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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."
RTFA.
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. ... 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.
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They're not dropping Silverlight or .NET. Try to pay attention. Nobody with any sense ever thought they were going to, but the usual suspects took every opportunity to make a "Durr hurr, Microsoft screwing over developers" thing out of it when there was no indication whatsoever this would happen.
Nobody sane wants to develop large applications in fucking native JS and HTML5, and Microsoft knows that.
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.
Great, so it's dead too since it hasn't changed for decades? Same as with COM, there's nothing stopping you from using it and it still works the same as it did many years ago. You can still use all the old technologies and they still all work just the same as they used to.
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 your argument is that Microsoft intentionally periodically obsoletes languages in order to make money? Am I reading this correctly?
You do understand that:
I think your theory has some holes. Now, Microsoft has definitely obsoleted languages - Visual Basic for one (and good riddance) - but they did that because the language had shortcomings. I'd detail them but we have a nice article that already does that. The .NET framework and language stack, C# in particular, is on the same general level as Java: it is a language that more or less suits the needs of every platform developer. Why the hell would they want to obsolete that?
No, languages aren't the issue with MS development, nor are they the theme of the article; frameworks are. A perfectly good language can be horrendous to use if it is unable to properly interact with its host environment to accomplish what it needs to accomplish. In this case (once again FTFA) C++ could interact worlds better with Windows than .NET could, and so .NET use suffered. This was an implementation failure on Microsoft's part. The article stipulates that Windows 8 intends to bring .NET back on-par with C++ as a development language, which (if true) means that it will be stronger than ever.
It's also worth mentioning that in terms of accumulated skills and experience, learning a new language is trivial compared to truly learning a new framework. How you interact with the system and cause it to give you the resources and services that you want in the manner in which you want them is the heart of all modern systems programming, regardless of language. If Microsoft emphasizes .NET in their APIs, then .NET will be a viable Windows development platform; if not, then who knows? None of that reflects on the language itself, but rather on its appeal over other languages.
Now, eventually every language will be obsoleted ... probably? I suppose we haven't been through that many generations of languages to know for sure, but that seems to be the case so far. There are various reasons languages die ... they suck, better ones come out, nobody likes them, no frameworks support them, or their target developer group gives up on it. .NET's main backer is cu
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.
I am a Microsoft employee in DevDiv.
(PS: Buy Visual Studio LightSwitch when it comes out! It rocks!)
I will not comment on the accuracy of what is in the ars article, other than to say: I know the answers to some of the questions they are worried about, and the answers do not worry me and shouldn't worry you either (unless you're a competing non-MS technology, perhaps :))
Regarding your post: I don't see how you'd conclude that .net is going anywhere from the article you supposedly read.
First and foremost, you would need to be specific about what you mean by ".net" for your statement to even make sense. Are you claiming that C#, the language, is on an EOL path? Or the .NET runtime will no longer be a supported way of writing userland apps?
Your claim that we intentionally obsolete developer technologies as some sort of money making scheme is hillarious. Have you worked in the commercial software industry before? Let me explain how it works.
1) we spend a ginormous amount of money paying engineers to make something that we hope developers use.
2) we figure out if its something we can even charge money for, or if we need to give it away so more people will develop for our huge money making platforms (Windows, SQL, Office, Sharepoint)
3) when we have something we can give away / sell for a pittance, we start doing so
4) this is when we might actually start getting money for our efforts.
Now then, if our strategy was to make money at any cost, you'd think that we'd fire all of the engineers and keep selling licenses at the same price indefinitely.
But as you've noted, our engineering staff moves on to new things and eventually the old things get phased out.
We don't start working on new platforms because we need to figure out how to get more money out of existing customers. We work on new platforms because we think they'll be better than the old ones; that customers will like them more; that they'll provide more value to everyone. There are all kinds of features and products we'd LIKE to put out there in the real world but they all cost us more money to do. And as you've noted, everything we release causes someone to get upset if we want to stop supporting years later. For every one of these developer technologies we ship, we end up supporting it for years after we're not selling it (and thus not getting new revenue). Our support life cycle is a hell of a lot longer than Apples, or any of the for-pay Linux distros, for instance.
Finally, regarding what a huge revenue stream deveopers tools are for us... I've never come across anyone in Windows or Office who is worried their project is going to be killed and their staff moved onto a _real_ money making project like the F# compiler :)
Sure, DevDiv does great revenue compared to a lot of entire companies. But look who we're competing against. I'm not sure we've ever sold 300 million seats ever, counting everything we do. Windows does that _every release_.
(nothing against the F# compiler guys. I just picked something :))
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.