Analysis of .NET Use in Longhorn and Vista

smallstepforman writes "In a classic example of "Do as I say, not as I do", Richard Grimes analyses the ratio of native to managed code in Microsoft's upcoming Vista Operating System. According to the analysis at Microsoft Vista and .NET, "Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista on native code development. Vista has no services implemented in .NET and Windows Explorer does not host the runtime, which means that the Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime. The only conclusion that can be made from these results is that between PDC 2003 and the release of Vista Beta 1 Microsoft has decided that it is better to use native code for the operating system, than to use the .NET framework.""

Comments

So?

[WalterGR]

Read this blog posting by Dan Fernandez:

"...For those of you that refuse to believe, here's an estimate of the lines of managed code in Microsoft applications that I got permission to blog about:

• Visual Studio 2005: 7.5 million lines
• SQL Server 2005: 3 million lines
• BizTalk Server: 2 million lines
• Visual Studio Team System: 1.7 million lines
• Windows Presentation Foundation: 900K lines
• Windows Sharepoint Services: 750K lines
• Expression Interactive Designer: 250K lines
• Sharepoint Portal Server: 200K lines
• Content Management Server: 100K lines

Re:Well DUH

[tshak]

Why not a C# notepad, mspaint, explorer.exe, taskmgr, regedit etc? All of those would be great in .Net and would show MS's customers that MS is behind .Net 100%. As it looks to me, .Net is the "soup of the day" at MS. .Net will be replaced in 3-5 years with something else that will require MS customers to re-purchase their development tool chain.
You are absolutely right in that MS should rewrite the "basics" like notepad and mspaint. Not because of .NET, but because these apps desperately need updating. There are already 3rd party .NET replacements for these, but MS needs to jump on it. However, you can't be farther from the truth with regards to .NET being replaced in 3-5 years just because notepad isn't written in .NET. Important enterprise applications like Biztalk Server and CMS have at least in part been ported to the .NET platform. Media Center is written in .NET. Parts of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System is written in .NET. This is all fairly public information - if I were internal at Microsoft I could probably list a lot more. So while I agree that MS needs to rewrite a lot of tooling in their OS (whether or not using .NET), I do not think that the lack of Vista .NET applications points to Microsoft not having a huge commitment with .NET and looking to replace it with Yet Another Platform to sell to everyone in a few years.

Re:Well DUH

[Coryoth]

I don't think anyone is expecting MS to rewrite the kernel in C# or managed C++.

Interestingly the people at MS research are expecting just that - they are writing Singularity in what is essentially C# with extensions (extensions mostly in the form of formal specification semantics to allow more complete static checking). The upside to doing this is that, when combined with a better ground up approach to security as is being used in Singularity, you get a remarkably robust and secure kernel for an operating system.

Of course this is a project at MS research - I wouldn't expect it to ever see the light of day in an actual product released by MS. It's nice to know that some people set their expectations suitably high though.

Jedidiah.

they did have managed code, but pulled it out

[owenomalley]

We had someone out to interview last month who is currently at Microsoft working on Windows. He said that the major reason that Vista is so late is that they had to rollback all of the development to remove all of the managed code because performance had gone to hell. Every thing that had been done in managed code had to be reimplemented from scratch. Ouch.