Why Microsoft Will Never Make .NET Truly Portable

Michelle Meyers writes "Just days before Microsoft claimed to be making parts of the .NET CLR "available" to other platforms, NeoSmart Technologies had published an article bemoaning and blasting Microsoft's abuse of it's developers by pretending .NET was a true cross-platform framework when they're doing everything in their power to stop it from being just that. Of interest is NeoSmart's analysis of how Microsoft has no problem making certain portions of .NET available to Mac users — just so long as its distributed under an "open source" license that forbids any and all use of the code except for educational purposes — yet are terrified of the very thought of .NET being available to *nix users, even if that's to the benefit of .NET developers everywhere. Even more interesting is one of the comments on that article linking to legal documents in which Microsoft employees discuss the (im)possibility of creating a cross-platform code and UI framework, years before the .NET project even started!"

Comments

Re:Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, I'm no fan of .NET, but the Help Desk webcomic isn't exactly the best source for objective and serious assessments of Microsoft products. Several programming languages have been built for .NET and programs that are built with these will generally require the .NET runtime to run. Although this is irrelevant to the well-definedness of the concept, most people tend to acknowledge that these languages, perhaps C# in particular, are far better than Microsoft's earlier offerings along these lines, although they may of course not be everyone's cup of tea for various reasons including but not limited to their being tied to a closed system and their being generally non-cross-platform.

You may not like the framework, but there is no longer any confusion about what .NET is. You'll notice that the comic you linked to was from 2004.

Re:Java

[poindextrose]

I develop in both the Java and .NET frameworks. I like the Java language a lot more than C#. Unfortunately, users like Windows.Forms a lot more than Swing.

Whatever

[Concern]

Even if Java wasn't about to be GPLd, was it really worth all the effort, plus daring the world's most notorious IP barratrers' fairly obvious patent/IP trap, so you can get...

Operator overloading? Unsafe code in a VM? Not to say there aren't a few nice things. But too few. Mono is a dangerous waste of time.

That C#/.NET hype is so damn tired. It's a dead-end platform, unless MS opens it up, or chooses to add some truly novel features to it in the future.

Re:Does it matter?

[Rob Y.]

...was just a ploy to take some of the wind out of Java's sails.

Absolutely right. Microsoft was originally pushing .NET as a 'better Java', and in some ways, it actually was better. But in the way that really mattered to most Java developers, it was much worse. Its cross-platform nature was the main appeal of Java. Yes, the language may have been viewed as an improvement, and the 'managed code' approach to security is nice. But 'write once, run anywhere' was the main selling point of Java.

So how did Microsoft 'compete'? First, by deliberately sabotaging the cross-platform nature of Java, and Second by implying that their Java clone was cross-platform as well.

And the saddest part is that if Microsoft had been broken up by the Justice Dept when it should have been, .NET probably would have been made truly cross-platform. Then it could have competed honestly with Java.