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The Longhorn Dream Reborn
gbjbaanb writes "Early this month, Microsoft dropped something of a bombshell on Windows developers: the new Windows 8 touch-friendly immersive style would use a developer platform not based on .NET. Cue howls of outrage from .NET developers everywhere, but here Ars Technica describes what's more likely to have been going on and why Microsoft is finally getting its act together for developers."
Film at 11.
Seriously, was it not expected at this point?
Did anyone really think that Mycro$opht would screw over it's Developers Developers Developers??
Do people reallly think that Mycrasaft are a bunch of racist losers like Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and the Tee Paartyy??
Get real!
The difference is that Longhorn's projected API's were advanced API's built on existing languages, tools, and frameworks, whereas the JavaScript switch is an attempt to move developers to a totally different (and arguably inferior) system. It solves the architecture-compatibility issue easily enough, but there are serious limits in what currently exists as "HTML5 and Javascript" (lack of threads, performance, etc) that make this a potentially very bad decision.
after silverlight, they are dropping .NET too ? what happened to "developers developers developers" ?
Read radical news here
If anything, we should be surprised that anyone's surprised. Whether or not TFA's theory is true, one thing is absolutely clear: .NET, like any Microsoft technology, has an expiration date.
Anyone remember COM, VBX, and other MS-Windows technologies of yesteryear? Or the Visual Basic debacle of more recent vintage. For as long as I can remember, there's been a steady churn of Microsoft technologies, coming and going.
Microsoft makes a lot of money from selling its development tools, documentation, etc... to its developer base. Microsoft simply runs the whole show. They are in full control, and call all the shots. And they understand perfectly well that if they keep the same technology platform in place, over time, they lose a good chunk of their revenue stream. That's why they have to obsolete their technology platforms, time and time again. They need revenue. It makes perfect sense. If you are a Microsoft Windows developer, one of your primary job functions is to generate revenue to Microsoft. Perhaps not from you, directly; maybe from your company. Whoever pays the bills for Visual Studio, MSDN, and all the other development tools. Maybe it's not you, personally, but it's going to be someone, that's for sure.
So, perhaps this is the death knell for .NET. Perhaps not. If not this time, maybe next year. But it's inevitable. It's a certainty. If you are a .NET developer, your skills will be obsolete. If you were a COM developer, or a VB6 developer, your skills became obsolete a long time. I see no reason why .NET developers will escape the same fate. It's only a matter of time, but that's ok: all you have to do is invest some time and money to retrain yourself on the replacement Microsoft Windows technology, whatever it's going to be, when its time comes. But, it'll come.
Originally I came from a Unix background. Many, many moons ago I explored the possibility of boning up on the MS-Windows ways of doing things. But, after a bit of some exploratory peeks and pokes, this became painfully clear to me; that whatever I learned, all of it was going go to waste, in its due time. And that was pretty much the end of my venture into the Windows landscape.
Well, I'm happy to report that read(2), write(2), and all the other syscalls that make up POSIX, and its derivatives, still work the same as they did decades ago. Everything I have learned, as the sands of time have rolled on and on, I still put to good use today, and I make a pretty good living using them. Nothing has gone to waste. Honestly, this is more than I could say for my peers who practice their craft on MS-Windows. A lot -- not everything but a lot -- they learned decades ago is now completely and totally worthless to them, and to anyone else.
So, whether Windows 8 is Longhorn reborn, as TFA says, or not, one thing can be said for certain. .NET is dead. It's just a matter of time. Good luck learning its eventual replacement. Of course, you understand that it'll be dead too, some years after that, of course; just keep that in mind, as you make your long term plans.
im somewhat of an audophile, and despite i have been using windows xp with extra software like srs audio sandbox (cryztalizes and clears sounds) and a good sound card (original x-fi x-treme music, from the production batch which got the good chips) with crystallizer and so on, on top of an altec lansing fx6021 speaker set (in-concert array microdrives totaling 12, crystal clear) for a long time,
i was dumbstruck with the audio quality pulseaudio + x-fi x-treme music + audacious media player with crystallizer plugin gave, when i switched to linux.
now im switching to linux every time i want to listen to music in high quality.
Read radical news here
Call me when they start talking about that again. The one thing Microsoft stringed me along for so many years... it'll be in the next version we promise!
The thing about talking about something so significant in highly abstract terms is you'll tend to imagine it doing precisely what *you* think the words mean and how you think a vision could be realized.
Then, when you actually get to touch it, you realize their vision either isn't the same as yours, or even if it matches what you had in your head, in practice it won't work out so well.
The ultimate end-user filesystem experience hasn't changed in years for good reason. Any generic approach is going to be fraught with too much work to bother. Sure, Music, Video, Document, etc applications could use the filesystem as a standardized way to store metadata instead of proprietary databases here and there, but much of the time a file containing data is a shared thing in a central place, with much of the pertinent metadata a user caring about specific to their view, making combining that data in the filesystem awkward. Notably some permament attributes (that should go with the file on transfer so it can't just exist outside the file) like title, release year, etc exist that are global in nature, but personal tags, ratings, bookmarks, etc just don't mesh.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Originally I came from a Unix background. Many, many moons ago I explored the possibility of boning up on the MS-Windows ways of doing things. But, after a bit of some exploratory peeks and pokes, this became painfully clear to me; that whatever I learned, all of it was going go to waste, in its due time. And that was pretty much the end of my venture into the Windows landscape.
I have to disagree, as anything learned is an advantage you can leverage in future learning.. Also, during the time that 'xyz tech' is in vogue, you are employed and making money from it.. that's not a waste in my book..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The article says windows is getting a new API, WinRT, which is a modern version of Win32. .NET and C++ development will both be updated for WinRT and have the same capability as each other so you can work in the environment you choose. Silverlight is supported, updated and renamed (codenamed?) Jupiter. Some other new things were added. In summary, .NET developers, you're getting new functionality. C++ developers, you're getting new functionality. Plus it will be easier than ever to go back and forth between the two because, underlying it all, is a new unified API.
Early this month, Microsoft dropped something of a bombshell on Windows developers: the new Windows 8 touch-friendly immersive style would use a developer platform not based on .NET, which Microsoft has been championing for the past decade. Instead, it would use HTML5 and JavaScript.
But he doesn't believe the alarmist hype:
Windows developers want to be able to build immersive applications, and they don't want to have to use HTML5 and JavaScript to do it.
They won't have to. Want to write an immersive application in native C++? That's cool. Want to use C# and Silverlight? That's cool too. Both will be supported. Far from being left behind on the legacy desktop—which was the impression that many took from the presentation—native C++ and managed C# will both be first-class, supported ways of developing immersive, touch-first, tablet-friendly Windows 8-style applications.
(Feel free to write another, better summary. The one given is just completely inadequate for such a long article.)
Currently I am working in a software project that is cross platform with Mac and Windows. I alone do the WPF/.Net side of things, a few other guys work on the Cocoa side of things. I am getting really tired of hearing them complain that it is hard or even impossible to create a rich and custom UI experience on OS X because of the lousy tools and development platform Apple offers. The Mac product is full of bugs and is about a good month behind on parity, and this is with 2 guys working on. I am sure they are equally tired of hearing me tell my project manager that I have just finished whatever feature they dreamed up of using WPF and .Net. Bottom line is, there is something wrong with a person or developer that prefers constant headaches and lack of productivity over something that offers rapid development, quality code, and ability to develop a rich applications without limitations. I should mention there is a small team looking to port to Linux and they are so lost they are at least a year behind to even reach parity with the Windows version.
I know everybody hates Microsoft at Slashdot, but you don't know sh*t about f*ck when it comes to software development if you are bitching about how bad C# or .Net or WPF is for developing applications. Bottom line is I get paid to develop software for Windows, and I can do it quickly, easily, and have a lot of fun doing it, but if I had to use the OS X or Linux tools for developing software, I would probably shoot myself.
The article is something that I have never seen before -- Microsoft fanfiction.
What creates an interesting problem -- since Microsoft fanfiction exists, according to the rule 34 there must be Microsoft slash fanfiction. But since there is only one instance of Microsoft fanfiction and it is not slash, someone on the Internet must write Microsoft slash fanfiction.
Go, Internet, go!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Came here hoping for something about Texas, left disappointed.
Keep in mind, MSDN licenses are annual subscriptions - so MS developers pay for the dev tools EVERY YEAR, and they keep on paying .......
This is all what Joel said in his blog about Fire and Motion. Every second you have to think about platform changes, you're wasting time that would be better spent building your product or even making it platform independent or even competing with MS - hey, you're both writing software. Windows developers are on a treadmill and think that's a normal condition. There are mature ways to write mostly platform independent code these days. This entire discussion is for people who are not using them - the rest honestly don't care and will not be wasting time thinking about it.
Maybe the response from .net developers is more rooted in the fact that a JS/HTML5 based application development language brings a whole lot more developers to the party with less of a learning curve.
they do. good luck finding such streams in the world of dynamic range boosted audio recordings.
there is no crystalizer support for x fi under linux, but audacious media player does that perfectly well (even better) with its crystalizer plugin.
Read radical news here
Comparing posix read() and write() to the shifting sands of MS APIs is pretty silly. If you're going to make a comparison to Unix, at least compare apples to apples. So once upon a time I wrote code in C++ with Qt 1.0. Then Qt 2.0 came along, which was mostly compatible, but introduced new features. Then Qt 3, then Qt 4. Some things were deprecated, some things added. Developers had to adapt. Same with Gtk+ 1 to Gtk+ 2. That was a pretty painful leap for developers with several important (but understandably obsolete) widgets were deprecated. A few vertical apps out there probably never have moved from Gtk+ 1.
Anyway the point is things on Unix, as nice as they are, are not static, or even stable. The real world APIs that are necessary for developing real applications are in constant flux, and many fade away (like Motif). New languages come along that get popular for a time, like Python. Will we be using python in 10 years? hopefully. But maybe something else will come along.
So is learning python and it's current standard library of APIs, and the various current GUI apis a waste of time? I mean if the Gtk+ developers are going to pull the rug out from under me every couple of years, what's the point, right?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261720&cid=36545928 Did something you did (like run after having your behind handed to you 10 times in a row, lol, upset you? You did that to yourself).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261720&cid=36545928 Is it because you trolled someone http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2253808&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=36521452 and they shot you down on every so called point you tried to make and they did it with documented facts anyone could see? I saw you run like a whipped dog 10 times there in fact, and for starting trouble with others you threaten to blackmail? Very intelligent (not).
So your argument is that Microsoft intentionally periodically obsoletes languages in order to make money? Am I reading this correctly?
You do understand that:
Pretty much every commercial MS developer already has an MSDN license, which (minimally) gives them access to the latest development languages, SDKs, and tools.
You do understand that:
MSDN licenses cost a lot of money. Were it not for the constant churn, developers wouldn't need MSDN subscriptions, and could save a a lot of money.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261720&cid=36545928 Is it because you trolled someone http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2253808&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=36521452 and they shot you down on every so called point you tried to make and they did it with documented facts anyone could see? I saw you run like a whipped dog 10 times there in fact, and for your starting trouble with others you threaten to blackmail? Very intelligent (not).
The reason to move to a js based system should be quite obvious. The only reason winodws is still the most used Desktop Os is because of the ton of applications which were developed over time. If all of these worked on linux, who knows if windows would be that widespread as it is now. Anyway, the reason i can imagine ms pushes a js system is to ensure crossplatformness in their apps. Windows 8 will be the first time they will support a different architecture on windows (arm). It will be easier to ensure a unified look and feel (as well as compatibility) if the thing is written in js. Suffice to say, you would have to be mad to develop anything big with js as your main language.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261720&cid=36545928 Is it because you trolled someone http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2253808&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=36521452 and they shot you down on every so called point you tried to make and they did it with documented facts anyone could see? I saw you run like a whipped dog 10 times there in fact, and for your starting trouble with others you threaten to blackmail? Very intelligent (not).
http://slashdot.org/submission/1671410/erroneus-makes-blackmail-threat-on-slashdot
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2253808&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=36521452
The last time they promised that, Vista.
No employer's going to hire you for blackmailing people on forums with threats like this http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261720&cid=36545928
If you actually read the article, you will see that .NET isn't being dropped.
It is proposed that there will be three ways to develop, first with the native C++ using and updated form of the Win32 API, .NET development, with some access to this variation on Win32 and a combination of HTML5 and Javascript. Nowhere does it say that .NET is being dropped.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261720&cid=36545928 Is it because you trolled someone http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2253808&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=36521452 and they shot you down on every so called point you tried to make and they did it with documented facts anyone could see? I saw you run like a whipped dog 10 times there in fact, and for your starting trouble with others you threaten to blackmail? Very intelligent (not).
I see they are the #1 most used computing platform on earth. If they do what you said erroneus, it must be a formula for success then. Argue with the numbers and reality.
See subject above, small edit/correction for clarity/accuracy.
Of getting his ass kicked about Microsoft when he rants vs. they:
E.G. #1: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32556164
On Windows Server & SQLServer Uptime ( @ NASDAQ 24x7 too, with Windows working as the "official trade data dissemination system" where it's been up, solid, 24x7 for YEARS now (almost a decade via clustering))
(Which ErroneOus couldn't disprove!)
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E.G. #2 - http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32525656
On Windows 7 having less known unpatched bugs than Linux kernel 2.6x AND, your inability to show workarounds as apk had, for Windows 7 2 bugs @ that time no less vs. more in Linux again, kernel only, NOT AN ENTIRE DISTRO EVEN (vs. Windows 7, a complete OS 'distro').
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I wouldn't use history were I you, erroneOus, yours in your rants about Microsoft don't look very successful up there...
Which U ran from in subsequent posts beneath yours here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2253808&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=36521452
As well as your blackmail threat here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261720&cid=36545928
are both libel and blackmail. Threats to someone's employment possibilities definitely is. No questions asked. Defamation of character as well.
Then, since it's false, it is blackmail AND libel.
(And, that 2nd link is a clear threat to someone, no questions asked).
You started it, and you can't handle it and try BLACKMAIL?
Clue/new NEWS/NewsFlash: Attempted threats to people regarding their livelyhood IS BLACKMAIL!
You are a very foolish person!
(You start trouble, & you choose to troll others and lie about them as well as try to blackmail them after you had every falsehood you post about others disproven (and you could not argue vs. documented proofs in links which you ran from)).