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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...
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.
HTML5 isn't a .NET killer anymore than LCD TVs are a Hollywood killer. HTML5 excels at the GUI. .NET is mainly used for server-side processing. Long live .NET. Long live HTML5.
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.
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...
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.
can Slashdot get *any* worse than this?
yes
ps. i'm not trolling, this is bad, but it can be a lot worse.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
A helluva lot of software was developed under FoxPro and VB5/6 in the day, and Microsoft had little trouble switching gears. In general, it means that the older development platform is steadily decelerated in favor of the new architecture. Still, Windows 7 still runs VB6 apps, so I'm assuming, if this story has any legs at all (and I'm not convinced it does), we could go the same route with .NET.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And just imagine, all this effort just to reinvent what C did 40 years ago.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
Silverlight devs
Are you sure that should be plural? =)
/* No Comment */
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
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.
.NET is mainly used for server-side processing.
Wait, what? I make client applications... Windows apps. I don't make websites. I don't make client applications that require constant connection with a server. So your statement completely forgets about me and thousands of developers who need to make real applications that work in the real world, not some dream land in the cloud.
I'm beginning to wonder if Microsoft hasn't forgotten about us too.
Oh... and this: HTML5 may excel with GUI, but it's not better than WPF. WPF is definitely better in terms of combining the power, flexibility, and ease-of-development of UIs. (Before the flaming begins... I never said WPF is better for everyone, it's just better for me and my Windows clients.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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
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.
.net on the server is doing pretty well, particularly in Windows shops. We're not at the point where you can write application tier logic in HTML yet. :)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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..."
In this particular case, the reason why people are up in arms is because .NET stack is actually significantly better than HTML5/JS stack at pretty much everything except for portability. As a language, C# (as of v4) roundly spanks JavaScript - it has every single feature of the latter except for prototypes (and even that you can emulate), and deals away with most of the flawed design decisions that have to be maintained in JS for the sake of back-compat (like semicolon auto-removal, or dynamic scoping of "this). As a framework, it's so far ahead it's not even something you can compare.
Of course, no-one said anything about .NET being dropped so far. People are making conjectures based on limited data, someone makes a pessimistic conclusion, and that enters a positive feedback loop where folks sit in the circle on the forums, and are exchanging opinions about how awful things are, with tone set bleaker and bleaker with every new iteration.
Corporate developers use .Net because it is fast to build apps and get business done instead of fiddling with window handling routines and manually drawing things on screen. Surprisingly, many different development toolsets all have a place. Things like Java, .Net, Native Code, HTML5, etc. - all have a place where they make sense. However, the few folks who may be whining about HTLM5 and Javascript taking over for .Net are a bit clueless. .Net is actually very performant. Javascript - well, let's just say it is not performant. Javascript also isn't strongly typed, doesn't support robust error handling, and is only attractive at all as a least common denominator tool to allow web apps (like say Google Docs) to function. Ever tested the speed of something like Google Docs though against apps that do a ton more like say Open Office or MS Office? It isn't even close because Javascript just isn't something you would want to code an app that needs to do any code in for an app that requires performance. It also can't easily tie into the native APIs of any operating system services. So, .Net is not going anywhere. Native Code isn't either. It is just for those small apps like MS showed so far for Windows 8 touch devices - a weather app, an app that shows HTML5 video. A Twitter feed. Nothing serious. When they needed something more serious up came Excel and it wasn't done in Javascript.
.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.
The next big thing might be the separation of UI and core program logic.
What do you mean, "the next big thing"? It has been the norm on .NET GUI stack for, what, 5 years now (since first version of WPF)? - there's XAML for UI, with bindings to data model implemented in code. Same thing in Silverlight.
No, his statement completely forgets about you and thousands of developers who use .NET because they don't know C/C++.
Right. Because C/C++ is all there is. The only tool for every job. Plus, it's what Real Programmers(TM) use.
Grow up.
Meh. Strong typing is waaay overrated.
I can't tell you how many broken keyboards it has cost me.
1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish
4) Profit
FTFY
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Hammers 4 ever ! Death to screwdrivers !
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
... 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.