Slashdot Mirror
Devs Worried Microsoft Will Dump .NET
joelholdsworth passes along a story summing up concerns from developers that "Microsoft seems to be set on adopting HTML5 and JavaScript as its main application development tools for Windows 8," and asking, "is this the end of .NET?" The article continues:
"To bet the farm on HTML5 and JavaScript being the next big thing is a good bet, but it's not a bet that Microsoft can easily take and make good. Even if the world does turn to JavaScript and platform-independent apps, this still means that Microsoft loses.
The problem is that Microsoft needs a technology that gives it an edge, and HTML5/JavaScript is everybody's edge. Microsoft developers feel left in the dark and very angry at the way they are being treated. You only have to browse the Microsoft forums to discover how strong the feeling is: forum post 1, forum post 2 and an open letter."
Reader Sla$hPot points out a similar story at OS News.
This is dupe from last week. Just for Joel to get some visitors to his ad ridden .info site...
.NET is only good for rendering client-side markup and script.
Seriously, can Slashdot get *any* worse than this?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When has Microsoft ever just killed off a technology that they pushed? Next thing you know will be telling me that VB6 and FoxPro are in danger of going away.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No.
If you watch the presentation for what it really is, what they're saying is if you want the 'New Hotness' flashy canvas, yes your apps will have to be HTML/JS. No, they're not going to throw away everything out there, you'll be able to use 'old and busted'.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
You can't write good direct x code even if they did manage to provide a JS wrapper. .net is here to stay.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Too many companies develop enterprise software on the .NET Framework for them to just scrap it altogether. As people continue to use .NET, Microsoft will have to continue to support it and eventually develop new features to cater to developer needs. .NET is here to stay for a long time.
They might drop .net like VB but that doesn't stop them from creating a newly-improved programming language exactly like javascript and html that is bound to blow the competition out of the water... and let's not forget, no backwards compatibility!!!
You can always switch to Mono.
ROFLMAO!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I highly doubt that MS will dump .NET simply because it is there technology and the control it provides. I would be more worried about them embracing, extending and extinguishing HTML5 and JavaScript as anyone could develop using these free tools instead of Visual Studio.
Time to offend someone
developers worry that closed platform multinational vendor may deprecate without concern
bloated proprietary framework in favour of "Next Big Thing(c)" in order to shore up appearance
of internet dominance. further research suggests multinational vendor may dabble in/support "next big thing"
until it loses its questionable interest, profits slip, lawsuits ensue, or wacky CEO sings songs.
all this followed by analysis/fearmongering/rampant speculation that closed platform multinational vendor may have
only been relevant a decade ago and/or is secretly a homosexual sharia law terrorist kenyan.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The developers worry about Silverlight and WPF, not .Net in general. .Net will still have its place for desktop apps and it will still be used as a server-side web platform. Silverlight and WPF have nothing (well, almost nothing, to the point of being inconsequential) to do with that.
But this is Slashdot, and that's Soulskill...
I'm a .NET developer and this is just useless worry. Javascript is already widely used and HTML5 isn't something that will replace .NET, it's something that will replace Silverlight.
Silverlight devs, on the other hand, have a right to be furious.
JavaScript is a great language, but using it for full-blown enterprise app development would be a major setback. Strongly typed languages are great for the enterprise, because you know (and Intellisense knows too) at compile time what to expect from objects.
Furthermore, I'd speculate that the performance of the .NET Virtual Machine is miles ahead of any JavaScript VM. I cannot recall hearing about any JavaScript VMs that support multiple threads either.
Shit like this makes me not even want to come to this site.
There are no Datasets in Silverlight! How could MS leave that out? Every Ms Programmer loved Ado recordsets and they love Datasets. Adoption would have been higher. Also, all calls to web r service must be non blocking. Bug hurdle for dumber devs. And no right mouse button! Any surprise silverlight flopped?
.NET is mainly used for server-side processing.
And for Xbox Live Indie Games.
If you're a Microsoft fan, this should make you happy - it would mean Microsoft is thinking about the future and realizing that future is multi-platform. In the past, Microsoft's behavior has been more along the lines of "attempting to shove the genie back into the bottle".
The problem I've encountered with a number of Windows "devs" is they seem strongly averse to learning anything new (or maybe they're simply incapable of doing so). In these guys' perfect world, everyone would still be running ActiveX-based apps with IE 6.
#DeleteChrome
When MS says Win8 = HTML5/js, couldn't they just mean that apps built with the new tools for Win8 will RENDER using HTML5/js, but all of the platform is still .NET? This seems the likely evolutionary choice for me...
This story has gotten out of hand and I didn't think would show up here. They showed a start screen with tiles done in HTML5. .NET is not oging anywhere. All your full fledged applications will run on .NET. Microsoft themselves have invested in .NET, in their own products.
If Microsoft dumps the .NET Framework, then it dumps XNA Game Studio, and it also dumps the only widespread set-top platform for video games from the smallest of studios.
...that's why you take a good, hard look at who pulls the strings for a given language and why before you adopt it. When a company, by itself, is the controlling body this is a risk. Granted, consortiums can take a long time to do things, and single companies theoretically can respond more quickly when needs arise, but a company is in the position to write the floor out from under you for the sake of their profits.
Microsoft has a track record of this kind of behavior. It's no surprise if true.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I guess there might be other strategy for MS to make this change. One thing I can think of is to have IE bundled with Windows, so they can ship and enable IE by default for better experience.
What is the future of Silverlight/WPF going to really hold for us? We use it in Line of Business apps because we can cross deploy to our Mac users and Windows users, get a level of performance we know we can trust, and not worry about browser issues as we would in native ASP or PHP.
Microsoft is committed to the platform, and I don't think there's any denying that; the problem is that with a presentation of this magnitude, there has to be room to clarify the positions, and quickly. I work in the financial sector and people jump on news that ultimately amounts to nothing. It takes but a moment for their PR person to get out there and say we are fully commited to .NET as a platform, and the HTML5/JS is only going to be used for the tiles, or whatever.
My gut instinct tells me that this is a result of in-fighting within the teams at MS; the IE9 team is heavily embedded into the HTML5 arena, and obviously the rest of MS has its own methods and thoughts on things. Simply put, Ballmer needs to go, and they need a unified voice back in charge to get the infighting out (I have had friends who quit MS for this specific reason) and get the engineers able to shine.
Because despite what people at Slashdot think, MS hires some *really* smart people. They just have a terrible management layer.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Indeed, Microsoft won't dump it, they'll just mention HTML5 is the new buzzword in every marketing statement they make. Eventually it will sink in and all the HR people will stop placing ads for 14 years of .Net and start looking for 6 years of HTML5 experience.
Welcome to that lovely early twilight where nobody really cares about the one framework you specialized on instead of being a generalist, but you still aren't rare enough to command COBOL salaries.
Aren't JavaScript and HTML5 kind of open-source philosophy? While .NET is apparently very proprietary...
I think if you truly appreciate the world community of intelligent developers, we as a group will "naturally" move to more open practices...
With a large group experimenting with code, how can any one corporation hope to match the bug-catching, the innovation?
David C. Baird theunspokenyes.com
Perhaps its just me, but this question is mixing apples and oranges.
JS/HTML5 are stand alone utilities in their own right, but you typically don't see a website these days without some form of ajax going on. You still need something to fulfill those requests from a server and .NET, PHP, Java and many others fill that role well.
So, why posture a question like this? Why would Microsoft want to kill .NET development and toss away all the progress they've made with ASP.NET, C#, WP and XBOX?
I do quite a bit of .NET development with MVC 3 and I'm not the slightest bit worried. Anyone who's doing work with Silverlight should be, because I can see that technology being axed in favor of pushing tools that use HTML5, JS and CSS 3.
http://www.allometry.com
This panic surrounding Microsoft and HTML5 is the dumbest fear mongering in all the years I've read about Microsoft fear mongering.
It's too easy and too soon to say told ya, it could be a clever MS strategy to instill panic and when hordes of devs cry release a new shiny net for win8, with Ballmer chanting "we care for you!!" in front of some burning chairs sacrificed for the occasion.
If things go wrong... till a couple months ago slashdot was full of people telling .net is good, 'cause there is a free implementation... since it appears to be true, to an extent, .net developers should regroup on mono, at least to keep investments already committed to .net safe for a few years.
It's not like a full free software stack when you run it on windows and MS will make sure that their own stuff runs better than mono on their own OS, but bitching about microsoft is a sign of little attention to their track record.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
They are from Microsoft. Let them cry. Poor babies
.NET Framework is more then making websites. I look at .NET Framework as a backend solution to build apps that can scale and multiple tiers of services that it can provided or developed on.
HTML5 and javascript are easy frontend tools to get a design or small apps to the market faster.
Let's also keep in mind that .Net's strength is server side... HTML5/CSS3/JS is a means to pretty up the client presentation. This whole idea seems ridiculous.
There seem to be people out there who confuse .net with silverlight or things running in your browser.
Yes. that is *one* technology where .net can be, but is not much used. It is like "oh, cryptographic tokens dont run java exclusively", has oracle/sun let us down?
The main amount of .net in my impression is on the server side/native windows applications. As far as i can see microsoft is *not* going to make the windows desktop and html5 browser coupled to some small computing core with ajax.
In the web, silverlight never catched on. If you couldn't interpret the statistics as a company for yourself and did invest more in it than a functional prototype in the alpha stage to figure that out, you deserve to loose the investment; if it wipes you out financially, good for the world. End users may have illusions about technologies which are there to stay. Softwar companies not.
Microsoft always consistently supports very old technologies which were successfully introduced. Things which were not successful are most of the time kept compatible but not evolved. And microsoft never tried to push a technology beyond the point where a vast majority of the customers plainly did not find it useful.
>Microsoft developers feel left in the dark and very angry at the way they are being treated.
I thought that was the normal state of affairs for MS developers.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Doesnt netflix require silverlight? will microsoft be migrating this to something else, or include "microsoft silverlight runtime" for future windows os, but no new feature releases?
This story made a lot more sense when it was about Silverlight. HTML5+Script does a lot of what Silverlight is meant to do, and it thus makes sense Silverlight is going to get less love.
However, HTML5+Script doesn't replace the other roles .NET has in the MS dev plan, which is basically everything else: random desktop apps, services, database-integrated software, server-side web stuff. That last one might seem like the closest, but even then it makes sense for MS to leave the server side mostly the same, but just change how it works on the client side.
MS has certainly dumped developers before - and I fully expect them to screw over Silverlight developers - but .NET is a reasonable framework, the bulk of which is not replaced by HTML5+Script. Even as someone who's fairly skeptical about MS, I find it very unlikely we'll see a major shift from .NET in the next 5 years.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
i WAS telling that anyone who banked on microsoft, including net thing, could get shafted, and a lot of microsoftbots had slammed me. fast forward to > now .... and ?
Read radical news here
I surely can't be the only one praying that they do drop .NET?
Yes, you are. .NET is one of Microsoft's better ideas.
Or perhaps you're a VB6 man...?
Advice: on VPS providers
I like Javascript; it's a nice little language, more elegant and powerful than it's often given credit for. However, it has a certain domain, and it cannot be used for every task .net is good for. The only things moving from .net to Javascript will be small, undemanding apps.
.net and introduce something new; but it won't be a JS/HTML5 combo. It would be something else. Right now, if they dropped .net, most development would move to C++ or Java, not javascript.
Now, I wouldn't put it past MS to drop
PHBs Worried, Devs Secretly Hopeful, Microsoft Will Dump .NET
Grape juice makers are worried about apples being thrown out in favor of oranges ...
I'd pretty much count on Microsoft phasing out .NET. Soon? Can't see that happening, the investment was too great too recently to get people to switch from visual studio. I DO see the first phase coming soon: accelerating the EOL of the products on the market now. I'd have thought that Microsoft devels would be ready for this kind of dick move by now, it's happened with every other Microsoft IDE.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
You know how all us freetards keep harping on about software freedom and why it's actually important and stuff?
This is why.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
After all COBOL programmers still get jobs. In the computer industry you either upgrade your skills or off to a legacy programming retirement home. .Net now joins the ranks of COBOL, VB6, Fortran, etc. as well paying but un-exciting jobs maintaining old programs. No one is going to start writing a new exciting program that doesn't run on all of iOS, MacOS, Android, WebOS and even Windows. What's the point, lots of people are doing it, get on board.
This is a great move for Microsoft because it ruffles the feathers of the amateur .NET/.NOT 'developers'. .NOT was a failure and even Microsoft has realized it.
First, .NET != Silverlight. Killing Silverlight will not kill the .NET CLR. A special version of the .NET CLR was created to support Microsoft's push into vector based graphic UI's (e.g. Silverlight) but .NET is just a programming language that Silverlight adopted for good reason. HTML5 + JS, in my humble opinion, is simply a change in direction from the previous attempt of trying to dumb down flashy Windows's UI development with XAML. After all, XAML was simply a XML based description language for the underlying vector graphics engine. If you haven't picked up by now, the interfaces to this vector graphics engine are changing with the industry. This of course sucks for those who are heavily invested in Silverlight development. Likewise, Flash developers are being locked out of the Apple ecosystem and are facing different frustrations. In all, the reality is that the industry is moving forward and there are a lot of people who have invested into these technologies and they are not going to be happy about the changes. I don't blame them. I, just as any developer on the Windows platform, have suffered through the Microsoft technology graveyard which has headstones for VB6, VBX controls, ActiveX, COM, COM+, MTS, DNA, MSMQ (to a degree), C++'s MFC, ATL, RDP, DCOM, DAO, VBScript, VBA, and ASP among many others. Microsoft technologies entering triage include C++ CLR, ASP.NET, XAML, WPF, and I am certain quite a few others. Now, in my humble opinion I don't think the .NET CLR is dead or even dying as it is the defacto programming language for WinForm development on the Windows platform. But it isn't going to be a hot technology. One could argue new Windows based applications won't need .NET but that will take some time if it is even possible. The language is really the only sane way to build applications for Windows unless you are using one of the very nice open source C++ frameworks or you simply have given up on Windows and target the web. In that case you better brush up on HTML5 and JS.
.Net is horrible, but at the same time I have no desire to write programs for my own machine in HTML/javascript. Doesn't anyone use C/C++ and a compiler anymore.
So they copied HP/Palm's mobile app platform?
Eventually it will sink in and all the HR people will stop placing ads for 14 years of .Net and start looking for 6 years of HTML5 experience
In addition to 5 years of Web 3.0. HR people and dang recruiters are quite the obtuse bunch most of the time.
the always vow they won't come back, and they always do
what are MS developers gonna do, look for another job ?
you become a parasite, ya gotta go with the host...
Does this mean I'll get decent javascript tools?
I've got no farking care in the world what I develop in as long as I've got decent tools to do it with.
Silverlight is maybe "cross windows" but not corss plateform. There are some attempt at duplicating it on linux, but nowwhere near what's on windows.
Dot Net is not going away in Windows 8 and it will probably be supported for at the very least the next decade. I would expect the trend to be away from it though toward emca script to be very real, that and possibly other interpreted languages. The whole bytecode interpreter concept is yesterdays tech. There was a brief period where for performance reasons it made sense, Dot Net if anything appeared after that day was passed. I have been saying this for years now and I stick by it. We are at a point where devices are powerful enough that a purely interpeted language is faster and more felxible to develop in, is more portable, and performs fine for all but a small subset of applications. Those applications that don't work well as interpeted code or so performance intensive that only native code is a real solution, whatever languge you select. Bycode interpeters be it CLR or JVM are answers to a question nobody is really asking anymore. They have little value other than incumbancy.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
There, They're, Their...
Seriously...
I surely can't be the only one praying that they do drop .NET?
Yes, you are. .NET is one of Microsoft's better ideas.
Could I ask for your perspective on why this is the case?
Bow-ties are cool.
"The problem is that Microsoft needs a technology that gives it an edge, and HTML5/JavaScript is everybody's edge."
Pardon the French, but are you fucking kidding me? HTML5/JS isn't anybody's edge. HTML/JS is in no way appropriate for writing an actual application. It may work, barely, in some circumstances, but it's the worst tool for almost any job except where it's required (in the browser).
Fortunately, as stated elsewhere, the concern is with the abandonment of Silverlight (which isn't really that great a loss, except for the people MS tricked into investing time and money in), not .NET as a whole.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Is it just me or was the obvious choice to use the CLR as the commeon ground for every development Windows-related ? .NET) and deployed on Windows 7, Windows 8-Arm, Windows Phone, etc.
Just as Dalvik is used for Android, the CLR could have been integrated to every Windows, be it Intel or Arm-based. That way, developers could have coded once (in
And this is why it's stupid:
Web development is a small subset of what you can do with .NET.
The other 90%+ of things you can do with .NET you're not going to write as a web application. Period.
Someone might as well ask whether HTML5 will replace C++. It'd be as about as idiotic of a question. Not only is the answer obviously no in either case, even asking the question reveals that the asker doesn't have even the most basic idea of what they're talking about.
The next big thing might be the separation of UI and core program logic. An example of this is what Nokia's Qt is heading towards: QML for UI (which is similar to or might even be a subset to Javascript, I am not sure) and Qt for the program logic and actual implementation of functionality. This is a powerful approach and it has many advantages that I think most Slashdot reader know. This might a new (optional) strategy for Microsoft applications, HTML5/Javascript for the UI and .NET for the implementation.
Disclaimer: I am an expert in neither Qt/QML nor HTML5/Javascript/.NET and what I am saying is just a thought, and I haven't heard about Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) saying that this is what they are aiming at. I just wanted to share a thought.
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remember the kin?
Killed off after only a couple of months
I'll do it for you.... TROLL
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
ASP.Net is a server side technology. HTML5 and JavaScript are client side. One does not replace the other. That's like saying HTML5 is going to make PHP go away for LAMP (or MAMP) developers. No, it makes your presentation snappier, but it doesn't change the business rules of your application (or rather, it shouldn't). Now, it COULD replace Silverlight/Flash/Flex without a problem (and probably should for wider adoption). Silverlight is, and always has been, a niche market - how many professional e-commerce sites you know are developed around Silverlight? Flash/Flex is old and bloated - it needs to be replaced. I don't see the problem here.
Seriously, though, HTML5 is a given and the spec for HTML6 is already underway. .NET dying is a good thing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I for one think our Pointy Haired Bosses should all go on a cruise to Hades.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Is there nothing so shrill, so piercing? When they finally realize that they directed enthusiasm - even affection - and invested personal identity in a corporation, they are still so enthralled that they feel betrayed instead of enlightened.
Look. Microsoft, Apple, Google? You are just a bit of tissue and they will wad you up, when finished wiping. Apple wipes their nose, while Microsoft wipes somewhere lower in the anatomical procession... Small comfort to reflect upon, as you trace an arc through the air, upon disposal.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm hoping for it too...
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Why would you? Do you really want an OS where applications are written in HTML and Javascript? Why the fuck would anyone think that's a good idea?
Or are you one of those people that prefers C++/MFC and VB6?
The first article made more sense, because Silverlight is something that MS has been waffling on for quite a while now and HTML 5 is a realistic replacement for it. But all of .net? Now we're getting out into WTF territory.
The core of the problem here is that there's no competing narrative. Microsoft's response that "oh we'll address it in September" only fuels the fire because for someone who is already worried, silence only acts as confirmation. It's baffling just how badly they're bungling the PR on this for a company that used to be very good at developer relations.
Maybe now it's time to jump on the "Fire Ballmer" bandwagon because no CEO should be letting this go on for this long without having the company get involved.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
No, I'm sure all the other haters are right there with you. Those of us in the .NET camp lack the religious fervor to wish death and destruction on Java, Rails, LAMP, OSS, etc. We just like getting things done quickly and easily. We honestly don't give you much thought.
DUH!
Microsoft actually announced plans to do just that a couple of years ago.
.NET isn't quite the same thing as Silverlight. Dropping .NET would be a much bigger deal, and I don't expect that to happen anytime soon.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
No. At least not for a long while.
Exactly. Honestly, I'd be much more worried if I were a Silverlight dev. It does a few things HTML5 can't, but not nearly enough to make a career.
I'm still thinking that any day now <asp:Control runat="server"> will include <asp:Control runat="cloud"> and <asp:Control runat="client">.
Ask me about my sig!
As other posters have pointed out, VB6 and FoxPro would still work.
Which misses the point entirely. So what? Scan Monster to see how many jobs there are coding on vb6 or FoxPro vs. open source Java. Someone who invested in learning FoxPro is screwed. Java, not so much. Yes, developers *can* relearn another db, framework or language. How many times do you want to be do that in your life, and at what monetary cost?
Bottom line? Microsoft has abandoned platforms willy nilly for the past two decades. Instead of quietly extending VB6 to include .net syntax (or vice versa) or quietly extending Winforms to be WPF-like, some bozo decides to throw the whole platform away and start over. I don't know why it's done this way, but it's a friggin' disaster for developers who spend years learning the ins and outs of a framework, language or DB.
So, I welcome HTML5/Javascript. It's open, and some myopic exec or pig-ignorant kid isn't going to be able to change it because he/she had their latest brainwave.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Take a look at Web Workers. I needed to synchronize multiple browsers to a common clock. Used ajax push engine as a message bus to send sync event timecodes, and a web worker on each client to run a timer in a separate thread from the main UI code. Works pretty good under Chrome.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Saying that something works on a platform doesn't mean that something else doesn't work on the platform. The entire article is based on the idea that since it appears that Windows is going to host/run javascript directly, to create "apps", it means that Microsoft is killing off .Net. The same argument could be made that if Windows can host javascript that means that Microsoft is going to kill off the Win C Runtime. Not gonna happen. Adding a hammer to your tool chest doesn't mean that you're removing a wrench.
The person who wrote this article must think that .Net is only used for quick on off apps, and doesn't know that many full blown enterprise stacks/applications are written in .Net.
Same thing happend when they dumped OS/2. That was when they lost me. And I've never looked back.
I haven't used a product from MS in about 8 years.
With the state of their product offerings I don't see it as an issue to be concerned about in the long term.
It could be a good sign, I suppose- as they drop core products and IDEs devs and businesses will continue to move away from MS products in favor of better ones.
I'd call that a win for all involved, myself.
Windows devs: best to look at which of the languages of the future you want to learn. :)
The summary is not exagerating about some feeling on that forum.
.NET games and Silverlight in his sig rants(bleep outs as they appear in forum):
One guy who lists developed
"Now they're not just f*****g Silverlight developers, they're f*****g WPF developers as well? The video is just another nail in the coffin for Silverlight. Only a complete f*****g idiot would start a new major project in Silverlight, WPF, or Winforms now. What are you people thinking, are you insane? Just so there's no confusion, when my text is edited, the *** stands for F - * - * - * - * - * - G Because we've just been F****D."
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Developers: can we get the embrace extend extinguish HTML thing done with? We want to get back to our beloved Silverlight. We want to be back in 2002. You are getting slow Microsoft, Bill would have finish this in no time.
Well lets refine that better... We still need client/server side applications to be coded. .NET is a more then capable (It is actually quite good, competitive to anything else out there) development platform for windows. And no matter how much you push to web based programming you are still going to need server side tools for managing this.
Will Windows Forms based apps die out? Maybe. Probably not soon. .NET is a good tool for making server side applications, I doubt it will go away anytime soon.
But server side apps? No.
How do we suppose to generate these HTML 5/Javascript tools without a back-end to do the work?
If we call MS killing .NET by removing Windows Forms App. Then maybe. But the end to .NET Nah I doubt it. Perhaps they can kill it by keeping the class structure and the code the same just have the code compile into a native binary again. Because .NET never became really cross platform.
I don't think Microsoft is killing .net or even silverlight. At some point there will be some more merging movements between .net, wpf, silverlight, html5/javascript, svg, etc. Silverlight is the current Windows Phone 7 development environment, so it isn't going anywhere. The advantage of writing in Silverlight is that it is a subset of WPF. So phone apps can be windows apps pretty easily. They won't throw that all away. There maybe some modifications to add html5/javascript for lighter weight applications, but there will always be a need for more power than html5/javascript can provide.
Since 'cloud' is the hot topic of the day with everyone yapping on about how all data will be on the cloud and we will be accessing our data and apps through smartphones/tablets (essentially thin clients, but I don't know the current buzzword for theses smart terminals) it makes sense that Windows 8 will have improved and robust support for HTML5 as the delivery system for the client terminal. .NET will disappear anytime soon. .NET is here to stay for quite a while until something better replaces it, and it won't be javascript and html anything.
That being said, I doubt that
Some apps make sense to be cloud based, others don't. I think everyone will jump on the cloud initially until their data gets hacked or the apps are too slow through the IT nickel-and-dimed bandwidth quotas. Then I think thick clients will make somewhat of a comeback as streaming app functions and data constantly over the internet/network is seen to be inefficient. You wouldn't stream an mmo over the internet all the time, just current game data. If I had massive doc files or excel spreadsheets, it might make sense to keep it on big hardware in the cloud and run operations on it, especially if others need to work with it also. Another example is how the current crop of tablets and smartphones work. They grab massive amounts of data from the internet, but all through apps running in the local OS.
I think
isnt media center a html interface with a js wrapper (for remote) hosted in a .net app. would be suprised if this is how they want you to buils apps, scrap winform and silverlight, .net with a html/js ui.
As long as javascript does not have strong typing, I don't think anybody will consider it a valid replacement for .NET languages.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
In response to criticism/limitations of ASP. Net (view state, proprietary UI syntax), MS released an MVC framework for Visual Studio. Now you can build an ASP.Net website using industry standard design patterns with HTML(5) + JavaScript for the view portion of the UI. All this sits on an application core written in .Net.
At the time, ASP.Net web dev's asked if this meant that "classic ASP.Net" was dead. It's not. You can use it, or you can use MVC. Both are supported and rely on C#/VB, Linq/EF/ADO.Net, SQL, for the application domain. No one ever suggested you build your middle tier in JavaScript.
For this recent Win8 PR mess up - replace "classic" ASP.Net (XML-based markup) with XAML. . . Get it? Yes, this does leave out Silverlight/WPF - though you can still use them. No, JavaScript is not replacing the .Net framework as the application core. There seems to be a resurgence of respect for JavaScript (fine by me), but it's not well-suited for large, complex applications. Don't believe me? Just try it.
It's odd that MS PR is letting this whole debate run amuck. Maybe it's a "social experiment" on their behalf? But, probably just a screw up.
MS changes development tools and technologies more times than I shower in a year.
For all of the blood and treasure spent on platform languages (Java, .NET, web stacks..etc) why is everything - operating systems, sql server, web browsers, media and games (that don't suck) all still written in C/C++ ??
If these languages are soo much better how come we are not seeing the translation into software that is soo much better as a result?
The answer I suspect is that language selection is mostly an irrelevent syntatic shell game that simply does not matter. Most OO crap falls to pieces in large real world systems.. Garbage collections black box nature and unpredictability become a liability rather than an asset.. Exception handlings true nature (goto) is revealed and when coupled with non-trivial concurrency requirements the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
That everyone who matters is still using C means there is a huge opportunity for Microsoft or anyone else up to the task to get off their ass and invent something better. Not just new versions of basic that make writing software easier for the masses.
...He can go about his business.
Move along
Nothing to see here folks, just the inane rantings of a moron (Mike James, that is).
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
C++ is undergoing a renaissance at Microsoft. Someone said that it makes sense as the platform team at MS doesn't like .NET and so doesn;t really give a fig what the dev team is trying to push. I guess the Mobile team is pushing Silverlight but no-one cares about them either. It sounds about right knowing Microsoft's huge staff and the infighting between teams.
I welcome a return to C++ on Microsoft platform, .NET is nice enough but it always felt a bit 'VB' to me, and besides, I have a huge amount of code to keep going (can't afford to rewrite it all). In any case, it does appear MS is moving away from its ".NET only, everywhere" approach to a more heterogenous development platform. I'm sure C# will be in there somewhere, even if WPF and Silverlight are relegated to the attic to keep VB and Foxpro company.
So yeah, everything just keeps going round and round.
We'll just switch over to other well-supported Microsoft technologies, like Visual J++, for our PlaysForSure application.
... who as at some time wrote programs of varying complexity in assembler, NEAT/3, COBOL, FORTRAN, Java, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, PERL, various Unix shell scripts, DOS and many others that time have passed on, there is only one thing I have to say about anyone lamenting the passing of anything ...
.. or become the most expendable at layoff time.
.NET and Java and Ruby and Python programmers today will suffer the same fate as the FORTRAN and COBOL programmers of the 60s and 70s. If you are too afraid to learn new things, you will become obsolete. You will become a dime-a-dozen programmer stuck with maintaining obsolete, legacy code that was so poorly written that no one wants to touch it. You will become the first person to be let go as the new kids get hired on.
.. and loving it! *AND* I know all of the old crap and can get in there and play hero when some POS C code written 15 years ago by a librarian fails.
Adapt
The
It doesn't happen overnight. Today, you can tell your boss that you don't know how to do that and he will get someone else to do it. You can whine about what an abomination it is to use that new stuff when the old stuff is just fine. And he will get someone else to learn it. There is enough work to keep you around for a few more years, so keep it up.
But soon, after a few more new technologies have shown up, based on the stuff you originally didn't think was worth looking at, you will look around and realize you don't know jack schit anymore. I've seen it happen over and over again, because *I* was the one willing to step up and learn new stuff by saying "I don't know, but I can figure it out." No matter what a pile of donkey dung I thought it was. Now, I'm 52, employed, and still working on new tech
Stop whining and do something about it by learning the new tools.
What a bunch of babies....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Let me start out by saying if they kill off silverlight nobody will miss it I don't think. Now, because javascript is client-side based language, and so is HTML5, 100% of the source is available to the browser. This doesn't work for most commercial solutions. I don't understand the validity of the comparison, it's like comparing apples and oranges. .NET works w/ jscript and html5, not as a competitor, nor is the latter a replacement. This kinda shit comes from newbs who probably wouldn't know where to start writing html1-4, much less predict technologies futures. Leave code to the coder people and go write about cooking, thanks.
I dislike Javascript. For the important job of client side web browser scripting language, I think we can and should do better.
get what you deserve, plebian pieces of shit
I agree. We seem to be in this damned scary world were all the devs rav about the UI in slashdot. What happened? Where is the command line school of thought? :-) A GUI is an abstraction that presents a well designed and implemented system to the user, not the other way around. Yeah so what Unity gave Ubuntu a slightly different shiny button than it had before, etc etc. To me we need to focus more on the systems and support for systems development (I use that kind of loosely as we are still talking up in the app layer) and not the shinny buttons in user land. At some level you need to be able to present things like print dialogs in a browser, or at least it would be nice to be able to, however the back end still has to be logically structured and written in a language that allows that to be expressed in a concise and clean mapping between concept and code. Java, .Net, python etc are the ways that is done. Javascript and HTML will never take the place of .Net because .Net is mainly a below UI language with some functionality for UI built on top. I think you can see that from XAML designers in the latest Visual Studio's. GUI is going to be more in the realm of graphics designers with a back end that is some sort of mark up. But the functionality will call into something more powerful like ASP, VB, C#, Java etc. Over on the desktop app land I don't think you'll see any change. .Net does what it needs to do to keep those developers happy with the GUI they can build and it is nice to have easy access to call into whatever objects are on the screen from the code that is used for the system logic.
Dump .NET which can be a server side technology with HTML5/javascript, a client side technology?
How do you make a db connection with javascript/html5? Are you going to put all server side password in your javascript file?
I have no sympathy for one-trick-pony "developers". I heard McDonald's is hiring. :)
Chrome + HTML/JS doesn't fly where I work. (a global bank)
It's IE + Security.
read: nannies don't fly for my children. It's convicted child molesters all the way.
I suspect Microsoft found out they didn't have any patent on .net they could effectively enforce.
Perhaps they found a way to patent a JS-> Windows API bridge that guarantees them the monopoly on the desktop. For example, I found this one in 10 minutes of browsing.
Yes Microsoft is embracing HTML5 and Javascript and JQuery, but does that mean the end of .NET? Those technologies are client side/browser technologies. .NET will still be used on the server side, just like it is today and has been. Yes Silverlight (as a WEB client) will be impacted but that is it. It does not mean .NET/C# is going away anymore than Javascript/HTML5 is going to make Java or PHP go away.
I want an OS written in HTML and Javascript. Sitting on top of a QBasic 'kernel'. Which, of course, sits on DOS.
If Microsoft were to do that, what's left? Their kernel? Their aging MS Office suite? Or are they going to become a total patent troll?
If you read the posting "Mac OS X Lion Has a Browser-Only Mode" above, and keep in mind that Google are bringing Chrome OS to the table in addition to Android, then you have the answer to the puzzle: M$ want to show that they can also do that (HTML5+JS, that is). Windows 8 has a "dual personality": one can choose from two kinds of user interfaces. So sleep tight and stop worrying.
I'm a 29 year old developer. I've heard this story from at least one co-worker at every company I've been at:
"Boy oh boy, technology X from 10+ years ago was really the best, why did we ever move away from that?"
As if Microsoft and all the other evil companies randomly force everyone to develop in their newest environments. If you like something, use it and stick with it. If you think it makes sense for Microsoft to become obsolete just because you fell in love with their technology, you're a little off your rocker.
As for me, HTML5 and JS is the best technology ever, I'm going to learn that and never have to learn anything ever again ;)
Sence C# requires .NET to run, will it get dumped?
As far as I know, every C# program out there that I've seen required .NET before I could download and run it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTkA9L2J2gY
I wish they were all this stupid.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
News at Eleven!!!!
WHUT? You mean this is no surprise? Not even News?
Sorry folks but everyone with a clue already knew that DOT NET was a Microsoft attempt to completely screw (over) the developer community.
The fact that said community was too blind to see it does not make the above statement any less true.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
We all know you're just a piece of online trolling trash per your own admissions thereof here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907528&cid=34543612 because, after all, you even admit to it you trolling online trash scumbag. Fact. Why do you think nearly no one replies to your trolling bullshit?
QUOTED MISTAKES FROM SAID ARTICLE:
"Before .NET Windows was a crude platform with an extensive and very idiosyncratic API that you could really only work with via C or C++. " - Dumping .NET - Microsoft's Madness Written by Mike James http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/2591-dumping-net-microsofts-madness.html
Ahem: BULLSHIT - you could call the Win32 API from VB (declare directive, sort of like a pragma), Delphi (directly available OR you could define an extern lib to call any API from it), variants of C/C++ (same as with Delphi) & more... and, it was FAR from "crude" or difficult.
Using the API? Quite EASY actually!
APK
P.S.=> Please, slashdot: Get EDITORS who know what they're about in programming - such a person would have caught that before you put this up (thanks)!
... apk
See here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2235456&cid=36432232
APK
TurboPascal - loved it, one of my 1st programming languages in Win16... & know what?
Same guy built Borland Delphi too, & is the architect of .NET as well!
(In fact, & I've stated this many times before online? He's one of my "technical/intellectual heroes" in fact)
Mr. Anders Hejlsberg @ MS now - he made it to "distinguished engineer" WICKED fast there too (& iirc, faster than anyone ever did @ Microsoft).
He's something else!
APK
P.S.=> He's VERY humble too, because when others have asked him about making it to the "distinguished engineer" titling @ MS? He said "WE ALL STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS BEFORE US"... apk
So?
Anyone remember the death of VB, ASP, and COM circa 2001?
I'm pretty sure I predicted something like this.
There was some outcry then, but a lot of us really felt shafted over the thing. .Net is different though. It's survived longer than I ever thought it would. That's for certain. Four major incarnations now, and I never saw it going past three.
Those of us that were smart realized there was no future in being a Microsoft Evangelist.
The Microsoft Evangelists need to understand one key point.
You just don't matter to them.
Otherwise, they would have a problem making you obsolete, and/or forcing you to re-educate yourself.
It's obvious that they don't.
So why not pick up a real platform?
Broaden your horizons a little?
Make yourself an asset, rather than just a member of the crowd?
Easier said than done, or any number of other excuses, I'm sure.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
And the issue is? Its up to them to bring or kill a product. They are a private company. They get to do whatever they want with their property. Users/developers have absolutely no say in what they do with their products. Their products are licensed, not sold. As licensees, users/developers have absolutely no recourse. Its not like open source software where you have source code and can keep developing to your hearts content. It doesn't work that way here. If it becomes uneconomic for them to keep certain product lines going, then they kill them. I understand that developers spend a long time creating products based on certain technologies, and if those underlying technologies are suddenly removed, great losses in terms of time and money are incurred by those developers. Its unfortunate, but part of the risk of using proprietary technologies as a licensee rather than as a partner or someone who has access to source code and a license to use it. It may be possible to port existing software to a new language/platform. That too may take quite a bit of time, money and effort, but it might be better than abandoning all and starting over. Consider everything carefully at this time. Betting long might win, but it might also mean losing more in the end. It seems being a developer sometimes involves risk management.
This article is fucking stupid, even Javascript web sites need a web service to fetch data from. Not like you are going to write a web service in JavaScript. This is just FUD.
Per your quote here:
" .NET is a good tool for making server side applications," - by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, @05:02PM (#36429040)
Absolute 110% agreement here, because imo? .NET's just a BETTER & MORE MODERN + SAFER FORM of "ISAPI" (remember that) for doing 'server-side apps' because it's faster than older ASP.NET and imo, the "main gain" is that it also has automatic garbage collection (which was or could be, one of the BIGGEST HASSLES in ISAPI DLL's server-side in the past - death by memory leakage).
APK
Ought to concern you (assuming you're mgt. because of your reply to the mgt. person HerculesMO):
Do you really *think* that the platform that runs on 93++% (roughly/thereabouts) of the world's computers is just "going away" soon?
Hey - Look @ IBM. They're still around, & kicking ass. Maybe MOSTLY in "services" now, but there bigtime!
MS will be around later too, for the same reasons (as well as millions of systems written on millions of lines of even older legacy code like VB6 to this very day & even COBOL is still around because of that reason - businesses built foundations around it!)...
Talk about "too big to fail".
In fact? "Way back when", in the 1990's, I used to ask my mgt.:
"Why don't we use Borland compilers? They're faster!" & I'd even show them proof in code, articles, you name it.
The answer I got, from a mgt. perspective, was this:
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, nobody ever got fired for buying MS"
Their reasons were simple (from a mgt. perspective): "He who has the big money, will be around later - will the underdog?"
---
Now, as to this from you:
"Microsoft loses more *really* smart people to Google, Apple and especially Facebook than they hire." - by Eponymous Coward (6097) on Monday June 13, @06:01PM (#36429640)
With today's YOUNGSTERS fresh outta academia perhaps - they're green, and cost less (remember that) for one thing. MS also has a LARGE entrenched base of some really impressive and notable people in this field, still to this very day in fact!
Especially when MS was KNOWN for "brain-draining" Borland quite regularly!
E.G>-> Case in point, the designer of .NET in Anders Hejlsberg (distinguished engineer @ MS, got there faster than anyone ever has iirc, & even other coders @ MS say "his design skills are WAY above the norm")
As well as his former Borland colleage, a bit later, in Chuck Andrezewski also
(By the by, those 2? They are designers/co-designers, respectively, of Turbo Pascal + Delphi @ Borland) - they're no "dummies" by a long shot!).
IF I were a "noob/youngster outta academia" etc.? I'd LOVE to have either of those guys as a "mentor"... I wonder if GOOGLE, FaceBook, etc./et al that you noted has people of THAT calibre??
---
Anyhow, on performance vs. mgt. views:
That was circa 1997, when I saw of ALL PLACES, in a competing language's "trade rag" VB Programmer's Journal Sept./Oct. 1997 issue where Borland Delphi knocked the absolute SNOT out MS STUFF!
Both VB (by huge margins/orders of magnitude, & on every test of 6 given on various tasks in String work, Math work, ActiveX loads work, API graphics, native graphics calls in the language itself, plus text box form loads - only in ActiveX did VB take Delphi)
AND YES, even MSVC++ (Delphi beat the HELL out of it in Strings & Math work, which MIND YOU, every program does, but margins of 2++ or better orders of magnitude & where it did "lose" (textbox form loads, & native graphics calls)? It was by PUNY margins... less than 1-2%).
APK
P.S.=> Didn't make sense to me to use lesser performing tools... from a CODER's perspective. From a mgt. perspective though? Money talks, you know this... or should - & who has the BIG COINS? Microsoft people... no doubt about it!
...apk
"because it's faster than older ASP.NET" - by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 14, @02:46AM (#36433010)
Sorry about that - I meant .NET, specifically ASP.NET, is faster than classic older ASP!
APK
P.S.=> Gotta catch that before the nitpickers here "rock my world", lol... apk
I've developed in C# (mostly a MVC2 app) and its great for quick web app dev and emulated ROR style archs very nicely. Im also a Java programmer (we use thrift for SOA service MVC2 utilises) and have gained an immense appreciation for JS. .NET developers have to step up their game and understand javascript is a first class langauge and it is here to stay. Get out of your cave and learn something beyond OOP; it does not solve all the worlds problems. JS is a prototypical language, and the sheer thought of a closure baffles the buffoons on these forums. I appluad MS effort to adopt an open standard for once. They wasted their talent on re-creating flash i.e. silverlight. Javascript is infilitrating many layers of the programming stack ( MONGODB, Node.js, etc) so its time we accept its place. Those who dont change with the times, get replaced.
But it will change the life of MS web developers. .NET will continue as usual.
Silverlight... Gone ( WPF stays )
All the bad practices in ASP.NET is allready being replaced with the MVC and Razor.
But it will embrace HTML as the main web GUI platform.
And it will still be a popular choice as backend.
.net isn't going anywhere, neither is visual studio... .Net as a core is just too heavily invested in, plus if you actually use it you'd know that it's pretty advanced, especially when it comes to the IDE. I've used netbeans and eclipse, and they're just really in the stone age by comparison.. so much so in fact that I don't even really find them usable. Besides with every version, they are actually adding very good features such as LINQ and lambda expressions. with linq alone i've cut most of my code down by about 50% on average, getting rid of stupid plumbing code. Yet I still have the ability to get down and dirty and do things any way I need to. The only drawback is that it's so easy to decompile back to source files, but as far as making applications go It lets me make them incredibly fast and easily.
Even if silverlight and wpf were dead on arrival, they are merely small derivatives.
I am a developer and I am NOT worried that Microsoft will drop .NET.
The real issue is shifting focus from Silverlight (which never got traction) to HTML5 and JavaScript as the cross-platform UI.
Silverlight will still exist on Windows if you want to use it, but if your app is to meet a broader audiance, Microsoft is putting focus on HTML5/JavaScript.
So, no panic.
hey hey!
this is not going to happen. .NET is sticking around . i have a source at Microsoft that says .NET is a big part of their future.
stop whining people.
silverlight is also (UNFORTUNATELY) sticking around. despite it being unbelievably bad... but it willl be here with Windows 8. silverlight is microsoft's main platform for their mobile devices. why would they ditch it?!? just wanna clear that up.
now, can we talk about something worth while now, like the linux uprising?
GWT is awful: it's hard to configure your environment, incredibly slow to compile, and very difficult to get the results you want in the generated page.
It is, no doubt, a technical feat (translation from Java objects to a Javascript driven web interface), but I wouldn't recommend it.
We tried it at work on a quite small project, and it was a really big disappointment.
That MS is about to axe Silverlight or .NET is FUD spread by an unholy alliance between click-whoring bloggers and individuals suffering from bad cases of Microsoft Hate Disease.
If you look at what MS has been doing with the browser HTML5 and JavaScript for tiles makes a lot of sense: Look at how IE9 integrated with the taskbar. Look at webslices introduced with IE7 (iirc). This will be about websites having an easy path to have tiles on the Windows 8 desktop. Not just as shortcuts to the front pages, but tiles which (like web slices) actually display live information directly from the sites. And don't be surprised if they are made using simple markup just like web slices.
MS is trying to blur the lines between apps, applications and internet sites.
But for application development .NET nor Silverlight are going away any time soon. On the contrary, Silverlight is very much at the core of Windows Phone 7/8. There are still tons of things you can do with .NET and not with HTML / JavaScript, like true threads and task oriented parallelism which will be *huge* going forward.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
The industry always eventually succumbs to open standards. If you thought for a second that investing your skill into a proprietary technology (like Silverlight of .NET) was a good long-term career move, you deserve to be left out in the cold by Microsoft.
.NET will be necessary for backwards compatibility of applications for several years to come. By then, hopefully, you developers will have learned your lesson. Never invest any more time learning proprietary API's than is necessary to satisfy your employer, especially if the API is from Microsoft.
Still,
That any competent seasoned dev. knows. See subject-line (if the trolls around here have nothing better to do, then I suggest they "get a life")
VB6 and FoxPro and not the same as .NET Framework. There is no where near the same investment or the same adoption rate and neither were anywhere near as good of a language as C#.
First, I don't think .NET is going anywhere. In fact, they are still taking both enhancement requests and bugs at Connect.Microsoft.com for WPF. In fact, they just fixed one of my bugs that they say will be released in .NET 4.5.
Windows 8 will have a strong .NET base and it won't be "the old stuff". There will be two modes...desktop and tablet mode. The HTML5 and javascript is for tablet mode. If you are running Windows 8 on a tablet, then sure, the HTML5 + javascript might be your interface. However, if you aren't on a tablet, you will be in Windows mode and the standard flashy awesome new interface will be...drum roll please....WPF.
C++ is the most cross-platform language available. You can write native apps on Windows, iOS, Android, WebOS, RIM's OS, Nokia's flavor of the month, etc
MSFT is now looking to update their C++ offering by renaming it WinC++. See for yourself: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/what-is-winc-and-how-does-it-figure-in-microsofts-bid-to-make-tools-a-2-billion-business/9359
http://10CentMail.com - the Amazon SES app.
You should relate to all of it (as it is your own culture and heritage) http://niggermania.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?25-Nigger-Crime&s=75b35560ae314c6061e8a68a5e074cca all based on news reports no less. Thoughts?