projects that actually ended up producing a key component for Windows, Office, or many of their other products? I used to follow Microsoft Research because it sounded like they were working on interesting stuff. Over time, however, it became clear that NONE of the projects were ever seeing the light of day. The most that was happening is that the researchers would do some work, post a web page, then say the project is still in progress when it was actually dead.

Of course, now that Microsoft is facing stiff competition, perhaps they are finally starting to rely on MS Research. But for the ~5 or so years I followed it, it certainly didn't seem that way.

2k was no different from nt4, xp no different from 95

95 and NT were interesting leaps in technology. 95 was interesting because it set the mold for nearly all GUIs that came after it. NT was interesting becasue it finally put Microsoft on solid ground in respect to OS design. 2000, however, was mostly just a matter of embedding Unix technology and technology swiped from Citrix. XP was more of the same of 2000, except that the GUI wasn't as good and the compatibility with 95 had been improved. (Microsoft has a database of special virtualizers that allow programs running on the NT kernel to perform certain operations that aren't valid, but were allowed under 9x. You can download a package for 2000 that does the same thing as XP's built-in code.)

You know what the kicker is? To the best of my knowledge, NONE of the technology used in the different versions of Windows came from Microsoft Research. What kind of research outfit produces short-lived research projects for a decade, and yet doesn't produce a single useful technology that can be adapted for market use?

As for my conspiracy theory, I have my reasons for wondering. Particularly, a few projects that have gone through research that are really matters that would normally be assigned to engineering. Not to mention that several of them have seemed suspiciously close to products already on the market from companies with "partnerships" with Microsoft. Not that it matters much. Most of that stuff is abandoned as well.

Re:Speech Server

[oliderid]

L&H went bankrupt. Directors went to jail.

Scansoft has been made by an American Entrepeneur who bought the US branch (Dragon Speech and err...Scansoft) from the "liquidation" (sorry I can't translate this term correctly). It didn't buy L&H. He took the property on some of their technologies. L&H has a such big debt that there was no point to buy the company in istelf.

The most notorious one was a completly new TTS engine. I think it was called the realspeech TTS or something.

Well I used to work in that industry around 2000. L&H kept buying companies after companies, in fact nothing serious has been really developped internally. Except probably the realspeech engine.

They turnover was fake, they were playing with different branches (mainly in Korea) to generate a fake turnover.

A wall street reporter found the trick and L&H disapeared.

Here in Belgium a lot of people lost all their economies with L&H. The sector was heavily dammaged by the affair (I had to find another work even if the competitor I used to work for, wasn't part of the affair).

Re:Speech Server

[leonard_chung]

One would think so. But find me projects that actually ended up producing a key component for Windows, Office, or many of their other products? I used to follow Microsoft Research because it sounded like they were working on interesting stuff. Over time, however, it became clear that NONE of the projects were ever seeing the light of day. The most that was happening is that the researchers would do some work, post a web page, then say the project is still in progress when it was actually dead.

As just one example of projects coming from research to product: Reliable Multicast Implemented in Windows & Cisco Routers

I'm not sure what you consider to be a "key" component. For example, the shell? Lots of research goes into UI interfaces, but research is generally aimed at specific topics and not a huge set of features and area that a product would cover. So the shell would be what came out of a bunch of research projects.

Leonard

Re:Speech Server

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to hate Microsoft - that's fine, we understand. But please stop trying to make vague technical arguments about positions that are obviously religious in nature to you. Instead, keep at the pointless grandstanding blogging. It's the only thing you seem to do well.

Re:Speech Server

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I thought that was Google's plan; not Microsoft's.

But Google is oh-so-innovative, man, don't you know? It's all about Web 2.0; have you been sleping. Maps, AJAX, API are all so new and exciting, don't you see?

Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

The computing world has long standardized on C++/Java. Writing to a dead and platform specific technology is not very smart.

You are just wasting time for yourself, or the people who replace you, when your stuff gets migrated to Linux.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[luvirini]

You would then apparently be surprised at the ammount of development going on with C#

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

You would then apparently be surprised at the ammount of people misusing the word development.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[orion41us]

C++ is good at what's it's designed to do, lower level programming, we should not compare C++ with higher level languages. Java - 90% hype that died out 5 years ago - inho. Just about every single negative aspect of the .net platform if plegues java - so I don't buy the Java > .NET argument.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

A day will come when programmers will be exclusively coding tools and OSes. Applications will be "developed" if you will by the user. In other words, Joe Accoutnant, needing an app, will just point and click, or speak, and create the app he needs on the fly. That's what's coming.

I can't count how many times that my coding job was to create an GUI for: adding/inserting, updating, deleting, etc... data. I found it mindless and boring. I just wish the tools for doing this was easier for the CPAs, business guys to do. And no, they ARE NOT too stupid. The tools are inadequate.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[drpimp]

Ahhhh. C++ is a high level language last time I checked!

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[sfontain]

The computing world has long standardized on C++/Java. Writing to a dead and platform specific technology is not very smart.

You are just wasting time for yourself, or the people who replace you, when your stuff gets migrated to Linux.

This is probably the most ignorant thing I have heard today. Aside from the fact that .NET is neither platform-dependent, nor dead, you have a wonderful post. Oh, except for the part about wasting time, being replacing, and Linux migration.

My 10-man company is making millions this very minute with C#.

Go read a book and consider trolling elsewhere. I would mod you down, however it looks like the others have beaten me to it.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

"My 10-man company is making millions this very minute with C#."

Hahahahahaah!!!

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[JebusIsLord]

Absolutely true... I get various contracting request emails every day, and 90% of them want either C# or Java coders. The rest are either C,C++ or specialty jobs.

C# and Java, btw, are two of the nicest languages I've ever used, and I've used a lot.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[penguin-collective]

Wake up: Java is history. Compared to its initial hype and promise, Java has been a dismal failure. The question you should be asking is: "who the hell uses Java these days". Java promised to be an open standard, a platform for high quality cross platform applications. Instead it's become the new Pascal and the new Cobol (only less successful).

And as for porting to Linux, Java is one of the worst choices for that: it's proprietary, closed source, and single-vendor.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

The industry doesn't give a fuck what a few open source license freaks have to say.

Sorry clown, Java is the top language/platform in new engineering positions right now. And it continues to grow.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[orion41us]

I was not talking about langauge level, but harware abstraction. If your writing a driver for something logical choice will be C++ ect... if your making a DB front end - well I just don't see C++ being a good fit.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sorry clown, Java is the top language/platform in new engineering positions right now. And it continues to grow."

Delusion is not an asset, and stating something as fact doesn't make it so. Arguing the pre-eminence of Java is laughable.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[mugnyte]

Interesting how the less-intelligent, personal-attack responses are from AC's, while the interesting contributors are not. Or not so new.

While I'm at now (US northwest), a lot of the programming is .NET based. If you are living elsehwere and have a Java-only view of openings, then great! both are alive in well in the world. Claiming either is a the single choice for all is a sure sign of an incompetent developer. Worse yet, the AC's here trolling are probably not developers at all (sigh of relief actually).

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

ASP.NET has overtaken JSP and Java Servlets taken together.

Sun had the biggest opportunity on the planet to redefine the future of computing and they completely blew it. They dropped the ball on applets, they dropped the ball on desktop apps, and they are dropping the ball on server-side programming with their bloated APIs and poor language evolution. Amazingly, Sun's engineers manage to do an even worse job than Microsoft's. Best stay away from both of them.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is really funny! I guess you were trying to be.. Anyways, if your serious, you need to look at the SourceForge stats. Java is gaining big time. Also, JVM's are created by BEA, SUN, IBM, and now Apache. As far as closed source. I have every version of the JVM since 1.0 sitting on my hard drive. That includes the C-source, header files and all of the java code. I also work for a company that employs more than 30,000 people. We are a java shop and there are no plans to change. C# is contained and not allowed and C/C++ is also contained and all new projects done in Java. Personally I develop using Linux and Netbeans and deploy to HP-UX, Solaris, Win XP, 2K and to my Treo600. I have had wonderful success without a rewrite anywhere. Just depends on the tools I guess!

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for fun, post a resume on Dice or Monster as an experienced ASP.Net/C# developer in the NYC area. Your phone will not stop ringing the next day. The demand for coders on the Microsoft stack around here is stunning.

How do I know? I just experienced it these past two weeks. I had THREE great offers, and took one at a "dream" company.

"Who The Hell Use .NET These Days"? Apparently, EVERYONE.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Outside of Novell/Ximian, is there really a lot of C# development going on?

From where I stand (mostly Oracle/BEA stuff) C# is VisualJava 7 years too late and with a few more incompatabilities than their first java.

I do see VB6 projects going to C#; but that's only because VB6 support got yanked and while some VB6 projects move to Python and others to Java, others go to C# expecting Microsoft not to do the same thing to them again.

I guess there was so much VB6 code out there (didn't Gates say there's more VB than Cobol out there), even that fraction does add up to a fair amount of C#.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[drpimp]

Well that makes more sense, but it was not clear the way you originally described it.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting how the less-intelligent, personal-attack responses are from AC's, while the interesting contributors are not. Or not so new.
While I'm at now (US northwest), ...

"While I'm at now"(sic) "Or not so new."(sic)

Where is this intelligence of which you speak?

Claiming either is a the single choice for all is a sure sign of an incompetent developer.

From where I stand, Java and C# seem to be merely clones of one another both well suited to solving the exact same set of problems (well, OK, java's better in embedded devices, and C#'s better for windows desktop apps) - but for the most part they're wholy redundant with each other and could easily be the "single choice" among the two alternatives.

If you're a developer studying both Java and C# you're wasting your time. From the point of view of solving real-world problems, C# is simply a not-very-compatable Java a few years late; or from the other point of view, Java is a mature, stable C# with the support from a lot of vendors in the industry.

There are other useful languages (the K language; various assembly languages; Haskell/ML; C; Ruby/Python/Perl ; Bash/MSH ; heck, even Fortran and Cobol and ADA) to make someone a well rounded programmer - because these languaegs excel in areas where Java/C# don't.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[segedunum]

Aside from the fact that .NET is neither platform-dependent

It is. Any thoughts to the contrary is just denial.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[cytg.net]

Wake up: Java is history. - Indeed it is; history, present and future. Compared to its initial hype and promise, Java has been a dismal failure. - You would need to quantify these constructs, but thats hardly going to happen, now isnt it? The question you should be asking is: "who the hell uses Java these days". - A hell of alot Java promised to be an open standard, a platform for high quality cross platform applications. - And it is. My java apps _are_ portable across systems, even my enterprise application is.. to top that, even my enterprise container, written in java, is portable to any given platform supporting a recent enough jdk. It is like it _should_ be .. zip directory .. move zip .. unzip .. java -jar MyShit.jar. Dont MAKE me spank your C#.net.win32 microsoft visual c++ runtime exception throwing java-lookalike-wannabe enterpreted excuse for a dev envoriment. But who the fuck cares about a few core semantics. Right ? For fucks sake i sure dont.. Im a problem solver, ill pick the best tool for the job, but fanboi's .. fanboi's must die.. MOVING on to the _place_ that actually matter ... YOUR ENTERPRISE ENVORIMENT .. the IIS is such a bitch.. granted there are alot of CRAPPY ASS appliaction servers for java outthere too.. But you have a CHOICE to avoid them and go with something like orion or resin and make your life a happy one. But the IIS is such a bitch(repetition is in order here) .. my god, the exceptions it has thrown at me, the 500's and what would look like a general hardware failure (but is not). The new Pascal ? Are you insane ? The new Cobol ? Are you more insane ? Infact where cobol IS getting phased out, it is my distinct impression that it is being replaced with Java (IBM Anyone ? mpe/hp3000/9000 ?). Replacing cobol is like recieving a blessing from god himself. Where is your persistence frameworks? I understand you're about to get SQLJ support in your dev envoriment ? lol, congrataltions on that. And where is your IntelliJ IDEA / Eclipse competitive ide's ? to quote karatekid 3 ; best way to avoid punch, is not be there. And I guess your app really is portable .. atleast between windows 2000 and 2003 .. think it'll fuck up on vista ? yea me too... And as for porting to Linux, Java is one of the worst choices for that: it's proprietary, closed source, and single-vendor. - I think ill just pull a C#.Win32.PostMessage(you,WM_CLOSE,0,0) on your ass on that one.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[cytg.net]

and what the fuck happend to my formatting of that text. little patience i have, will robinsion, for such.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[cytg.net]

Going by that weighting of the positron, i suppose ie is superior to firefox as well. Are you guys listening ? Cause here it comes. Yes.. Java is bloated. API's EVERYWHERE ... its both hell and a blessing ... hell navigating, and a blessing cause you can get very very productive _fast_. The gold ; BLOAT IS A SIGN OF SUCCESS. Take it to the bank guys'. Bloat is a consequence of success.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, shoot. Where is the surprise ? As far as I can see, there are tons of Java developments, but ZERO (zilch) C-hash developments.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[penguin-collective]

"Compared to its initial hype and promise, Java has been a dismal failure." - You would need to quantify these constructs, but thats hardly going to happen, now isnt it?

That's easy to quantify: Java achieved near 0% of the dynamic web content market, and it achieved near 0% of the desktop application market, both areas where Sun was boasting that they were going to take over leadership from Microsoft (and people like me were supporting and cheering them on). The only area where Java has achieved any significant market share is in dynamic web services, but there Java has already fallen behind ASP.NET. So, in two out of its three target markets, Java has failed completely, and in the third, it's falling behind.

A hell of alot Java promised to be an open standard, a platform for high quality cross platform applications. - And it is. My java apps _are_ portable across systems, even my enterprise application is..

Java is not an open standard. And Java is only "portable" to the degree that it limits the degree to which you can access platform-specific features. That's not a good way of achieving cross-platform capabilities, it's a good way for driving away developers and it's the reason why Java failed in so many areas. Enterprise developers have the least need for high-quality platform integration, which is why Java is still hanging on to life in that area.

Dont MAKE me spank your C#.net.win32 microsoft visual c++ runtime exception throwing [rant continues]

I don't use Microsoft development tools or environments, and I rarely use Windows at all. And I don't recommend any specific alternative to Java (there are plenty, take your pick).

All I'm saying is that people like you are making false statements about Java. Java is a commercial failure compared to its initial hype, it has deep technical flaws, and it is clearly not the future.

Im a problem solver, ill pick the best tool for the job, but fanboi's .. fanboi's must die..

You're not a problem solver, you are a Java fanboi. Do us all a favor, take your own advice, and jump of a bridge.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Rew190]

Dice.com returns 10115 results for the search ".NET", 13356 results for "java", and 7145 results for "c++".

So yes, there's a lot of .net development going on. I'm surprised so many people think that noone is using it.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a developer studying both Java and C# you're wasting your time. From the point of view of solving real-world problems, C# is simply a not-very-compatable Java a few years late

C# is more than that: it fixes a number of serious deficiencies in Java, deficiencies that Sun has acknowledged but still hasn't fixed out of concerns over breaking backwards compatibility.

or from the other point of view, Java is a mature, stable C# with the support from a lot of vendors in the industry.

Java has become a niche player; it's primarily being used for server-side development of web-based apps. And even at that, it's not very good. Oh, and it is widely used in education--Java is the new Pascal.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[cytg.net]

So Java equals JSP and Swing ? Java is a shitload more than that.

Let me ask another question, is asp.net superior to jsp ? No ? Then is it "jsp" itself you're putting down or the people marketing it? If windows is the choice for 98% of business servers, does it make sense that there's more asp than jsp pages outthere?
The desktop application market?

Are you seriously stating that you we're cheering on a company that claimed to remove windows programs from the windows operating system and replacing them with JAVA applications ? AWT ? Swing ? allrighty then.

"And Java is only "portable" to the degree that it limits the degree to which you can access platform-specific features."
- omfg .. that makes next to no sense at all unless you're suggesting the "java operating system" -wich of course you'd be cheering on for world domination as well? ;)
NO its not an open standard, but it IS portable. Besides that there's no point to be made no matter how hard you try double or triple negating shit.

"All I'm saying is that people like you are making false statements about Java. Java is a commercial failure compared to its initial hype, it has deep technical flaws, and it is clearly not the future."
- There you go again.. let me polish your boolean logic for ya'... here you go 'All im saying is that people making false statements about java is making false statements about java'.
Again, double negating your shit may impress and convince your average .not dumboi's but really... c'mon.!!.
Deep technical flaws ? Like what ? (honestly interrested!)

I work with both java and .net developers on a daily basis, mainly integration between different business constructs, and this is my subjective take on usability roubustness and performance; the java envoriment can be extremely crappy, the .net envoriemnt is crappy and the java envoriment can be pretty good. Let it be said, that it's easier to drown in the massive amounts of bloat and marketing hype in the java section than to get it 'right' the first time around, but you CAN get it right. a respectible rdmbs, subversion, hibernate, resin/orion, IntelliJ IDEA etc. and you're close to an optimal development configuration.
Of course, this is *just* the spice.. with out the right management your shit no matter how good your tools are.
On another note, i too will migrate my primary core competences to .net, not because its superior but because its the monopoly of today and, its my prediction, its the monoploy of tomorrow. I still dont care much for microsoft, but on the other hand if it wasnt microsoft it'd be another large corporation (IBM?) dictating everything and everything .. the future looks alot like that old-old-game.. what was it.. syndicate(s) ?

Im done. I got pulled in to begin with but i have little time for fanboi' wars.. i suspect you do to. We all need to vent from time to time.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[penguin-collective]

Let me ask another question, is asp.net superior to jsp ? No ? Then is it "jsp" itself you're putting down or the people marketing it?

I have no opinion on which of the two systems is better; I just pointed out that Java is falling behind ASP.NET, so it doesn't look like it's the future.

And Java is only "portable" to the degree that it limits the degree to which you can access platform-specific features." - omfg .. that makes next to no sense

I'm sorry it makes no sense to you; if you actually were in the business of writing high quality cross platform software, it would.

NO [Java is] not an open standard, but it IS portable.

Good that you acknowledge it. Now, you may believe that a proprietary standard is a good standard, but I disagree.

I work with both java and .net developers on a daily basis,

Well, with people like you in this industry, it's no wonder that software quality is so awful.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what is there to gain in .NET that Java doesn't already do?

I have widely spreaded JRE's on consumer machines in Java
I have guaranteed, very well working cross-platform support in Java,
I have *WAY* more (not to mention more mature) libraries for Java,
I have better, more mature IDE's for Java (and the best one is and always will be free) (not to mention the sheer amount of plugins),
I have better, more mature VM (and many, many ones to choose from),
I have dozens of scripting languages to choose from,
I have ClassLoaders,
I have Java Webstart (it's gonna be really slick in Mustang),
I have VM that does very extensive inlining (.NET JIT does very bad job in inlining)
I have ~7 different tuneable garbage collectors to choose from (Mustang probably introducing few new ones again)
I have SWT (native widgets for slick desktop applications)
I have the source-code of Java (and sooner or later Open Source Java),
I have real documentation for the Java API that nearly never leaves doubt what a thing does

NET/C# offers me (in addition to lose all the above ones)...?
- Excellent Windows support, especially for desktop apps (not that I don't have it in Java, especially when using SWT)
- Syntactic sugar a'la events, properties & delegates?
- Little better generics?
- Unsafe? (ugh)
- Operator overloading (ugh) ...?

As for the "who uses Java these days"..
Well the chaps at Google use Java very extensively these days and keep on supporting it (through JCP).
I wonder why they're not switching to .NET if Java is a dying, failed technology.

Oh by the way, few weeks ago Java surpassed C++ at sourceforge in project count.

If it wasn't the letter 'C' and Microsoft - nobody would be using C# these days. It's mainly just these old C/C++ programmers - who probably just wanted to see what the next 'C' brings to the table - that realize: "Hey this is actually nice language!", "I'm so much more productive when using .NET!". Too bad Java has had it all for many years already. It's sad that the previously bad performance of Java was probably the fact they dumped it in the first place, along with the missing 'C'-letter, of course.

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[cytg.net]

"I have no opinion on which of the two systems is better; I just pointed out that Java is falling behind ASP.NET, so it doesn't look like it's the future."
- No you did not "just point out".

"I'm sorry it makes no sense to you; if you actually were in the business of writing high quality cross platform software, it would."
- Will Robinson, your logic has deep technical flaws, i assume you acknowledge that since you fail to comment on it.

"Good that you acknowledge it. Now, you may believe that a proprietary standard is a good standard, but I disagree."
- Again, i wasnt disagreeing on the open standard part, in fact i have no oppinion whether it would be better than the jcp. But you allready know that, since this is the part you choose to single out of the argument.

"Well, with people like you in this industry, it's no wonder that software quality is so awful."
- Aw.. thats just plain mean! :) .. gotta do better than that

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[QunaLop]

You forgot these pros for .NET
- can write in any of at least 50 languages including VB
- dev environments that accountants can figure out
- value types
- a well organized api
- extensive active progress, .NET 2.0 was a huge step, wonderful tools like linq comming down the pipe

i am not saying it is superior, but you seem to present an extremely shallow view of what .NET offers

Re:Who The Hell Use .NET These Days?

[WilliamSChips]

Actually Google prefers Python, I think

Step 1

[this great guy]

Building Intelligent .NET Applications

Step 1: get a brain.

Re:Step 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 2 - become a closed minded linux douche

Re:Step 1

[PsychicX]

Step 3 - Profit?

Re:Step 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 2 - become a closed minded linux douche

Step 3 - don't read slashdot.

Re:Step 1

[Anonymous Coward]

... then they fight you...

Re:Step 1

[Compholio]

Step 2 - become a closed minded linux douche

Remember this: We think the same thing of you.

Re:Step 1

[CDarklock]

Nobody on the Microsoft side has ever suggested that Linus or ESR or RMS is the devil.

Oh, wait, I did. But it's not like I was serious.

Re:Step 1

[flosofl]

Remember this: We think the same thing of you.

That he's also a closed minded linux douche?

Is this like the Chewbacca defense?

Speech-enabled applications?

[Tackhead]

> Within the discussion throughout, there's a good bit of attention paid to configuring Speech Server and the problems people are typically confronted with when they create speech enabled apps.

"Start! Run! Cee-Emm-Dee! Format! Cee-Colon Slash X, Slash, U, Slash Y! Enter!"

And now you get to write a book on rebuilding intelligent .NET applications...

Re:Speech-enabled applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unable to open this Internet Shortcut. The protocol "cmdformatc" does not have a registered program."

Re:Speech-enabled applications?

[7macaw]

And now you get to write a book on rebuilding intelligent .NET applications...
Nah, you'll just get "cannot find the 'cmdformat' file". It's a very robust system, you see ;)

Re:Speech-enabled applications?

[chemisus]

can you imagine programming for this thing? you say: pound include open angle bracket es tee dee i oh dot h close angle bracket enter enter int function myfoo open parenthesis close parenthesis open curly bracket enter return 0 semicolon close curly bracket you get: # include open angle [ s t d i o dot h close angle [ int function open ( close ( open [ return 0; close [

Re: Future MS Patents

[Alien54]

I can see patents on the concept of intelligent design in computers. After all, how many stupid computer programs and designs have you seen?

Then the anti-evolutionaries can be sued for patent infringement.

There's no such thing....

[70Bang]

as "is comprised" in the English language.

e.g.

A banana is composed of pieces.
The pieces comprise the banana.

Although there seems to be an exception for every rule in English, this is one rule with no exceptions.

And to everyone else, don't invoke Godwin's Law on your first reply, okay?

Re:There's no such thing....

[podperson]

Usage Note: The traditional rule states that the whole comprises the parts and the parts compose the whole. In strict usage: The Union comprises 50 states. Fifty states compose (or constitute or make up) the Union. Even though careful writers often maintain this distinction, comprise is increasingly used in place of compose, especially in the passive: The Union is comprised of 50 states. Our surveys show that opposition to this usage is abating. In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected. See Usage Note at include.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=comprised

Language changes -- sometimes for the worse. Get over it.

I fully expect "loose" to be an acceptable spelling of "lose" within ten years.

Re:There's no such thing....

[hosecoat]

Godwin was a natzi

Re:There's no such thing....

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you were going to say there's no such thing as intelligent .NET applications.

Re:There's no such thing....

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Language evolves, even if technology (as far back as printing in Europe) has slowed down the evolution.

Do you go to the cleaners or the cleansers?

Does gay mean happy or homosexual?

Still, they're and their and there I find annoying, but I imagine it is for non-English speakers trying to learn it.

I hate that Microsoft can backport DotNet into Windows 2000 but intentionally cripples new games like DS2 not to work with it.

Re:There's no such thing....

[BorgCopyeditor]

I second your comment. It's an error of logic on the same order as writing '=' in your program when you mean '=='.

Re:There's no such thing....

[BorgCopyeditor]

In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected.

In 2005, over 50% of Americans surveyed believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Re:There's no such thing....

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who spells lose "loose" is obviously a Nazi

Re:There's no such thing....

[WilliamSChips]

What's a "natzi"?

Re:There's no such thing....

[hosecoat]

its the same thing as nazi, but spelt by an idiot.

IP concerns?

[Colonel Panic]

OK, so if I start building 'intelligent applications' (Intelligent Desgin, anyone?) using these new discoveries from Microsoft Labs will I be running the risk of a lawsuit?

Re:IP concerns?

[aurb]

I'm not sure about the risk of being sued, but you should not forget to show those applications who's the boss, when they start talking about evolution.

.NET programming

[TheDarkener]

IANAP, but my good friend is. He's a huge Linux guy, but unfortunately (as a lot of Slashdotters I'm sure) programs for a Windows-only firm. He's since started using .NET, and swears by it now. He says it is incredibly easy to build applications with it. I trust his judgement, because he's an incredibly talented programmer, and also programs in C/C++, Perl and is a huge database guy as well.

It all comes down to the best tool for the job. I'm sure you wouldn't want to use .NET for a site that gets 20,000 hits a minute, but you also wouldn't want to use C++ or Perl to integrate Windows-only applications with Active Directory, either.

Step 1: Yes, get a brain. Don't use a hammer on a screw.

Re:.NET programming

[luvirini]

.NET seems to have finally matured to a quite usable framework of technologies. In begining it was like anything Microsoft puts out, buggy, badly documented and so on, but now it seems that the associated technologies and tools actually help programmers.

Re:.NET programming

[PsychicX]

I'm sure you wouldn't want to use .NET for a site that gets 20,000 hits a minute, but you also wouldn't want to use C++ or Perl to integrate Windows-only applications with Active Directory, either.

I've got to ask, what would you use for a site that gets 20K hits a minute? A LAMP setup? PHP would fall over and die. Java servlets would be understandable I suppose...but if your beef is with Windows rather than the .NET platform, then just keep in mind that ASP.NET works fine under Linux/Apache/MySQL.

Re:.NET programming

[Homology]

Step 1: Yes, get a brain. Don't use a hammer on a screw.

A screw works very well as a nail, you insensitive clod!

I'm sure you wouldn't want to use .NET for a site that gets 20,000 hits a minute, but you also wouldn't want to use C++ or Perl to integrate Windows-only applications with Active Directory, either.

Of course not, Microsoft works hard for this to be hard for you (sry folks, I wrote "hard" not "hard on")

Re:.NET programming

[fyrie]

I'm sure you wouldn't want to use .NET for a site that gets 20,000 hits a minute

Monster.com and Match.com both use ASP.NET. I'm not sure how many hits they get a minute, but I bet you it's several thousand. Both sites are usually very peppy.

Re:.NET programming

[Anonymous Coward]

CyricZ is that you? Nice troll. I'll bite. Yes, a LAMP setup. You do realize that Java has no magic powers that make it scale, right? So for your measly 20K hits per minute we would have to set up, let's say 10 web servers with DNS-RR, which would each serve 33 hits / second (20000 / 10 / 60 ~= 33). Shit, even my crusty old home server, which is powered by a P2 can serve 10 hits / second with a moderately complex DB enabled app. So this job could be done even with 5 boxes, each serving about 70 hps. So in conclusion, fuck off and stop spreading your FUD. Oh and in case you dont believe me, have a look at the amount of pages Wikipedia is serving with their "shitty amateurish LAMP setup". Fucktard. Disclaimer: yes I am a LAMP fanboi.

Re:.NET programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah. You must mean the wikipedia that is quickly grinding to a halt on a daily basis. Truly an excellent, shining star when it comes to performance.

Re:.NET programming

[ergo98]

I'm sure you wouldn't want to use .NET for a site that gets 20,000 hits a minute

The greatest improvement that .NET brought to the table wasn't rich apps (Winforms still are quite a few steps behind what you could achieve with Delphi 7 years ago), nor was it component integration (COM is still the pervasive component model, and .NET remoting is just finally getting the features of COM+): It was that it revolutionized web development on the Windows platform.

Not only was the programming model a world better than the classic ASP, but the scalability (and automatic scale-out features like shared session state) improvements are colossal. .NET is one of the few technologies you should rely upon to service a large scale, robust website.

Re:.NET programming

[ThinkFr33ly]

I know of a few bugs in v1.0 of the framework, nothing too serious... mostly stupid stuff (like a property being protected when it should have been public and is therefore inaccessible to anybody using the framework), but the documentation has always been stellar.

That's one that Microsoft does better than pretty much everybody. MSDN is an incredibly good resource. For the most part, it always has been. Can you provide examples of crappy documentation in v1.0 or v1.1 of the framework? Again, I'm aware of a few isolated areas, but they were few and far between.

Re:.NET programming

[Lemmingue]

...but you also wouldn't want to use C++ or Perl to integrate Windows-only applications with Active Directory, either.

No, no, no. You will want to use C++ to integrate a Windows-only app with Active Directory. The main Windows API (Win32) is still C based, and the main Active Directory API (ADSI) is still C++/COM based.

Re:.NET programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't speak for the second one, but with the first one, you must be using a definition of 'peppy' I'm not familiar with.

> Adjective * S: (adj) bouncing, bouncy,
> spirited, zippy (marked by lively
> action) "a bouncing gait"; "bouncy tunes";
> "the peppy and interesting talk"; "a
> spirited dance"

Nope, not how I would describe it at all....

Re:.NET programming

[ThinkFr33ly]

20,000 hits a minute doing what? I've created .NET sites that handled about 60 million hits a day (advertising related), with peak traffic doing 5000 requests a second. (That would be 300,000 requests a minute.)

All this traffic was handled by two Dell servers which cost about $5000 a piece. (1.5GB of ram, 10k RPM SCSI RAID, dual 2.8 Ghz CPUs.) Neither machine ever went above 40% CPU, which means a single machine could have handled all the traffic. During peak times, we were fully utilizing a 100Mb pipe.

Each request typically did some MSMQ operations and the occasional SQL Server DB hit if there was a cache miss, but most of it was served via the kernel mode HTTP listener and a few custom HTTP Handlers written in C#/ASP.NET.

It all depends on what each hit is doing. If each request takes 1 second to complete there is no way you could do 20,000 hits per minute unless you had a large web farm. In our case, our TTFB (time to first byte) was very, very small. .NET performed extremely well, as did IIS 6.0 on Win2k3 Server. Very reliable too... never had downtime thanks to NLB. .NET is a fully capable platform. If the .NET application is written correctly, it can handle just as much load as a custom ATL-based application, which is typically regarded as the best performing platform. And trust me, writing an ATL app is painful for all but the best C++ developers.

Re:.NET programming

[Silverstrike]

Not if the rest of your code is in C#. You're probably better of using the Novell C# LDAP library.

I know about System.DirectoryServices, but its just a COM interop for the windows standard API -- which dopes ADSI -- which sucks the monkey nut.

It uses Mono to do SSL -- but I stripped that out and used .NET 2.0's SSL stream -- worked like a dream. And it talks real standard LDAP, so you can use it against AD, NDS, etc.

Re:.NET programming

[hedge_death_shootout]

So you will</flash> want to simplify your life massively by avoiding native C++, and using a managed language and the managed AD API, and drop down to the C API where neccessary using P-Invoke (unlikely to be neccessary).

Unless this is one of those weird Active Directory apps that needs raw speed. Maybe an Active Directory based first person shoot-em-up?

Re:.NET programming

[Pedrito]

Can you provide examples of crappy documentation in v1.0 or v1.1 of the framework?

I don't know if the original poster can, but I sure can: BindingContext and CurrencyManager. Having written a data bound hierarchical grid in C#, I can tell you for a fact that the CurrencyManager documentation is horribly documented for control designers, the people who have the most need of good CurrencyManager documentation. As a single major flaw, take the "Note to inheritors" section of the documentation. This would be really helpful if the class didn't have protected abstract methods and properties which you therefore can't implement and thus meaning you can't inherit from the class.

The System.Window.Forms.DataGrid control is also horribly documented, hence the very extensive FAQ on it that George Shephard wrote. In fact, the extensiveness of his Windows Forms FAQ is necessary because of the poverty of good documentation from MS.

Next, the documentation for accessibility is horrendous. There are things that are completely nonsensical in the documentation. Without help from the developers that work for manufacturers of accessible hardware, we would have had a much harder time implementing the accessibility in our app.

True, CurrencyManager and accessibility aren't exactly part of the mainstream of coding, but they're both areas that any control developer will have to be familiar with and thus, important areas to be documented.

Re:.NET programming

[killjoe]

Do you have any firsthand experience with using the ASP.NET under linux (using mono I presume). Does it really work "just fine", does it work well enough to put into production on a heavy site?

I don't know but given that java is proven to work on linux (and other unix platforms as well as windows) I don't know if any business would risk using mono on a production web site.

Finally since MS has patents on the ASP.NET platform a company would open themselves up for a patent infringement lawsuit for deploying on mono. The risk may be small (for now) but I don't know too many legal departments who would approve of such a project when a patent free solution is available.

Re:.NET programming

[jack_csk]

I don't know much about Match.com, but the Monster.com should be a counter-example instead. Last time I check, their site was quite buggy. Post back buttons would be missing randomly, etc.

Re:.NET programming

[mikek3332002]

Though the rest of the system is mainly undocumented. Read stuff from the guy who found the rootkit and be amazed at all the well hiden functions Mark found.

Re:.NET programming

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working on Dot-Net 2 for about 8 months, and the documentation for the stuff I'm working on is abysmal. Most methods/properties and such have recently migrated from "This is not yet documented" in red to

  Property bool Foo

  C# example:

      thingy.Foo = true;

with no meaning of what Foo does.

Unlike working in Java you can't dig into the class library source code, and I don't think the documentation is as good. Also Visual Studio is lacking in many places Eclipse excels. The language also has some interesting features - especially with imports. Whoever chose to use capital initial letter for namespaces made a bad decision - method and property names nearly as bad. Don't give a class the same name as a namespace - anywhere - or expect bits of code to stop compiling.

A lot of it is still thin wrappers over COM, and suffers for it. There's a lot of legacy there, and things hit most when trying to debug and either COM or MSDTC decides to time out. Woe betide you try debugging something multithreaded. Where Eclipse lets you watch threads as they run and look for deadlocks, Visual Studio's thread handling is very rudimentary at best.

I still prefer Java.

Re:.NET programming

[open_source_dweeb]

Unlike working in Java you can't dig into the class library source code

Can't you just use the IL Disassembler with .NET Reflector 4.0? The disassembled code should be fairly readable to give you an idea of what it does.

Re:.NET programming

[Anonymous Coward]

"Neither machine ever went above 40% CPU, which means a single machine could have handled all the traffic."

Scary that you think this.

Re:.NET programming

[tau-lepton]

Well first of all there is no bug list. That, for one, is less than steller. At least Borland always had a reasonably well maintained bug list. There are lots of KB articles though.

Here are a couple of killers bugs that are not documented:
The serialization of HashTable requires a special keyword to reduce serialization from 30 minutes to 5 seconds. On a 2GHz PentiumM 2GB memory -- unless a magic keyword is used, 600,000 element hashtable takes 30+ minutes to store to disk, with the keyword it only takes five seconds, and the magic keyword? : System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.FormatterT ypeStyle.XsdString. Microsoft is completely silent on this. It took me a half a day to track it down. It is documented here: http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-1351498.ph p. Not mentioned anywhere by Microsoft. In addition the hashing algorithm is broken for large hash sets.

Here's another killer, try performing binary serialization of a DataSet in 1.1. It doesn't exist you just get XML, which I guess strictly speaking is binary, but in the rest of .Net serialization with a binary format basically just streams the memory image of the object to disk. .Net is a lockout mechanism by Microsoft. There are NO serious applications written in .Net that Microsoft sells, none. And I know about visual studio.

Re:.NET programming

[jsight]

I was just about to post many of the same things. The documentation for the Java platform is much more open and generally higher quality, and Eclipse is a better code-level editor than VStudio any day.

Re:.NET programming

[Anonymous Coward]

I program using wxWidgets. Not only is it a easier than .Net, it has been out much longer, and it does not lock you into the Microsoft platform.

Intentionally locking yourself into the any platform is just stupid.

Re:.NET programming

[Anonymous Coward]

The original Pentium at 200 MHz can easily handle a 100Mbit Ethernet connection with the right software.

The original Pentium at 66 MHz can handle one million database transactions per second, with the right software.

The tcp/ip stack on FreeBSD 4.x, slightly modified to manage connections on a per port basis, can handle over one million connections per second on the original Pentium at 200 MHz.

It seems like you do not have any experience with real high load software. Your setup is overkill for anything other than something developed on the Microsoft Windows platform.

Microsoft software is always poorly design. It seems that Microsoft cannot find knowledgeable and experienced people who want to work for them. Therefore, they get green programmers who have no experience, or really old VMS Nimrods who disregard the previous twenty years of operating system design. It's even worse seeing Microsoft produce more and more API cruft built on top of old API cruft. How many times can you coat shit in shit before you realize it's still shit?

Listening to the people on Microsoft's "channel 9" is really sad. They all come off as academics and old mainframe programmers who do not know how to design software for horizontal implementation by many groups, and still take into account how the hardware actually works. Hell, the Microsoft Platform still does not have a unified virtual memory buffer cache.

Re:.NET programming

[IntergalacticWalrus]

MSDN good? Oh please. I still have nightmares about searching for a Win32 API function, and ending up on WinCE pages.

I guess it got better now though (I haven't done Microsoft development in years, save for VB6 which has its own traditional help system that doesn't end up in something else you don't care about).

Re:.NET programming

[nighty5]

It must be some fabulous porn site!

Re:.NET programming

[ThinkFr33ly]

Why would that be scary?

We have done testing to confirm this, and in fact we had a NIC failure in one machine which resulted in the failover of all traffic to a single machine right at the beginning of our normal peak load times.

The result? That second machine hovered around 75% to 80% CPU for the hour or so it took us to replace the NIC in the first machine.

Re:.NET programming

[ThinkFr33ly]

The original Pentium at 200 MHz can easily handle a 100Mbit Ethernet connection with the right software.

Ya, it's called Windows 95. Or Linux. Or NT. Or XP for that matter. What's your point?

The original Pentium at 66 MHz can handle one million database transactions per second, with the right software.

That's a pretty silly statement. What software would that be.

The tcp/ip stack on FreeBSD 4.x, slightly modified to manage connections on a per port basis, can handle over one million connections per second on the original Pentium at 200 MHz.

Interesting. There are a max of 64,000 ports. That would mean each port would need to handle over 15,000 connections per second. What useful thing could be done with so little time to do it? The memory resource required alone would almost certainly be more than any PII motherboard could hold. Even if each connection only consumed 1Kb of memory, it would take about a GIG of ram just for the connections.

It seems like you do not have any experience with real high load software. Your setup is overkill for anything other than something developed on the Microsoft Windows platform.

It seems like you enjoy making up stuff and then making judgements about other people's experience which you are clearly not qualified to make.

Microsoft software is always poorly design.

Why am I even replying to this... never mind.

Re:.NET programming

[PickyH3D]

Actually, I have always found my .NET sites to be extremely responsive.

Really, the only hold up with sites is the databases, and caching is so powerful in .NET that can become extremely managable.

I had once coded a news engine that used caching, and I had extremely fast load times using output caching, standard data caching, and web controls. The site never launched to the public, and the server would not have been able to handle it anyway, but my point is that coded correctly, I would gladly use .NET on a project like you mentioned.

It could be that I have a bias, but I also code Windows software with .NET.

Re:.NET programming

[Ravatar]

Give VS 2005 a try; then come back and apologize for that ridiculous statement.

Re:.NET programming

[ScottyH]

I use both regularly. VS.NET 2005 at work most of the time, and Eclipse for the OSS development and some side projects.

As far as writing code goes, Eclipse still beats the poop out of VS.NET 2005. Better refactoring and formatting options, TODO and FIXME integration into the task pane (I can't stress how important this is), and that cool strip beside the scrollbar that shows where errors, warnings and tasks are located in the file. I consider these features indispensable and I notice them not being there in VS.NET. I write a lot of code that has to be well documented so I like that I can set Eclipse to view an undocumented method or member as an warning or even an error so that it won't compile. A lot of these options can be set on a project to project basis too. Useful if you write a lot of code, or are writing code with people using different code style than you do (and you want to play nicely). Or how about file icons in the project panel showing whether there are errors or warnings in the file, or whether they're up to date with source control...I could go on and on, but I won't.

I guess the downside of Eclipse is that once and awhile you can feel it lagging, even on a faster machine...I can't say this bothers me much though.

I do like all the integrated tools and palettes VS.NET 2005 provides. I also like the organizational tools for websites (although they're kind of shoving their ideas down your throat...but the ideas aren't bad). Code completion is fast. Unnamed bookmarks are great (I can't STAND that I have to name bookmarks in Eclipse). Support for source control system plugins (thank god, not everyone uses Sourcesafe). Not to mention super tight integration with their framework, which rocks I might add. The new refactoring tools are nice as well. It's a great editor, no doubt.

But if you asked me what I'd rather write code in, I'd pick Eclipse, hands down.

Re:.NET programming

[aybiss]

Actually .NET performs very well and while the distributed code is an intermediate form of machine code it is JIT compiled and having run some tests I can tell you that average code written in C# ends up being just as fast as C++ in the end, although of course in C++ you can do more tricks to make things really fast.

The API is at least as extensive as Java's and IMHO Visual Studio is the only way to build Windows Apps. Your friend is quite right to swear by it, MS really did get quite a few things right with .NET.

Don't want to detract from all those free tools out there but MS's developer tools ARE the shit.

Re:.NET programming

[AaronBrethorst]

I'm the Program Manager who owns Accessibility for Visual Studio. I recognize that we need to improve the quality of our documentation on making accessible Windows apps (I just had a conversation with my counterpart on Windows Forms about this yesterday, in fact). Please let me know which specific pieces of information you would like to see better documented. Feel free to log a bug on this at the MSDN Product Feedback Center (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback) or send me an email at abreth at microsoft dot com. thanks!

Re:.NET programming

[Ravatar]

VS 2k5 has integration for TODO and FIXME in it's task pane, and it also underlines the exact lines of code that are incorrect in red, a la misspelled words in MS Office. It also has unparalleled refactoring/formatting capabilities... The code commenting system in VS 2k5 not only integrates nicely with the client, it also updates in real-time within the IDE. I'm failing to understand why you can't find any of those tools in the IDE.

Re:.NET programming

[fyrie]

ok.. Comparitively speaking... monster.com is peppy compared to techies.com (java). I know, I know.. jsp can be hella fast... just not in this case.

Re:.NET programming

[ScottyH]

Sounds like the only one I really missed was TODO and FIXME in the task pane, which is a big relief.

It sounds as if you misunderstood my other comments though.

Re:.NET programming

[Ravatar]

I guess I'll be more clear then..

cool strip beside the scrollbar that shows where errors, warnings and tasks are located in the file.

I'm unfamiliar with this feature, but when VS throws you an error in the output list, if you right click it you can get the exact line that the error appears.

write a lot of code that has to be well documented so I like that I can set Eclipse to view an undocumented method or member as an warning or even an error so that it won't compile.

There is a very similar feature available (although I think as a plugin) that will throw you a warning for every undocumented method in your project. Also, don't forget VS2005 now has built-in support for FXCop (if you write code in .NET) and that might catch some of the missing xml-documentation tags.

Or how about file icons in the project panel showing whether there are errors or warnings in the file, or whether they're up to date with source control...

There is a plugin available for this, but I do agree it would be nice to have this functionality by default (Team System *might*).

Re:.NET programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, don't bother replying. Slashdot is a forum for linux hobbyist to complain about anything Microsoft and make themselves feel better about their OS choice.

"Intelligent" and ".NYET" in the same sentence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only with the word "not" can that be a logically correct sentence; otherwise, it's an oxymoron.

Small nitpick

[Swamii]

"Avalon" (now known as the Microsoft Presentation Framework

A very small nitpick, but for the record, it's Microsoft Presentation Foundation.

Maybe it's just me, but "Avalon" was a much cooler name.

Re:Small nitpick

[PCM2]

Actually, it's Windows Presentation Foundation.

Re:Small nitpick

[mullahbill]

Good catch and actually it's not a nitpick. I wrote a book on the stuff so I should have at least gotten its name right. Sorry about that.

I'm happy for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

for not being a IANAP. I Am A Penis and I have a hard time sometimes. Most people, though, understand. Occasionally, people call me a Dick! But really, IANAD!

Re:I'm happy for you!

[TheDarkener]

Pass the blunt, buddy! =p~~ ~

Re:I'm happy for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a few beers actually ....and their mine!

What's really funy is that I got modd'ed as "Troll" for slamming myself. The only thing that makes sense is that the mod is a psychotherapist. They want to make sure that I have good self esteem.

Intelligent? .NET?

[RodgerTheGreat]

oxymoron n. pl. oxymora (-môr, -mr) or oxymorons A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in a deafening silence and a mournful optimist.

Business intelligence

[ech00ne]

If you really want to seize an opportunity to drive some demand for your products you have to take a serious look at embedding some Business Intelligence into your product. Don't believe me?

1. The second most important technology priority (after security) for CIO's is Business Intelligence.
2. Not only that, but the most important business priority for them is business process improvement

Re:Business intelligence

[luvirini]

That is the "buzzword complience" thing one needs.. but any proper CIO knows that almost all BI products are total crap. Thus there is definitely a trend of "oh your product also does BI?, bye" raising. What is needed is actually GOOD products as the current wave is largely "hype-ware", though there are actually some fairly good(if very complex) products.

Mono Chapter?

[ztwilight]

If they had a chapter about Mono compatibility, I might consider the book.

Re:Mono Chapter?

[PsychicX]

The technologies are Microsoft Speech Server and Microsoft Analysis Services. I'll write the extra chapter for you:

CHAPTER 10: Mono Compabitility: None of these technologies or any equivalents are available in Mono. You might be able to hack something together with /dev/speech, and that's about it.

Kind of a short chapter though.

Building Intelligent .NET Applications

[_PimpDaddy7_]

Building Intelligent .NET Applications

Isn't that an oxymoron? ;)

Re: Building Intelligent .NET Applications

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but you're one! (Minus the oxy- of course).

Another Microsoft Story

[amightywind]

Slashdot has been shilling every skank Microsoft framework, language, and 'technology' for months now. It is an eyesore to those of us who have come here for free software news. Moderators, why do you accept these submissions? Don't you see that you are polluting hacker culture? Are you succombing to pressure by Microsoft's advertising dollars?

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[PsychicX]

"Free software news" ? Where the hell does it say that?

By the way, "hacker culture" is no longer "cool". It's a pathetic group of people who can't come to grips with modern technology and simply scream (well post) from their basement about how the world misuses the world "hacker" and doesn't give their command line the respect it deserves.

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[amightywind]

By the way, "hacker culture" is no longer "cool". It's a pathetic group of people who can't come to grips with modern technology and simply scream (well post) from their basement about how the world misuses the world "hacker" and doesn't give their command line the respect it deserves.

Better that than a clueless drooler who willingly tithes to a vile corporation who shits on the world, and uses them as a surrogate for their thinking. (I expect the standard reply, Bill Gates is worth $50 gazillion, how much are your worth?...)

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[external400kdiskette]

Many people use .NET and it's an interesting enough language to warrant a story on using it more efficiently. Slashdot is not designed to be reporting 100% on free stuff and for good reason, if you want an IT news site that doesn't report on ANYTHING that isn't free RMS style your going to have a site that will appeal to a much smaller audience though it could be a good narcotic for zealots. Most people want news on everything IT of interest irrespective of its philosophical status.

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[Anonymous Coward]

you're a basement mama boi jacking off to your uber dork status.

slashdot is about "TECHNOLOGY". it doesn't have to be all about opensource.

go jerk off somewhere else.

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[external400kdiskette]

You should read "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. As a zealot your merely filling the void in your life with some utopian technology beliefs and admonishing a website for not subscribing 100% to your misguided point of view. Furthermore you have a need for an enemy and therefore Gates & MS become the earthly embodiment of satan in your mind. In the long term you might be better off losing a bit of the anger and doing more productive things because even if Gates is a convicted monopolist he doesn't come across half as hateful or bitter as you. But of course when you have self-proclaimed total morality with a completely pure system it's ok to be what you ostensibly despise when dealing with the "ultimate evil".

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[Brataccas]

For the love of god...please stop calling .NET a language.

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[amightywind]

Pick your code word: utopian, communist, un-American. Proponents of free software are used to it. The cause manages to advance. Your labels don't constitute a debate. You denegrate zealotry and embrace moderation without knowing why. Muzzy thinking is nothing to be proud of.

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, you just got served!

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[patiodragon]

" "Free software news" ? Where the hell does it say that? "

It doesn't. OTOH, it IS called slashdot, not back-slashdot...

Re:Another Microsoft Story

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they never claimed that, but it has been a part of the past of Slashdot. Hell, isn't Slashdot one of the premier members of the Open Source Technology Group (Formerly Open Source Developer's Network.) However, OSS can be coded in any language. It's not about what it's written in, it's about the accompanying liscense. And Slashdot is PRIMARILLY News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. Just that it used to be "Stuff that would mostly matter to Open Source Nerds." (Not the actual slogan, but their general bent on stories.)

I don't think you can do that

[rabbot]

Are you sure you can use the word "intelligent" when talking about anything to do with .NET?

oxymoron?

[Eisenfaust]

I've been coding for Win32 for about 10 years now. I still prefer Visual C++ 6 over any of the .NET versions. The .NET Framework seems to be a giant hog that sits on top of the other Win32APIs. If the .NET Framework was integrated into the operating system maybe it would be more seemless and less bloated. Or maybe it would just make the OS bloated...

These days I try to stay away from technologies that lock you into a certain platform. The two major down sides to this are development time and usability.

Maybe this book gives some tips on how to reduce .NET bloat, but with so many other graphical platforms around these days (OS X, KDE, Gnome, Plain old X) I think people should be spending their time looking for a more long term solution to their GUI development needs.

Hopefully someday there will be a free universal extensible light weight API for developing desktop applications. Until then we'll have to compromise.

Re:oxymoron?

[mcho]

It's true that the .NET Framework is really a fancy wrapper for Win32 API's, but the C# language is really great to work with -- only if it's the right tool for the job.

What really grinds my gears is that, as a micro-ISV, the .NET Framework isn't installed on a majority of customer's computers. And it's unfair to ask them to download and install the +200 MB Framework to use your ~100 KB application. That's why I've recently re-writen my client software in C++, but I still use .NET from my server-based applications.

Don't believe the hype, .NET is not everywhere as it should be and if you're developing consumer Windows application with .NET v2.0...well, mod yourself down.

Re:oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

200MB? You are off by an order of magnitude. The dotnetfx.exe installer is only 20MB to download, and it probably takes up no more than 50MB of disk space. Perhaps you are thinking of the SDK, which clearly doesn't belong on end-user systems.

Anyway, the beauty of writing apps in .Net is that I can just ship a 100k executable instead of a 100k executable and 5MB worth of DLLs and a 10MB installer because my app isn't just a single EXE anymore.

dom

Re:oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's unfair to ask them to download and install the +200 MB Framework to use your ~100 KB application.

WTF? Microsoft's .Net Framework 2.0 redistributable is 22960 KB and it's available on Windows Update. That's a far cry from 200MB, though larger than the JRE 1.5 (which is 16,387 KB).

I don't really care that much for .Net. I do occasionally code in C# for client-side stuff at work, but Java is used on the server (if I had my way we would've chosen Java or something cross-platform for the client-side stuff). But still I don't think its that much of a burden for people to download.

Re:oxymoron?

[in10se]

That's quite an exaggeration. While the framework download is somewhat large, it is nowhere near 200MB. In fact, not even the v1.1 SDK is 200MB. If you compare it to the JRE download (15MB) which is required to run Java applications, it's not really that big.

.NET Framework Redistributable v1.1: 23MB
.NET SDK (not required to run apps): 108MB

.NET Framework Redistributable v2.0: 22MB (even smaller)
.NET SDK (not required to run apps): 362MB (much bigger)

Re:oxymoron?

[westlake]

And it's unfair to ask them to download and install the +200 MB Framework

Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86) 23 MB, 2-4 minutes to download, assumming a broadband connection.

if you're developing consumer Windows application with .NET v2.0...well, mod yourself down.

Paint.NET has a .NET 2.0 Framework release scheduled for January with native x64 support.

Re:oxymoron?

[dbIII]

I've been coding for Win32 for about 10 years now. I still prefer Visual C++ 6 over any of the .NET versions.

Obviously, since your 10 year old C++ will probably still be portable in another 10 years with minor tweaks but we don't have a clue what fad language will be used for whatever VB morphing to .NET and whatever is next will be. We've had things similar to basic, pascal, and now java already - so it may be better to use a standard defined outside of MS than an internal shifting goalpost - either that or intelligent programming in .NET will be making it as easy to port to something else later as possible.

Re:oxymoron?

[open_source_dweeb]

I've been coding for Win32 for about 10 years now. I still prefer Visual C++ 6 over any of the .NET versions.

Unfortunately, it is time to move on as Microsoft is dropping support for Visual Studio 6. If you do not want to write managed code, you can still use Visual C++ .NET. However, getting a 10 year old project written VC++ 6.0 to compile under VS.NET is no mean feat. For example, some of the ATL templates have changed over the years and may no longer be compatible with your code. For our case, we have decided to rewrite many of our legacy C++ applications as .NET managed code whenever major functionality was added.

Re:oxymoron?

[Nicolay77]

Actually, my C++ single exe self containded applications are just a little over 1MB and run on win 95, 98, 2K, XP etc...

However, I put them in a installer because clients expect it that way.

Not all C++ stuff is like mozilla or openoffice.

Re:oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use wxWidgets. It is free. It is cross-platform. It has been available for over a decade. It is written is C++. It already uses OO design principles.

There is no reason to lock yourself into yet another platform specific API.

Hmm...

[flamesrock]

Sounds like another '.NET for idiots' book.

Honestly, you can build smart applications with the emacs editor and 5 years experience 'fooling around' with code. Why does everyone want to become a brilliant programmer from day 1? Takes time you know.

Here's a free guide, shorter, more enlightening and language agnostic: Teach yourself programming in 10 years.

goa7

[Anonymous Coward]

asshOle to othe7rs

Troll comment get's a 3 for Funny?

[Tominva1045]

So a trollish comment gets a 3 for being Funny?

If this had been a Linux story and I typed in the same thing I'd have gotten whacked big time.

Re:Troll comment get's a 3 for Funny?

[this great guy]

So a trollish comment gets a 3 for being Funny?

Hey ! This was not a trollish comment. Apparently people didn't get my joke, I would have done the same one for any language ("Building Intelligent XXX Applications"). Please don't mod me Flamebait.

Application orientation

[RageLink]

Well aparently this is a good book if you're chosing a programing platform that is application oriented. I'd like to know if there is anything in the book about making intelligent (efficient) .Net applications. If there is any part in that book on how to make .Net code not consume all the resources in testing server I'll buy one right now.

Re:Application orientation

[Anonymous Coward]

Get more than 32MB of RAM. If it's REALLY hurting you, turn off debug mode. An in-progress application crash still won't take the OS down. Not even if you try... the CLR always catches it and offers to debug.

I'll agree that for tiny apps, the weight of the CLR is kinda absurd, but that'll probably be a non-issue in Longhorn if .NET is actually integrated with, and not bolted onto, the OS. But really, do you not have 12MB of free RAM? Your testing server must be on a single chip...

SALT? Agnostic? Nice touch, indeed...

[Anonymous Coward]

TFR says:
Another nice touch is that she spends a good bit of time discussing more agnostic elements of speech and telephony development, S.A.L.T. in particular.

Erm... either "agnostic" doesn't mean what you think it means, or, more likely, you don't understand that SALT is about as "agnostic" as .NET or NTFS. SALT is part of the MS "ecosystem."

Go to http://www.w3.org/Voice/ to learn about "agnostic" standards for speech.

Buy it here!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't even BUY this book from B&N! Why not save yourself some money by buying the book here: Building Intelligent .NET Applications. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Step one: don't write your stuff in .net.exhibit A

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of fixing their hugely bugging drivers, shit opengl performance, broken & terrible install/uninstall, shit for Linux drivers, ATI spends their time in a circle jerk with .net to come up with the crapola that is CCC. Flash over substance.

.NET

[certel]

Intelligent .NET applications... Is that an overstatement? We have some .NET applications at work and although some work pretty well, they are always fixing them.

Re:.NET

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps it's not the tools but the smith?

Intelligent .Net Applications?

[Qbertino]

Now that's what I call a contradiction in term.

If you're intelligent you don't build in .Net, but some other, slightly more predictable technology.

What's next?

Reasonable Al-Quaida Terrorists?
Goody Twoshoe CIA Interrogators?
Guantanamo Bay Beachpartys?

Re:Intelligent .Net Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about: patriotic non-liberal, non-terrorist loving you.

Re:Intelligent .Net Applications?

[jferris]

If you are intelligent, you have a diverse skillset and code were the market demand (directly proportionate to money) is. I don't develop in .Net because I think it is the best thing since sliced bread (although it is very solid if you take the time to learn it), but because I make a hell of a lot more than I would if I was a PHP or Delphi developer.

Re:Intelligent .Net Applications?

[swordfish666]

You've got that right.

Contractor Story:
Company A: "Hello Contractor, we don't have alot of money so we would like to do the Open Sorce thing with PHP/MySQL etc."

Developer: "My rates are $XX p/h."

Company A: "Whole $&!%. We can pay you $XX - $Y. Hello? Hello? I think he hung up the phone."

Company B: "Hello Developer, we have plenty of money and we want you to develope a robust system with .NET"

Developer: "My rates are $XX + $(CostOfNewLaptop / ContractLength.Months)"

Company B: "We'll see you on Monday."

Re:Intelligent .Net Applications?

[jferris]

Exactly right. At first, I used to feel guilty about it - for some strange reason. I thought that I was making an absolute killing at a certain amount that I was billing for, then I found out that I wasn't getting the same interest for the .Net project work.

The reason? I was looking for *too little* and not too much. I adjusted my hourly rates upwards and landed an open-ended position. There are two directions to price yourself out of the market. ;-) Of course, this was for the financial industry, and a lot of stock-related companies jump on buzzwords faster than Anna Nicole Smith jumps on a corpse.

I recently gave up contracting, because as a 1099, there was too much work not related to the contract - such as getting reasonable health insurance, setting part of the budget aside for taxes, etc. About four months ago, I took a full time .Net position that paid the same base rate as my contracts. Of course, not having the out of pocket expenses along with a nice benefits package, I actually have more to show for it. ;-)

Mod parent Off Topic

[Anonymous Coward]

This book has nothing to do with writing desktop applications. It is about writing apps that use artificial intelligence. In particular, it covers how to do so using the .Net framework.

What you seem to misunderstand is that there is no such thing as a framework that is both complete and lightweight. Sure, you can use just bare Xlibs and Athena widgets and make a simple, ugly application where you have to write most of the UI code. However, most of us want to write apps, not UI code, meaning that the framework should handle as much of this for us as possible.

Any framework that handles most of the work for you is going to be large. If you think .Net is "bloated", you have apparently never used KDE or Gnome!

dom

Why is this Linux vs. Windows?

[PhatboySlim]

Honestly, I have been developing web applications for some time and granted I use C#, but I've never been opposed to someone using Java, or PHP, or Oracle. My personal experience has been that every language has a slight edge in some regard, but they all do the same thing. There is a much greater difference in the talent of programmers than in the language being used. If you pitted Steven Hawking in an Enzo Ferrari vs. Michael Schumaker in a Ford Taurus, who would win the race? I mean honestly. Mark me flamebait or troll I don't care, but all this Windows vs. Linux high school propaganda has got me sick of Slashdot. The original post was a book review on developing .NET. It wasn't a, "Why anything except MS sucks" book review. Can we please stay on topic and get the ever-increasing in size chip off the linux community's shoulder? Thanks.

Java falling behind

[penguin-collective]

Sorry clown, Java is the top language/platform in new engineering positions right now. And it continues to grow.

As someone else pointed out already, ASP.NET has already overtaken Java for web development. For dynamic content, Java has been almost completely replaced by Flash and dynamic HTML. And for desktop applications, Java is non-existent in the real world.

Own up to knowing Delphi

[Latent Heat]

What a person needs to advertise is knowing Delphi at a deep level (component writing, ActiveX).

The people using Delphi out there are simply desperate to find anyone else who knows anything about it to help out.

Re:Own up to knowing Delphi

[jack_csk]

Surely, there really aren't many Delphi developer positions, at least in Michigan, United States.
I am not sure where you are, but I'm sure that Delphi developer (well, I used to be...) is hard to find in United States. Last time I saw a job that involves knowledge of Delphi software development, the employer was an immigrant from an European country.

How about writing fast .NET apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't do it, can you?

A recent performance test of some floating point intensive code I did earlier this year showed an over 3x slowdown when run on .NET.

(Sorry -- have to post anon -- don't want to get in trouble...)

Re:How about writing fast .NET apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

and you are surprised that unmanaged compiled code outperforms managed code why exactly?

Re:How about writing fast .NET apps?

[the_instigator]

in #some# situations .net code can outperform unmanaged code because it (for example) knows where all the space is on the heap and can optimize to exploit this knowledge when JIT compiling at run time, rather than second guess optimizations at compile time. This is true of any managed code, not just .net. Java code is pretty much as optimizeda as .net now, but they took a while to get there because java was not initially designed to be JITted .

Re:How about writing fast .NET apps?

[TheNetAvenger]

Yet something that needs speed the most, DirectX 9.0c has portions that are written in .NET - managed code.

Don't believe, go look it up...

But I'm sure 'your' tests are the definitive answer on its performance.

Re:How about writing fast .NET apps?

[Corngood]

Go look it up? How about you just provide some proof.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of .Net and DirectX, but I'm pretty sure the only part of DirectX which runs managed is the .Net wrapper 'DirectX for Managed Code'. I've made lots of unmanaged DX9 applications which run fine without the .Net runtime.

No Such Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Intelligent .NET" -> It's a wikipedia definition of oxymoron.

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

.NET... intelligent... oxymoron

Giant Log?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you said

The .NET Framework seems to be a giant log that sits on top of the other Win32APIs.

Oh, I was going to point out that it wasn't a log but was an, ummmm.... well, you know...

Monster.com Uses "Old" ASP, Not ASP.NET

[Anonymous Coward]

And gets better performance out of it than they would out of ASP.NET. They should know, they've tried but are sticking with ASP.

Thousands of firms are sticking with ASP because it runs better and faster than ASP.NET. Surprise, surprise! But they won't talk about it because the ASP.NET EULA forbids them from releasing benchmarks.

Re:Monster.com Uses "Old" ASP, Not ASP.NET

[fyrie]

Page extensions at Monster are aspx. Granted, they may have just renamed their .asp pages to aspx

My Dealings With ASP.NET

[LifesABeach]

On using ASP.NET:

Boss comes in says, "Build me a simple order entry screen. And use those 'new' asp:datagrid's with anything that looks like a table. If its HTML, don't use it. All input items are in the datagrid format also."

Getting drop down boxes, check box lists, and text boxes to work is an undocumented nightmare. My humble dealings with ASP.NET is that its not ready for prime time.

Re:My Dealings With ASP.NET

[sw155kn1f3]

Yeah, right... If you didn't get proper training and even didn't read a book on it, that means it's not ready for prime time. What a comfortable attitude.

Re:My Dealings With ASP.NET

[LifesABeach]

Training? How about documentation? It reminds me of an old road racing saying, "The Bullshit Ends When the Green Light's On."

Intellegent .Net Design?

[nurb432]

I thought good coding evolved.

SOoooo.

[MrCopilot]

Building Intelligent .Net Applications

S0Oo...It's Fiction then.

open source needs to change

[penguin-collective]

I agree: languages/environments like .NET are the future: they are easier to develop for, prevent silly programming mistakes, and help with security.

But this is nothing specific about .NET; many languages have that property. Microsoft deserves no credit for the technologies in .NET or VisualStudio, since those technologies are 20 years old and weren't invented at Microsoft.

Still, where does that leave open source and free software? We need to discard the user environment and applications written in C and C++; those languages are obsolete for mainstream software development and they are holding back FOSS (the kernel should eventually be discarded and replaced as well, but we can take a little more time for that).

I don't know what language should replace it. Mono would be the obvious candidate, but the fact that it is based on a Microsoft language makes it unattractive to many people. Java is definitely not the answer--it is riddled with technical problems and it is proprietary. Objective-C inherits too many of C/C++'s flaws to be much of an improvement.

The best thing to do might be to come up with a derivative of C that would feel quite familiar to C/C++ programmers, but add garbage collection and runtime safety. It should also probably be batch compiled, since the bloat associated with the JVM and CLR runtimes is unacceptable to many people.

Re:So .net is used for things other than ATI's CCC

[Anonymous Coward]

And by god the ATI catalyst control panel that uses .NET is most horrible piece of software I've ever seen!
To be honest - off the top of my head - it's more ugly than any Java desktop app I've ever seen (even since the 1.1 days). It took like minutes to start-up (even if I only wanted to change resolution. etc!), ate crazy amount of memory and was very choppy overall. It's unbelievable that we see shit like this coming from ATI engineers. I honestly don't know if it's the .NET or the engineers who are to be blamed. Note that I tried it few months ago so I dont know how it's changed. Nor do I really care. I'll never install that piece of shit on my machine again.

If you want a real ATI control panel, don't be afraid to get Omega Drivers and it's tray tools. It makes the ATI stuff look pathetic.