Was .NET All a Mistake?

mikejuk writes "The recent unsettling behavior at Microsoft concerning .NET makes it a good time to re-evaluate what the technology is all about. It may have been good technology, but with the systems guys building Windows preferring to stick with C++, the outcome was inevitable. Because they failed to support its way of doing things, .NET has always been a second-class Windows citizen unable to make direct use of the Windows APIs — especially the latest. .NET started out as Microsoft's best challenge to Java but now you have to ask: what has the excursion into managed code brought the Microsoft programmer, and indeed what good has it done Microsoft? From where we are now, it begins to look very much like an unnecessary forced detour, and Windows programmers are going to be living with the mess for years to come."

Comments

No?

[bhcompy]

Works fine for what it is. It's not meant to build OS's with. It's meant for the applications within, and certain applications at that. Works pretty damn well for that.

Re:Signs point to

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. .NET drove me away from developing windows apps altogether... it killed visual studio for me.

When it first launched, nobody had .NET framework installed, so you were screwed on that end. Then it started shipping with the OS, but it was never up to date it seemed like. The number of times I just wanted to download an app and have it run, only to be foiled by an out of date version of the .NET framework... which was also freaking HUGE!

It was basically in theory the same idea as java, except with even more restrictions, limits, and headaches. On top of all that, it was force-fed down all of our throats by Microsoft for years, and still even up to this date.

In short, it's like java, but a 10x bigger disaster.

Re:Was this article all a mistake?

[SpryGuy]

Who cares? ALL my customers are on Windows. The tiny fragment of a market that can't run windows software is irrelevant to most people, especially those in the business of making money.

Even the largest of those tiny minorities (Mac users) can run .Net using bootcamp or parallels or some such.

And for the rest, there's Mono, which will run a subset of .Net stuff.

Really, this notion that EVERY program must be able to run on EVERY platform is just ridiculous B.S. It never has been true and never will be true.

And really, anyone that has to "buy new hardware" to run a .Net application has some pretty alien hardware to begin with. XP, Vista, and Win7 run on most things out there, and Win8 will add to the supported processors and form factors.

Your post is a lot of hot smoke and arrogant ignorance. There's a huge ecosystem around .Net, and it's a lucrative framework in which to develop. That's a simple fact that no amount of foot-stamping will erase.