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Has a Decade of .NET Delivered On Microsoft's Promises?
cyclocommuter writes with this snippet from The Register's assessment of whether
Microsoft's .NET framework has been a success: "If the goal of .NET was to see off Java, it was at least partially successful. Java did not die, but enterprise Java became mired in complexity, making .NET an easy sell as a more productive alternative. C# has steadily grown in popularity, and is now the first choice for most Windows development. ASP.NET has been a popular business web framework. The common language runtime has proved robust and flexible. ... Job trend figures here show steadily increasing demand for C#, which is now mentioned in around 32 per cent of UK IT programming vacancies, ahead of Java at 26 per cent."
The article says that demand for c# is around 32%, but it should also add in the demand for vb.net, which is less but should be added to the total, as it is in use. In my view, the language features, excellent development environment and comprehensive libraries make .NET a win for most LOB applications - which is the vast majority of all PC applications in use at the moment.
Joking aside, Java is multiplatform in practice and .Net is only in theory.
839*929
As a professional Java programmer, I've watched as Java-the-language has stagnated. Java-the-platform has only thrived thanks to Open Source, and no thanks to the sclerotic Java Community Process and an ineffectual steward in Sun Microsystems.
Java programmers have watched in horror as C# gained fully reified generics, lambdas and closures, arbitrary monadic comprehensions and Hindley-Milner type inference, whilst we've only grudgingly been allowed a broken generics model whilst Sun spent years rejecting and rewriting closure proposals that are still 1-2 years away from adoption.
C# is thriving because it has a benevolent dictator in the form of Anders Hjelberg. Java the language is a stagnant mess.
You're just sore because you made the wrong decision to learn Delphi.
Moreover, Microsoft seems to earnestly care about putting the geekiest of the geeks in charge of their language development. They have quite a few functional programmers who have a significant say in the future of languages like F#, and continue to produce great libraries for the CLR.
And now of course, IronPython is a dream scripting language that's incredibly easy to host and entirely open source to boot.
I think people unnecessarily mock Ballmer for "Developers, developers, developers!" He was right. It worked, and Java lost, despite having done so many things right first, and having nailed cross-platform application and service design. Or at least, Java is in the process of losing.
The answer is, as always, it depends.
If you expected cure for cancer, it failed miserably.
However, if you were involved with any of the likes of MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6 and bellow, DAO, Interop & COM (to name just a few), it is to be regarded as the second coming of Christ.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
Gee, I have mod points but could not help but notice your modesty - why exclude yourself?
If someone has mod points, please mod us all up!
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
Ironically did you know the guy that designed Delphi also designed C#?
Where I live, on Dice.com there are 74 open ASP.NET, and 17 open PHP jobs.
You are totally talking out of your ass. I really hope you understand the irony of starting with, "please dont bullcrap if you are not in industry".
I may not be in the dumb, arrogant PHP developer industry, but I can assure you that I am in the industry. There is a good chance that if you haven't used a website that I helped develop, you have at least used one that my company has. Where I work, we use ASP.NET (Primarily .NET) and Java, but not PHP.
But hey, don't let that discourage you the next time you want to post an uninformed and totally inaccurate rant about PHP and how you are in the industry but nobody else is...
Well of course you will. The projects on those sites are looking for cheap implementation and damn any sort of quality or maintainability. The register didn't look at those sorts of sites, they looked at recruiting sites instead, the ones businesses use. Using the slime pool that is the "Write me a twitter clone for $100" sites to say LAMP is the most popular in businesses is laughable.
You realize the "point and click" stuff is for laying out dialog boxes, right?
Writing boilerplate code to lay out controls and handle window messages wasn't some noble art that's been lost. It was low level tedium that distracted from real programming. I remember opening Petzold's Windows programming book and being horrified that the code for "Hello World" spanned several pages.
I don't know about your wages, but I get paid a fair amount for my time to write C#, and that time is a lot more productive and enjoyable thanks to such things as IDEs and component libraries.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Of course their reasons for doing it are not benevolent, they want software designed for Windows so that users want to use Windows. Regardless, they produce extremely slick dev tools because of it. Often the things maligned by self proclaimed "real" programmers are actually quite useful dev tools in the right situations.
Visual Basic is a good example, all sorts of geeks liked to hate on VB as being stupid. While they were on to something in that VB wasn't powerful like C/C++, they missed that the reason was that VB was a managed language back before such a thing was popular. It allowed you to easily churn out UIs and things like that with minimal effort and without the need to check for the gotchas you got with something like C. Hence it was quite popular.
What MS has done real well is realized that most developers out there are NOT the hard core "Give me a text editor or give me death!" types. They are people in business trying to get something done, and get it done with minimal fuss and hassle. They also likely have to put up with management idiots who want to change the requirements every 5 minutes and thus being able to rapidly change the software is a benefit.
They really do seem to be a company that is in touch with what developers want.
Yet another comment by someone who thinks Java is “applets in my browser”.
Java is THE dominant language for mobile phone development (96% of all phones support it, the other 4% allow it with a little precompiler), and “enterprise” server development (where is is the fastest mainstream non-C language, except for [maybe] OCaml/Haskell).
Java is not only going strong, with no decline in sight. It is dominant in many sectors.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Powershell was never designed to be used by day to day admins in general administration tasks. GUI for many things allows you to look up data or make one off changes much quicker. Powershell is designed to be used by admins to script common tasks they do daily. I have a Powershell script that will parse a comma delimited text file and add every line in there as Active Directory user with Exchange Mailbox. When we get 30 new employees at work, I modify some parameters on Powershell script, take list from HR and bam, in 15 minutes, I've added 30 new users with Exchange mailboxes. That's purpose of Powershell.