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Microsoft To Open Source .NET and Take It Cross-Platform
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today announced plans to open source .NET, the company's software framework that primarily runs on Windows, and release it on GitHub. Furthermore, Microsoft also unveiled plans to take .NET cross-platform by targeting both Mac OS X and Linux. In the next release, Microsoft plans to open source the entire .NET server stack, from ASP.NET 5 down to the Common Language Runtime and Base Class Libraries. The company will let developers build .NET cloud applications on multiple platforms; it is promising future support of the .NET Core server runtime and framework for Mac and Linux. Microsoft is also making Visual Studio free for small teams.
Too little too late, Billy Bob Gates
Our company would have used it as a platform then.
We already have Mono!
I fear the geeks even if they bring presents.
This is actually a pretty smart idea, but it sounds like what Sun did with Java and parts of Solaris. .NET was designed to be a Windows-only application platform, requiring Windows clients for fat applications and at least Windows servers for web applications. Now Microsoft is seeing Windows become less relevant, but they do want people to be using their software stack regardless of platform.
Same thing with Visual Studio being made free...kind of like XCode being free for MacOS, and the open source IDEs being free. It's a bold move because now the .NET ecosystem needs to stand on its own, and I guarantee they're going to try to tie this in with Azure somehow (like making you run the free VS in Azure VMs you pay for or something...)
One scary thing from my side of the house (systems engineering/integration) is the number of new security flaws and the sheer volume of patches that are going to be released once .NET gets more scrutiny. A good thing, yes, but patching .NET is already a pain in the butt.
has been slapped. let the battle commence!
I can hear the sigh of relief from all those c# houses.
I've got only one question: What license will they use?
I really hope systemd is rewritten using .NET!
The tag line at the bottom of the page is "We are Microsoft. Unix is irrelevant. Openness is futile. Prepare to be assimilated."
I fully expect post-Ballmer Microsoft will continue to surprise all of us.
Anybody know anything about what's going to happen with the C# compiler?
16 years after it became clear that Linux would break through. Well, at least they posted the stuff on GitHub under the MIT license. Let's see if anyone bites.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
bit fuckin' early for April Fools isn't it?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Pfft. I don't see going to a language less supported would be a panacea to your Java problems. From what I can tell "cross platform" to MS seems to be x86 only. MS has to develop the compilers for other platforms which is not an easy thing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That's one reason you see languages that want to build on top of an open-source VM, like Clojure or Scala, targeting the JVM rather than Mono.
One major practical problem with using the JVM is that Oracle has power to use the courts to enforce a strict cathedral model. Because the license of Oracle's Java Language Specification forbids distributing implementations of subsets of the Java platform, any reimplementation of the JVM has to be kept private until it's complete enough to pass all tests.
What about it? The next gen one has already been much talked about (Roslyn) and you can already get access to it.
Can you explain? what part of the .net collections would be lacking? .net and java, it's usually that the past 10 years .net has evolved and java sometimes catches up a tiny bit. .net even an array is also still a collection, they have collections for just about anything you need, and with LINQ you've got an incredibly powerful way of manipulating/creating/accessing collections.
If you see comparisons between
I always thought that java collections were weaker since in
I wish MS the best but the best thing they could is keep the gimp hidden behind the gloryhole
Good luck with that. GIMP is already far more capable than Microsoft Paint, and Microsoft's other image editor is overspecialized toward editing photographs, such as red eye correction, color correction, cropping, and rotation. It's not for actually painting. Does Microsoft have anything to compete with Paint Shop Pro, let alone Photoshop? If not, I'll only have to keep using GIMP 2.8.x on my Windows 8.1 box at work.
As much as I don't care for Microsoft, if this brings about an end to all the headaches I run in to trying to use mono then I will welcome it. I love all the applications that I need to run that have 30 pages worth of crowd-sourced (and nearly unreadable) documentation for how to run them in wine with mono. It's time to be done with this bullshit and get back to work. I understand the goals of mono and they were admirable but they just never really worked out. Hopefully those guys can help the development of the open-sourced .NET.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"We are Microsoft. Unix is irrelevant. Openness is futile. Prepare to be assimilated."
Microsoft still has dominance (monopoly) of desktop OS and office software. They still have incompatible office formats. They still corrupt international standards organizations. They still have the mindset of "Microsoft way or the highway". They still bundle their OS with most computers and vendors that want to sell computers without Windows still get in trouble. They still screw up their mobile phone partners.
They are still as evil as they used to be. They missed the boat with search/internet services and mobile- so they have a weeker position now. And now we have other evil companies like Apple and Google, and other evil organizations like NSA and GCHQ that affect the internet and computing world. But given emergence of new evils and reduction of power of Microsoft does not make them less evil.
--Coder
In concept making the .NET framework open source sounds cool. But, does making it open source mean that I can make a change to the framework, recompile it, distribute the binary framework along with my dependent application, and expect that someone else can just install my version of the framework and be good? Or does it mean that if I want to distribute a modified framework, I have to go through some sort of code signing process in order to allow it to run on someone else's computer? What would this signing process look like? In addition the assembly loader in .NET makes certain assumptions about version numbers of assemblies. It will be interesting to see how it works when due to multiple development paths, core assembly version numbers are not necessarily sequential / increasing over time.
I'm sure this will usher in a new era for Linux desktops!
That's a good move for .NET and C#, with Mono being so far behind on the feature list.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Does this mean that the client-side stuff (WPF) will be missing? .NET is a lot less useful if the GUI components are still missing.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
All of the presentations can be seen here (it's live through this afternoon and tomorrow as well):
http://www.visualstudio.com/co...
BlameBillCosby.com
Well it's about time.
To make it cross-platform for real is hard. Lots of programmers don't try to avoid platform-specific and write code such as:
...instead of:
Another mistake is using explicitly hardcoded paths that only exist in Windows. And another challenge would be case-sensitivity of the filesystem on Linux; this can break programs that were developed and tested on Windows only.
The framework must provide for platform-independent ways to do things so that it is easier/shorter to do it the right way than using a naive but non-portable approach. Or programmers not really thinking things through will simply keep writing non-portable code anyway. The example above illustrates that; it is way more conventient to combine pathnames with such a non-portable string concatenation than it is with the right approach.
I am not really here right now.
Mono is a framework. It is not an IDE. Xamarin is the IDE you have to use. On top of that the compiler has to be cross platform. Xamarin for iOS for example uses both the Mono and the LLVM engines; however, only newer features (Arm v7) are supported by LLVM not Mono. Who maintains LLVM for iOS: Apple and others. MS has to invest time and resources to make .NET truly cross platform by working on the compiler. This is not a small undertaking.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Do you seriously believe .NET ever really had a chance of crushing Java? By the time .NET really came online, Java was already heavily embedded in the enterprise. This guarantees that Java will be a development platform of significant entrenchment for years, probably decades to come.
People seem to believe that because Java has retreated to some degree from the desktop that it is a failed platform. But its penetration in many enterprise and financial organizations is huge, and I can't imagine that changing any time in the near future. Maybe in the long run, sure, but then again, the long run for banks, insurance companies and the like is half a century; look at all the COBOL code out there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
.NET applications still need read about 1GB of libraries from the disk (only portions are kept in memory). This is why .NET applications are so brutally slow to load. Will this improve?
.NET Native speeds up startup times considerably. The way it works is it compiles your .NET app into native code, does whole-program optimization, and "shakes out" all the bits of the framework that aren't actually even needed by your code. (.NET Native is still under development, and currently available in preview form for store apps)
disclaimer: I'm on the .NET team (in particular on the VB/C# language team)
Like the oil companies are doing with prices to stay ahead of the alternatives. But, what the hell, this is a good thing. There aren't too many Linux Tycoons that are going to cry over this.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Good for them. .NET will probably work better than just shouting "developers, developers, developers!!!"
Open sourcing
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Of course, I saw all the expected arguments, and a lot of "but, Microsoft is the exact same company from 20 years ago, so this must be wrong, evil, etc." Well, companies change. Skepticism is good, but evaluating things as they are is good too.
The .Net ecosystem is a good environment to program in. They have great languages and frameworks. The Python Tools in VS are actually quite nice (they work fine with CPython). It is disappointing that the IronLanguages project has died off, but maybe this will spark some new interest.
And one of the main drawbacks to the platform in terms of target platforms is starting to be addressed in a real way.
It's a pragmatic decision. Microsoft has already benefited from open source projects (ASP .Net MVC, Entity Framework), and this is just an expansion of this. The hardest part will be getting resources to get people to really bang on it on other platforms.
I bet that internally at Microsoft, lots of people are happy about this, as they really do think they did great work and this gives them greater visibility.
How is Microsoft anywhere close to being dominant or a monopoly? They make a lot of money but it can be argued that they don't dominate ANY market right now. If you count ALL devices, Windows isn't even close to being the most widely used OS. Office makes them some dough, but that is mostly because of the ineptness of their competition than their own competency. The Office file format is freaking XML, it's not rocket science to move around.
I hear it's gettin' cold down there ...
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil.
Below the UI, Windows really does understand '/' as a path separator, or, at least, it did when I used to write drivers and services for it.
Can you explain?
I'm not the GP and I'm a self-proclaimed C# fan, but: The Java collections seems to have been more well thought out from the beginning with abstract types (interfaces) for different types of collections, such as bag, list, set, stack, queue, vector etc and then concrete implementations with separate characteristics, such as hashed, sorted etc. .NET is catching up, especialy in the 4.x versions, but Java (IIRC) still has proper priority queues that has no equivalent in .NET.
If you see comparisons between .net and java, it's usually that the past 10 years .net has evolved and java sometimes catches up a tiny bit.
Agreed.
I always thought that java collections were weaker since in .net even an array is also still a collection, they have collections for just about anything you need, and with LINQ you've got an incredibly powerful way of manipulating/creating/accessing collections.
I always found the Java collections a bit stronger conceptually. For instance, it really bothered me that there was no hashed set (there is now), and I had to play tricks with HashTable by using the same value for key and value to mimic a set. It was particularly annoying as I went from C++ to Java to C#. Java seemed to have lifted the collections from STL where they seemed to have been very well designed. C# collections always stroke me as having been "thrown in there". Thankfully they have improved a lot since then.
and with LINQ you've got an incredibly powerful way of manipulating/creating/accessing collections.
LINQ cannot be overestimated. Large parts of code is actually manipulating collections, and LINQ is just awesome. Also the fact that C#/.NET generic collections were always properly reified, unlike Javas fake generics (type erasure) which causes all kinds of strange corner cases and problems. C# generic collections allow primitive types to be used for type parameters, and always without performance loss due to runtime downcasting like in Java.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
If you count ALL devices, Windows isn't even close to being the most widely used OS.
If you count ALL devices, you're just as clueless as those nitwits who thought tablets were going to make PCs a niche market again.
I thought .NET cached its JIT images. Is this mistaken? If not, what's really new in .NET Native?
Are tablets and smartphones considered computers?
AC #48369023 was probably referring to desktop and laptop computers. True, some people abuse a tablet with a keyboard as a laptop, but you'll probably get similar usage share percentages if you consider computers whose OS includes 1. a GUI with a window management policy allowing multi-window and 2. an approved way to install applications without asking he operating system publisher "mother may I?". This is a useful approximation of computers suitable for "work", which the post-PC FAQ defines as "focused activity".
The cost for major enterprise operations to move from Java would be monumental. A web interface is one thing, changing your underlying transaction management system would be a huge undertaking and cost an enormous amount of money. It would probably be cheaper to pay Oracle to fix the security bugs.
Java isn't going anywhere.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you count ALL devices, Windows isn't even close to being the most widely used OS.
How does the market share fall out if you count all devices with a multi-window GUI? Because of their ingrained assumption of a single maximized application taking up the whole screen, Android and iOS aren't so good for viewing multiple apps at once unless you buy one device for each simultaneous app.
The open-source x-platform server announcement was revealed on Scott Hanselman's blog in August 2014. But oddly, the permalink now points to this new announcement. Is there some conspiracy to pretend this wasn't already announced?
Google cache of the August announcement
Even if your claim of a desktop OS monopoly was true (it isn't), being a monopoly isn't in itself bad or illegal. Using your monopoly position to quash competition in or entering that space is where things go from good to bad. Microsoft's announcement today of opening .NET, providing VS to small teams gratis, and providing an Android emulator within VS (and standalone) all point to the face that Microsoft isn't attempting to stifle competition on desktop, mobile, or anywhere else. They're doing what they've always done best, providing development tools. They're providing tools you can use to deploy software just about anywhere.
Yes: Roslyn. Open sourced back in April. Currently in development for C# 6.
The Roslyn page on MSDN has links to nuget packages and their git repo.
Speak before you think
Yes it does. And that's the problem with corporations and capitalism in general.
Corporation by design is supposed to do one thing and one thing only- earn money for shareholders. All other concerns basically do not exist. Corporations do not have morals, they cannot have morals, and yet they are legal persons. If you were to do a personality profile on corporate behaviour- you'll find they all act as maniac psychopats. Corporations will hapily pollute, externalize costs, screw up communities, bribe & corrupt as long as they can get away with it- and usually they can. If they cannot do it in the West, they'll find some poorer country and do it there.
While a corporation is small, you could argue that it follows moral standards of the founders. However, as soon as it gets bigger, it inevitably becomes evil. And that is because of the way we reward corporations and define their success. We don't consider a corporation successful because it cleaned something up or improved life, we say a corporation is successful because it earned record profits. Sometimes you can achieve both, but if people can be screwed over to improve profits, that will eventually happen.
--Coder
You succeeded in posting, nice job.
nosig today
It's hard to give him the benefit of the doubt when he strangled Nokia's Android handsets.
That was simply a bad business decision.
Google's control of Android is very loose, and it would be quite easy to fork it, as Amazon, BN, and even Nokia already demonstrated.
If Microsoft supported Android, and integrated it into Active Directory as a first-class mobile platform, it would immediately become the standard handset for corporate America.
Not doing so seems a standard case of NIH hubris.
I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil.
You succeeded in posting, nice job.
And you succeeded in a snarky reply. Welcome to the Evil League of Evil!
We meet on Tuesdays.
I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil.
Because more often than not it's true? Market power corrupts, monopoly power corrupts absolutely. Or maybe you should say it's more of a latent behavior in profit-maximizing companies, they simply lack the means to be a market bully until they're successful. Or you're seeing a company in the early phases of an "entice, entrap, exploit" strategy where they act nice and friendly until they got you locked in good and bleed you dry. You might call it good turned evil, they'll call it return on investment and a success. And a tool is a tool, Google used Mozilla to break the IE monopoly and it might have been good for open source and web standards but they were a pawn in a corporate play. And pawns get sacrificed when the goal is in sight, they're not your friends for life.
Of course there are companies that really do stick to making good products and services that the customers like and are happy and willing to pay for, but most sooner or later turn to the dark side. Particularly if they see a downturn in business and is facing cut bonuses and lost jobs, very few businesses go nobly down the drain. And almost anything can be excused with "it's a free market and we're only charging what the market is willing to bear", or at least that's what you say out loud even if you know they had absolutely no real choice in the matter. Particularly in business to business there's absolutely no hesitation or shame in grabbing as much of the other company's money as you can.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I thought .NET cached its JIT images. Is this mistaken? If not, what's really new in .NET Native?
JIT has to be done very quickly. Therefore it's purely local (method-by-method) rather than cross-method. Also even within a method it only has time to do simple easy optimizations. NGEN is a way to do JIT ahead of time. But it still only uses the same JIT algorithm, i.e. doesn't do heavy-duty optimization.
Also, .NET Native does build-time generation of interop and serialization code. .NET Native uses the VisualC++ compiler backend, benefitting from its long history of optimizations. All this adds up to massive perf benefits - in some apps, 50% cold startup time improvements, 85% reduction in .NET startup costs.
It's A TRAP !!!
Wait a second: GP listed reasons why Microsoft was and still is a sociopathic entity, and your one and only counterargument is "I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil"? Looks like you arrived to the end of your brain, and it was a very short journey indeed.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil.
It's not success itself, but what was done to achieve it.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
It describes Supercapitalism. Look it up on amazon and read the first review which summarises the concept well. Companies exists to provide the best value both shareholders and customers which deflates real wages. They play by the rules governments set, so it is up to governments to legislate the social outcomes they expect.
46137
C# generic collections allow primitive types to be used for type parameters, and always without performance loss due to runtime downcasting like in Java.
C#'s primitive types actually aren't. They're really structs with overloads for math operators. For example, int is a System.Int32.
No, the benefit C# has here is that it only has one number representation.
Java's int is a real primitive... but as you noticed, Java's Collections don't work on primitives. So, Java has to convert it to the equivalent object.
Since Java doesn't let you do operation overloads on types, you have to convert it back to a primitive before you can most things with it.
Also, objects tend to be heavier than structs.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Oracle lost that lawsuit
Oracle won on appeal, and it'll have to go back to the District Court to weigh the fair use factors
This can only mean that Mono is about to catch up.
I guess it depends on how many popular apps have been tested with Samsung's multi-window feature. Because of requirements in Google's Android CDD, apps need to explicitly opt into multi-window. In practice, has this become widespread?
C#'s primitive types actually aren't. They're really structs with overloads for math operators.
This is both true and false. Struct Int32 is magically mapped to int and vice versa, but go look at the definition of that struct inside the framework. Notice the field of type "int" inside? If they were truly one and the same, this would've been infinitely recursive, but it's not.
In practice, CLR distinguishes between primitives and structs, but allows you to treat one as the other transparently. And C# obscures it even further by always treating Int32 as alias for int, basically.
Anyway, all this is not particularly relevant to what GP said. The point is that in C#, you can have collections of value types, be they primitives or structs. In Java, the only value types are primitives, and generics don't work with them at all. And, of course, heap-allocated boxed wrappers in Java are much more heavyweight then C# structs, which can live on the stack or even in a register.
JIT has to be done very quickly. Therefore it's purely local (method-by-method) rather than cross-method.
That is not entirely accurate - JIT will inline across method boundaries, and even across assembly boundaries, and optimize the result. But, obviously, the time constraints put a limit on what it can do.
Microsoft also just (today) announced a new edition of VS 2013, called "Community", that is free (like the old Express editions) but is "full-featured" and supports both extensions and multiple languages. In fact, it comes with support for building iOS and Android apps built in, which kind of astonished me.
As far as I can tell, the only difference between Community and Professional, aside from the present of a purchase price, is that Comm is "for non-enterprise application development". I'm not sure where something crosses the line into being an "enterprise", but I think it's quite fair to say you can write and publish mobile apps (including iOS or Android mobile apps) with this as a hobby or independent developer.
http://www.visualstudio.com/en...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Just putting it out there...
Who thinks that one of their marquee project will be migrating Minecraft (client and/or server) from Java to .NET? Until a multi-platform version of .NET comes out, they would be limiting themselves to migrate it to only one platform (I am not including Mono in this case).
(It might also help to motivate kids to have some exposure to .NET, but the bigger story would be all those systems running the "New" version of M$craft).
[sarcasm]Yes, their ARM compiler will do wonders for someone to run server code on their PowerPC.[/sarcasm]
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Even if your claim of a desktop OS monopoly was true
Microsoft has 90% of the market desktop share. It got this position through law suits, and insider dealing to keep other OS's off PCs. It even threatened legal action to anyone who shipped a computer capable of running windows without windows.(to include other OSs)
being a monopoly isn't in itself bad
being a monopoly is terrible, because people do not have a choice in using a product. A company can sell products without fear of people choosing a competing product, because there are none. prices go up, quality goes down. Company has no incentive to listen to what the people want. I mean isn't that the argument that people have against communism in the first place? your not a commie are you?
illegal
Well that really depends. Monopolies can be illegal. Wikipedia: US anti-trust laws
Microsoft's announcement today of opening .NET, providing VS to small teams gratis, and providing an Android emulator within VS (and standalone) all point to the face that Microsoft isn't attempting to stifle competition on desktop, mobile, or anywhere else.
its a very new reversal of policy. Consider this, 20 years ago, microsoft tried labeling Free Open Souce Software developers as terrorists and have the barred entry to the country, calling them all communists. They went as far to try and use the state security aparatus against the competition. I welcome the news of .NET openess greatly, and hopefully microsoft can reverse course, but history does not simply go away.
I think plain old "capitalism" itself fits the description. The only time that capitalism ever appeared to work at all is with massive government intervention, and regulation. Even then regulation and government causes new problems. Capitalism doesn't work because its capitalism.
Clueless nonsense.
I can tell you've never worked with those companies.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
autoboxing makes it easy to miss potential NullPointerExceptions
Also, autoboxing in Java was a horrible idea from the start. For a start, a Java boolean and a Java Boolean are "interchangeable" in code, but not in real life. Some frameworks (for example) can get you into serious trouble here when trying to assign a null to a boolean primitive type.
MS already has compilers for other platforms. ARM for one.
Mod parent up. I was going to post the same thing.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Yes, for now the community edition (2013) and when this is released what amounts to today's Professional edition will be free.
And the problems with MS's patent licence for this new .NET code are spelled out here:
http://endsoftpatents.org/2014...
Basically, you're safe if you just use MS's version, but as soon as you modify the code you've probably lost those protections, and if you think of re-using the code in another project then you've definitely lost your protections. That means MS can sue you.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
As "shutdown -p now" says, the inlining point is not correct. As I understand it, .Net has been pretty competitive with C++ for performance, depending on the task; substantial optimisation seems not to be an issue. I know that Sun/Oracle Java has done very aggressive inlining, for a very long time. They even push it as part of the advantage of VMs: the compiler can 'see' everything, from your code to, say, the GUI library, and inline things all the way down to the calls to OpenGL (or whatever). This is generally not possible in C/C++.
Additionally, in 'mixed-mode execution', a JIT compiler can run in the background, and eventually take over from the bytecode interpreter. Using this, JIT compilation is not a start-up delay, and advanced optimisations can be performed. This is how mainstream JVMs have worked for years, but if I understand correctly, .NET never uses interpretation. Extending this, multi-tiered compilation is now emerging in JavaScript engines, where a slow-to-run-but-generates-fast-code JIT compiler is used only if the code generated by a quick-to-run JIT is executed heavily.
I wasn't aware that .NET Native uses the VC++ backend. Interesting.
This is very good news. ASP.NET is a great web development platform, far superior to the atrocious hack that is PHP. The only reason so far why PHP has predominated is licensing costs: until now, you needed a Windows Server to do ASP.NET properly (or else resort to unsupported hacks like Mono), whereas PHP is free. Now that the playing field is about to become more level, hopefully it will be the beginning of the end for PHP.
You are twisting his words. Ballmer was not talking about Linux, but about the GPL and it's 'viral' nature.
No. You are totally incorrect. Here's the quote, from it source in the Chicago Sun-Times (via the internet archive):
Q: Do you view Linux and the open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft?
A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force us to be innovative. It will force us to justify the prices and value that we deliver. And that's only healthy. The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Don't trust Microsoft. Never trust Microsoft! Always remember their strategy: Embrace, extend, extinguish!. They are attempting the first step EMBRACE by slipping their tools into Linux like a Trojan horse virus. DON'T USE THIS .NET TROJAN. Get it out of Debian free and place it back in nonfree where it belongs.
Mono developer Miguel de Icaza has pledged to continue to add Microsoft's code to Mono saying "Like we did in the past with .NET code that Microsoft open sourced, and like we did with Roslyn, we are going to be integrating this code into Mono and Xamarin's products".
But is that wise? To your point, the Free Software Foundation's reaction to Microsoft's similar 2009 action point to exactly how changing ownership of patents render Microsoft's Patent Promise not to sue useless. This very promise could become the basis for a patent trap. In 2009 Microsoft's promise not to sue was called a "Community Promise" but today's .NET promise not to sue is risky in the same way—it's not (as the FSF rightly puts it) "an irrevocable patent license for all of its patents that Mono actually exercises" and neither is the MIT license Microsoft chose to release their code under.
Looking back at that essay from 2009, we see the FSF warn us (emphasis mine):
Falling into this trap will directly adversely affect your ability to run, share, and modify covered software. The FSF points to a practical way out as well:
I find it no accident that the built-to-be-business-friendly "open source" language is all over this announcement including the aforementioned blog post from a prominent endorser, while the wise warnings of falling into a patent trap come from the FSF who consistently looks out for all computer user's software freedoms—software freedom being the very thing that "open source" was designed never to bring to mind (see source 1, source 2 for the history and rationale on this point).
Digital Citizen
Beta = evil!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Monopoly means single, sole supplier. 89.95% (as of 10/14) is not a monopoly. It's exactly 10.15% (as of 10/14) short of being a monopoly. Just because no desktop Linux distribution can market itself out of a paper bag and Apple is happy with high margin low volume machines that doesn't mean Microsoft is a sole supplier.
"being a monopoly is terrible, because people do not have a choice in using a product"
So if I go invent some new item/widget/process/service/whatever that the world has never seen before and I end up doing amazingly well because of it I'm terrible? I'm the first and only supplier so I have a monopoly for no other reason than I had a brilliant idea and brought it to market. That doesn't make me terrible it makes me an innovator. Almost every government of the world will let me benefit from that by granting my a patent on my idea to give me a legally protected monopoly position for about a quarter decade. Nothing about any of that makes me or my fictitious company terrible - other than you and your incorrect definition of and views on monopolies.
Hypothetical situations that refute your ignorant statements aside, Microsoft is not a monopoly. There are competing products and people every day choose to use them. Microsoft is not attempting to stifle the sales of devices that run other operating systems. It even creates markets on those systems; Office for Mac, Office Mobile for iOS & Android, Skype for just about damn everything - and even contributions to Linux, being the largest kernel submitter for 2012 and most of 2013. All of that helps increase the adoption of those platforms. That is not the behavior of an illegal monopolist.
Communism has nothing to do with monopolies, absolutely nothing. Straw-man arguments are the first and last refuge of someone ill equipped to properly debate the topic at hand. If you believe Soviet era Russia only had one supplier for anything your knowledge of history is woefully small.
I know about computing history in the 1990s. Again, it is irrelevant to the Build announcements this week. The Microsoft of 2014 is behaving amazingly well; developing good products and embracing the idea of letting developers use their tools to deploy software on a multitude of platforms, not just those that Microsoft owns.
The only group of people that don't appear to appreciate what was announced at Build are people that just want to have a villain so they can act hurt and repressed. The only villains doing that to them are themselves.
Oh good, this will mean Mac folks can also suffer through insanely long, slow .NET patch updates every time there's a new remote-execution vulnerability.
What is success ? Making money at any cost ? Producing defective games ? Telling your production engieers to shut up when the yields are below 50% ? Blaming the customer when the DVD reader design scratches the expensive games ? Using loopholes to extort small businesses ? Lying to congress ?
The root of the problem is not just corporations, it is pretty much all large organization structures. Movement to the top is usually the result of being good at politics, or mentally ill. (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2013/10/are-ceos-and-entrepreneurs-psychopaths-multiple-studies-say-yes/) Neither of which will direct a corporatiion to benefit both stockholders and customers.
Maybe one hundred years from now, those in positions of authority will get extra scrutiny, as they should, and be assesed for narcissm, psycopathy. The company I work for is still reeling from misadventures of the previous CEO. I sensed a serious problem the day I first met him, and every time after that.
There is no interpreter -- .NET code is never interpreted. The output of the C# compiler is CIL (Common Intermediate Language), which is akin to the output of the front end of the LLVM compilers (called IR "Intermediate Representation"). (note: .NET is older than LLVM)
.NET and LLVM, the intermediate language is not suitable for interpretation. It is always translated into native machine instructions before execution. In .NET that can either be at runtime (JITed) or install time (NGENed).
In both
I'm simplifying of course. They don't need to write an interpreter, they need to write a back-end and port the runtime components.
Also, I don't think there's much if any C/C++ left in it, it's C# all the way down.
A sort-of correction that reaches the same conclusion: End Software Patents (ESP) speculates that "the 2012 'in re Spansion' case in the USA and the judge ruled that a promise is the same as a licence". And since ESP mentions that Microsoft's Patent Promise has serious problems restricting its promise to those who don't add covered code to another project or those who produce something other than a "compliant implementation" of .NET, it seems that Microsoft patent promise has enough problems that it's still wise to not build dependencies on .NET (as the FSF warned).
Digital Citizen
It's a business, it's about making money, not about patting puppies on the head and kissing babies. Dick moves will be made, trying to dominate the market and squeeze out competition, all of that is about making money. I hate when people go MS is EVIL because they are doing crappy/unethical things.... THAT MAKE MONEY! Stop whining about it and make Linux a viable alternative, because at the moment Linux is STILL not as user friendly as windows.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
I just love this way of thinking. Oh, they are being dicks and screwing people over to make money. Well that's ok then...
I know businesses and corporations, most of the big ones at least, are being dicks to make money. That is still NOT OK. I know it's the "usual" way to do business. But it's still NOT OK. I know that's the way things have been for a very long time. That still doesn't make it OK.
And I do know Linux has it's share of problems, especially on desktop for newbie users. That still doesn't make it OK for Microsoft or any other organization to be dicks.
--Coder
I've lived under Soviet Union. It wasn't much fun. I'm definitely NOT a communist, even though Soviet union wasn't really communist.
I don't pretend to know the solution. But I'll be the first to say that the current system of corporate demoracy is broken and must be improved.
I also believe that the solution will probably depend heavily on individual freedoms, and keeping computing, communications and the internet free and private. The alternative is a totalitarian regime backed by modern technology and that is the scariest thing I can imagine- and we are rapidly moving in that direction.
--Coder
One big problem with Linux on Desktop is lack of proper hardware support out of the box.
Microsoft and its monopolistic practice of strong-arming hardware vendors is directly responsible for a lot of it.
--Coder
From what I can tell "cross platform" to MS seems to be x86 only
Your name is fitting. Your statement is based on an ignorance that is not only deep, but stems from a retarded mind. Most people know that Microsoft has a mobile platform (that isn't doing too well, to put it mildly) and there isn't really an x86 platform for mobile phones as of now (not really, it's even less successful than Microsoft's mobile OS). So, assuming MS does only x86 requires you turn off your brains first.
Also, instead of just opining nonsense, why not just check out the information provided. You can use Visual Studio 2015 to build native C++ apps for Android. In fact, even the preview of VS 2015 blows the doors, roof and walls off any other development environment for Android out there. For C++ or Cordova apps (not for Java apps to my knowledge).
they need to write a back-end and port the runtime components
Given that they have had ARM in Windows Phones for a few years already, I think we can assume they already did. Also, if you read the info provided, VS 2015 can be used for writing C++ apps for Android devices. so I think they are well covered already.
Does MS still sell that kind of thing?
Yes. Windows 8 kept the desktop. Even Windows RT has the desktop, though only File Explorer, IE, and Office are allowed to run in it.
wasn't the whole point of the win8 hate that win8 was terrible at handling multiple windows?
The Windows 8 desktop is almost identical to that of Windows 7, other than replacing Aero with a flatter theme. Modern UI apps can snap to a 320px-wide strip down the side, which is about as wide as a phone's display. This "snap an app" feature was made slightly more flexible in Windows 8.1. It's also possible to run a Modern UI app in a window on the desktop using a third-party app called ModernMix. You have to become an administrator to install it, but unlike on Android, becoming an administrator on desktop Windows doesn't require exploiting the kernel or wiping your PC.
The years of ridicule and ad hominem attacks, that you have had to endure, have finally paid off, hats off. Congrats.
Actually it's not that simple. I have yet to see one positive argument go towards ANY large corporation that finds success. I would bet money that if Linux went as big as MS or Apple that it would immediately be called evil because it would no longer cater to the 1%.
I don't know one company that can go down the drain nobly. It's part of human nature. When one drowns it brings other down with it. If you know your losing you house no matter what you do you'll stop making payments. That is evil from the bank's point of view so everybody is just as evil as the same companies we call evil. Evil companies are made up of the same people that talk on /.
For Linq queries in Java you need QueryDSL http://querydsl.com/
Thanks!
This is clearly an attack on Java and Tomcat.
Read the parent and following responses.
If large companies are so bad why do we still buy their products and services? It's too easy to point at successful people and call them liars, crooks and hypocrites. At the end of the day the biggest hypocrite is the one that continues to buy their products.
>>If large companies are so bad why do we still buy their products and services?
Often we are forced to choose the lesser evil. And of course, I am in the vast minority, considering a company's behavior before my purchase.
>> It's too easy to point at successful people and call them liars, crooks and hypocrites
I acknowledge your opinion but I was addressing the question "do we have serious problems with organizational leadership ?" I included a link to research that seems to confirm what many have felt for a while.
>>At the end of the day the biggest hypocrite is the one that continues to buy their products.
You make a good point. If everyone shopped like me there would be less of a problem. But looking at developmental studies that is not likely to happen soon. So should I abandon any attempt to improve the system ? I say no.
Microsoft may well be mending their ways under new leadership. I don't expect it, of course, but if they were it would be slow change as new patterns of thought work their way through the company, they play out existing partnerships/contracts, and make some moves to see how the public/partners act (and/or revenue changes) and use that feedback to guide them on future changes.
All of which takes some time to play out, in spans of years and not months. Microsoft in 2015 won't look much different than 2014, but in 2020 it could.
There is a big difference between "was born in 1901" and "published novels and short stories in 1901." No one who is alive today knew Arthur Conan Doyle.
PCs running MS-DOS are general-purpose computers in the sense of not needing "mother may I". They're just not part of the set of computers under discussion here. Most are used either by a (negligible) set of hobbyists or in industrial control settings, so they probably wouldn't noticeably affect the usage share figures anyway. Besides, there were several popular third-party multitasking environments that ran on top of MS-DOS. One such environment, called Windows, became so popular it inspired its own operating system based on a VMS-clone kernel, called Windows NT.
Sorry, I meant no one who is alive today knew him when he wrote the books and short stories. Why should his descendants still have cla to them?
Sure, of course. You will notice though that I actually copied in the specific sentence I was replying to. It's not that unusual to know someone who lived at the turn of the last century. That's the only point I was trying to make. I wasn' t making any claims about how long copyrights should last.
Um, you're actually retarded aren't you? .NET is neither slow, nor a memory hog.
lol no, not retarded , just 1st hand knowledge. .Net is a bulky framework even if you only use 1% of it. Compile a blank project and check the memory usage.
Handy if you use most of the frameworks features, yes. But most people dont and theres faster frameworks/api's out there for c++. (FLTK).
Like all JIT'd languages it compiles to native on first run so it's as fast as anything else that compiles to native.
You are aware that the language you use in the 1st place has an great impact on the runtime speed of the program? Or, didnt they tell you that in Java classes?
no, I am responding to you. You said "we hate success", success at what? Today I was successfuly at putting on my pants. a theif who gets away is succesful, a terrorist who completes his "mission" and kills people is "successful". So what the blazes are you talking about without putting out buzzwords?
And in other news Microsoft announced the next version of Windows would be called GNU/Windows.
That's why I said read the parent. His comments were in the context of large companies that have success.
success at what though? being large companies?
In this case successful at selling a lot of what they offer at a large profit. Products that aren't good don't sell or quickly get replaced. GM and Chrysler experienced this first hand.
Products that aren't good don't sell or quickly get replaced. GM and Chrysler experienced this first hand.
really, I am pretty sure they made crappy products for decades.
In this case successful at selling a lot of what they offer at a large profit
I knew someone would back me on this. See my friend Leon is a pimp, and everyone thinks he's evil. They just hate his success. He too sells a lot of what he has to offer for a profit! So does my friend Anthony, who tells me selling large volumes of black tar heroin.
Those fucking cops right, they just hate success. I mean what do they do besides steal from "successful" people.
In all serious, microsoft always had a crap product they kept afloat through bullying tactics. Success? For whom? Steve Balmer mabey, who recieved a nearly 1 billion retirement package, right before MS layed off 10,000 people with no severence package, all stemming from the rotten nokia deal. If Microsoft is successful in the same way we say Gengkis Khan was "successful".
They probably did.
MS moves so slowly that it likely took this long to move through the thousands of layers of bureaucracy.
GM and Chrysler didn't always make crappy products and because the average lifespan of a vehicle is about 10 years it takes a decade just to get customers discouraged from buying their products. It probably takes another 5 - 10 years for the company to start suffering and the bailout was proof the companies were no longer attracting customers which is why they are re-inventing themselves.
As for MS, if someone truly had a solution to replace them they would had been replaced if their products were crap. I keep hearing people calling MS products crap but yet nobody explains why it is. Billions of dollars are invested YEARLY in R&D surrounding MS and their APIs so I'm not sure why professionals continue to buy their products if they are crap. Is it because the alternatives aren't viable or require a higher level of expertise?
Sure, MS like every other product out there isn't perfect but clearly they are perfect enough for 95% of the PC base. The significant increase in revenues for their business division is also sending a clear message that businesses trust them more than ever.