That was exactly the kind of link i was NOT looking for. One AC who replied did find something however.
I agree, the AC's link is more informative from a developer's perspective. That link is about the.NET Framework, which is only a piece of the first out of five parts of what.NET is, listed in the link I cited. So it answers maybe 10% of your original question.
Your question was "what is.NET", not "what is the.NET Framework." I answered what you said, not what you meant. Answering the question "what is.NET" requires a higher-level, "marketecture" description, since it is excessively broad, and isn't just about programming. Answering the question "what is.NET" with a definition of the.NET Framework would unnecessarily confuse a person who just wanted to know the big picture.
your link basically says:
-buzztalk.(webservices trie tier bla bal bla)
-Get.NET studio, read the docs.
Web Services are an important part of what.NET is about from a developer perspective. As far as the importance of reading the.NET studio docs, that's where the AC's link came from. If the marketecture summaries don't cut it, then you're just gonna have to drill down into the details that interest you. The details of the.NET Framework are comprehensively documented here.
Nobody wants to have a secure product in which you have to manually enable all the great features because of which you bought it in the first place!
Microsoft itself would now supposedly disagree with that point. As part of their new security effort, they are reviewing all parts of their code, including default configurations.
As part of the security initiative, every manager has to justify not only the group's programming decisions, but how the software is configured as a component of Windows.
Program managers are being asked, "Are 90 percent of your users using this feature? If not, then you better have a good reason for enabling that feature by default," Howard said.
The goal is to make an everyday user's computer secure by default, he said. "Not everyone needs IIS (Microsoft's Web server) by default," he said. "Not everyone uses Index Server by default. So today, those features are turned off by default."
The cat recently cloned by Texas A&M University filed a lawsuit against the university, claiming its DNA was illegally reverse-engineered. When asked for his opinion, the cat said, "I did not give my consent for those scientists to use my DNA, which has been a carefully guarded family secret for generations. How am I supposed to produce unique offspring now? Those gene sequences are MINE, dammit! I demand that the copycat be destroyed immediately. If I find out my gene sequences are available on Morpheus, I'm gonna be REALLY ticked. I'll fight this one all the way to the supreme court if I have to, if it takes me all nine of my lives."
Explain to me again which part of the Internet isn't "real life"?
I was being facetious when I said "real life" ownership, hence the quotes. I meant to imply "your grandma's idea of ownership."
Things change, technology advances. Sharing digital copies is not as encumbering as sharing physical objects. That fact is neither good nor bad in itself.
And a door without a lock is neither good nor bad in itself. It's when you throw human beings into the mix that you get problems.
Re:Books, VS.NET, .NET FreeBSD
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2
ISO images? I could only find the single download on the MS site.
You've got to navigate the tree menu on the left to get to the ISOs. The main page only offers a convenience link to the single file download.
The fact that the Internet makes it possible for individuals to distribute their intellectual creations directly to consumers terrifies the old industrial intermediaries. At the same time, the Internet gives intermediaries the potential to extract a fee from every single repetition of an expression.
The opposites are true too: the Internet makes it possible for individuals to distribute other non-consenting individuals' creations directly to "consumers" (the most prevalent use of Napster). At the same time, the Internet could cause intermediaries to lose the ability to extract a fee from every single piece of content they used to sell (the death of the media giants).
Until someone can create a system that accurately models the way "real life" ownership works, we will have these kinds of "reality disconnect" problems, where you can loan a book to a friend, as long as it's not an e-book.
People take for granted the way physical ownership works, with all its limitations, and the unspoken rules of ownership that go along with it. When you transition to a wide-open medium like the internet that takes away the physical limitations but leaves the old rules of ownership unmodified, the old rules become insufficient. Big media is scrambling to come up with a way to re-implement the old physical limitations of ownership in this new medium, but the results are pretty weak. So in the meantime, it's legislate legislate legislate! However even that is harder to enforce in this new medium than it was in the old.
This is a very thorny problem, and I don't think it's going away any time soon.
Re:Books, VS.NET, .NET FreeBSD
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Right now I am downloading the seven CD Visual Studio.NET Enterprise final version (yep, already warezed)
I downloaded the seven CD Visual Studio.NET Enterprise Architect final version (yes, the one they officially released this morning) a month ago from Microsoft's very own download site. They made it available as one big download, or as ISOs. You've gotta be an MSDN Universal subscriber to download it, which costs about as much as Visual Studio.NET does, but you get full download access to all of their products (all their OS's, Office versions, server software, beta releases, etc.), not just Visual Studio. Not a bad deal when you add up the street price of all the software.
It seems to me that nickle and diming the customers on a per-stream basis for what they download is a very quick way to kill VoD on the internet. Seems like the Television Network approach would be much better suited. "This content comes from our sponsors."
You're paying for your content, one way or the other. One is with your time (watching commercials), the other is with your money.
People are used to paying for content by putting up with commercials, and after you get used to it, it hardly seems like it costs you much at all. But once you make it easy enough for people to ditch the commercials entirely, you can bet many will do that. Putting content on the internet makes it that much easier for people to ditch the commercials, thereby devaluing the amount the networks get paid for each ad.
There are at least two different ways to respond to this problem: 1) pay-per-view, or 2) make sure it's not easier to ditch the commercials. Which method do you think will cost the networks more to implement and enforce?
Until they can come up with a streaming protocol that makes you sit through the ads (either through ingenious new technology, or more likely though a half-baked, legally enforced "can't break this or else" protocol), you will probably see more of these pay-per-view strategies, since they are otherwise at a loss for how to keep making the same kind of profit off their content in this new medium.
As the original post mentioned, be careful you're not just "sitting around discussing the language without discussing the problem." As you just demonstrated, even design has its buzzwords. No one methodology is ideal for solving all problems. Choose the best tool for the task, and this includes methodology.
Beware of just abstracting the language debate to a higher level.
Your boss it approaching the problem from the wrong angle. From your description, he has basically said, "must use 10-lb hammer, Phillips screwdriver, hand-saw, and 100-grit sandpaper, because they will ensure a successful project." It's your job to see the forest despite the trees, even though he's not. After all, you're the one who's going to have to actually use those tools.
Unless your development team is a bunch of seasoned object oriented pros, multiple inheritance will probably cause more problems than it solves. Other items on the check-list may present similar "user error" problems.
You boss's check-list is a common phenomenon in the tech world. Each person has their own preferred techonological hammer they like to throw at every problem they come across, without considering what it the best fit.
Your boss sounds like a language-feature elitist. I know it's not your concern as much as his, but those features come at a cost. Unless he has budgeted for his discerning tastes, your project may very well be over-budget before you start.
In the future, we will have TV shows where you are forced to watch commercials.
As we move from one protocol (linear television) to another (PVRs, embedded metadata), media corporations will struggle to keep the ad-pushing "micro-payment" advantages of the original protocol.
<Magic-8-Ball> This will eventually result in the creation of a low-level protocol where enforced advertisement display is a part of the protocol itself. People will find ways to hack around it, but they will continue to "enhance" the protocol so it becomes either very difficult to circumvent it, or, more likely, making it illegal to circumvent it (bullet-proof-protocol-by-fiat).
</Magic-8-Ball>
Generic Types. There is currently zero support for generic programming in the CLS.
Nobody has mentioned this yet, so I will. A research version of the CLR implements true generics, but because they only have limited resources, they decided not to include it in the first release. The following is quoted from this interview with Chief C# Language Architect Anders Hejlsberg:
Hejlsberg:
But with respect to the generics that you asked about, I definitely think generics are a very useful concept and you can certainly tell that from all the generics research that's taking place in academia and industry. Templates are one solution to the problem. In our internal discussions, we concluded that we wanted to do it right for this new platform. But what we would really like is to have generics understood by the underlying runtime. This is different from how some of the generic prototypes have been built. Take Java's notions of "erasure" where there's really no knowledge of generics in the system. By having the common language runtime understand the concept of generics, multiple languages can share the functionality. You can write a generic class in C# over in one place and someone else using a different language can use it.
But making generics part of the runtime also enables you to do certain things much more efficiently. Instantiation of generics should ideally happen at runtime. With C++, instantiation of templates happens at compile time, and then you have two options: you can either let your code bloat or you can try, in the linker, to get rid of some of the bloat. But, if you have multiple applications, you can forget about it. You're just going to get bloated code.
If you push the knowledge of generics into the common language runtime, then the runtime can understand that when an application or a component asks for a list of "Foo's," it should first ask: "Do I already have an instantiation of a list of "Foo?" If so, use that one. Indeed, if Foo is a reference type, and if we do the design right, we can share the instantiation for all reference types. For value types, such as ints and floats, and we can create one instantiation per value type. But only when an application asks for it. We've done a lot of the design work and groundwork necessary to add generics to the runtime.
It's interesting you asked earlier about the IL because deciding to add generics impacts the design of the IL. If the instructions in the IL embed type information -- if, for example, an Add instruction is not an Add, but is an Add int or an Add float or an Add double -- then you've baked the type into the instruction stream and the IL is not generic at that point. Our IL format is actually truly type neutral. And, by keeping it type neutral, we can add generics later and not get ourselves into trouble, at least not as much trouble. That's one of the reasons our IL looks different from Java byte code. We have type neutral IL. The Add instruction adds whatever the two things are on top of the stack. In a generic world, that could translate into different code when the generic is instantiated.
Osborn:
Is that available to all.NET languages?
Hejlsberg:
Yes. Microsoft Research in Cambridge has created a generics version of the common language runtime and the C# compiler. We're looking at how to move that forward right now. It's not going to happen in the first release, that much we know, but we are working on making sure that we do things right for the first release so that generics fit into the picture.
Security in.NET has been built into the foundations of the CLR, not added as an afterthought as Bill Joy implies. Read more about it at the.NET Framework Security Overview. The reason Microsoft seems so cocky about their new "trustworthy computing" crusade is because they know their new framework makes it a lot easier to follow through on their promises. Although there is still room for programmer error, that room is now the size of a broom closet, not a stadium.
The Java Pet Store, Sun's J2EE best practices blueprint application, was rewritten in C#. It took 1/4 the code and performs anywhere from 15 to 28 times faster than J2EE. Check it out here. Debate on how it was done can be found here.
Anders Hejlsberg wrote the Pascal compiler core. Quote: "Borland licensed the Pascal compiler core, written by Anders Hejlsberg (Poly Data was the name of his company in Denmark), and added the user interface and editor."
Anyway, I just hate to see technical terms get misused...
Yep, I can see now that's what happened to the definition of NFA. Thanks for making the case for it and causing me to go digging for a better understanding of it. O'Reilly's book acknowledges the misuse of the term, and then goes ahead and misuses it anyway!
I do see your point, in theory... Here's yet another quote from chapter 4 of Mastering Regular Expressions:
The true mathematical and computational meaning of "NFA'' is different from what is commonly called an "NFA regex engine.'' In theory, NFA and DFA engines should match exactly the same text and have exactly the same features. In practice, the desire for richer, more expressive regular expressions has caused their semantics to diverge. We'll see several examples later in this chapter, but one right off the top is support for backreferences.
As a programmer, if you have a true (mathematically speaking) NFA regex engine, it is a relatively small task to add support for backreferences. A DFA's engine's design precludes the adding of this support, but an NFA's common implementation makes it trivial. In doing so, you create a more powerful tool, but you also make it decidedly nonregular (mathematically speaking). What does this mean? At most, that you should probably stop calling it an NFA, and start using the phrase "nonregular expressions,'' since that describes (mathematically speaking) the new situation. No one has actually done this, so the name "NFA'' has lingered, even though the implementation is no longer (mathematically speaking) an NFA.
When it comes right down to the implementation though, a DFA would be the preferred choice for Google. Another quote:
Three things come to my mind when describing a DFA engine:
Not entirely accurate. Here's a quote from chapter 4 of O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions: "The way a DFA engine works completely precludes the concept of backreferences and capturing parentheses. It just can't happen."
is a relatively simple proof to show transformations between them.
Between some of them. If you expression contains backreferences or counted subexpressions, then you can't go from NFA to DFA.
If I use a more exotic language with features not found in others... I don't think I'll be able to export Interfaces using these features.
Keep in mind this is version one of the CLR. In a very informative interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of C#, as well as Turbo Pascal and Delphi, he says that some of the higher-end language features such as generics were implemented in a research version of the CLR but were cut for the current release. After reading that interview, it looks to me like they will implement the more exotic language features in future releases of the CLR, but they just didn't have the time or resources to implement their entire language feature wish list.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, the AC's link is more informative from a developer's perspective. That link is about the .NET Framework, which is only a piece of the first out of five parts of what .NET is, listed in the link I cited. So it answers maybe 10% of your original question.
Your question was "what is .NET", not "what is the .NET Framework." I answered what you said, not what you meant. Answering the question "what is .NET" requires a higher-level, "marketecture" description, since it is excessively broad, and isn't just about programming. Answering the question "what is .NET" with a definition of the .NET Framework would unnecessarily confuse a person who just wanted to know the big picture.
your link basically says: .NET studio, read the docs.
-buzztalk.(webservices trie tier bla bal bla)
-Get
Web Services are an important part of what .NET is about from a developer perspective. As far as the importance of reading the .NET studio docs, that's where the AC's link came from. If the marketecture summaries don't cut it, then you're just gonna have to drill down into the details that interest you. The details of the .NET Framework are comprehensively documented here.
Microsoft itself would now supposedly disagree with that point. As part of their new security effort, they are reviewing all parts of their code, including default configurations.
As part of the security initiative, every manager has to justify not only the group's programming decisions, but how the software is configured as a component of Windows.
Program managers are being asked, "Are 90 percent of your users using this feature? If not, then you better have a good reason for enabling that feature by default," Howard said.
The goal is to make an everyday user's computer secure by default, he said. "Not everyone needs IIS (Microsoft's Web server) by default," he said. "Not everyone uses Index Server by default. So today, those features are turned off by default."
Quoted from this article.
The cat recently cloned by Texas A&M University filed a lawsuit against the university, claiming its DNA was illegally reverse-engineered. When asked for his opinion, the cat said, "I did not give my consent for those scientists to use my DNA, which has been a carefully guarded family secret for generations. How am I supposed to produce unique offspring now? Those gene sequences are MINE, dammit! I demand that the copycat be destroyed immediately. If I find out my gene sequences are available on Morpheus, I'm gonna be REALLY ticked. I'll fight this one all the way to the supreme court if I have to, if it takes me all nine of my lives."
The Simplest Way to Define .NET by Sanjay Parthasarathy, Vice President, Platform Strategy, Microsoft Corp.
I was being facetious when I said "real life" ownership, hence the quotes. I meant to imply "your grandma's idea of ownership."
Things change, technology advances. Sharing digital copies is not as encumbering as sharing physical objects. That fact is neither good nor bad in itself.
And a door without a lock is neither good nor bad in itself. It's when you throw human beings into the mix that you get problems.
You've got to navigate the tree menu on the left to get to the ISOs. The main page only offers a convenience link to the single file download.
The opposites are true too: the Internet makes it possible for individuals to distribute other non-consenting individuals' creations directly to "consumers" (the most prevalent use of Napster). At the same time, the Internet could cause intermediaries to lose the ability to extract a fee from every single piece of content they used to sell (the death of the media giants).
Until someone can create a system that accurately models the way "real life" ownership works, we will have these kinds of "reality disconnect" problems, where you can loan a book to a friend, as long as it's not an e-book.
People take for granted the way physical ownership works, with all its limitations, and the unspoken rules of ownership that go along with it. When you transition to a wide-open medium like the internet that takes away the physical limitations but leaves the old rules of ownership unmodified, the old rules become insufficient. Big media is scrambling to come up with a way to re-implement the old physical limitations of ownership in this new medium, but the results are pretty weak. So in the meantime, it's legislate legislate legislate! However even that is harder to enforce in this new medium than it was in the old.
This is a very thorny problem, and I don't think it's going away any time soon.
I downloaded the seven CD Visual Studio.NET Enterprise Architect final version (yes, the one they officially released this morning) a month ago from Microsoft's very own download site. They made it available as one big download, or as ISOs. You've gotta be an MSDN Universal subscriber to download it, which costs about as much as Visual Studio.NET does, but you get full download access to all of their products (all their OS's, Office versions, server software, beta releases, etc.), not just Visual Studio. Not a bad deal when you add up the street price of all the software.
You're paying for your content, one way or the other. One is with your time (watching commercials), the other is with your money.
People are used to paying for content by putting up with commercials, and after you get used to it, it hardly seems like it costs you much at all. But once you make it easy enough for people to ditch the commercials entirely, you can bet many will do that. Putting content on the internet makes it that much easier for people to ditch the commercials, thereby devaluing the amount the networks get paid for each ad.
There are at least two different ways to respond to this problem: 1) pay-per-view, or 2) make sure it's not easier to ditch the commercials. Which method do you think will cost the networks more to implement and enforce?
Until they can come up with a streaming protocol that makes you sit through the ads (either through ingenious new technology, or more likely though a half-baked, legally enforced "can't break this or else" protocol), you will probably see more of these pay-per-view strategies, since they are otherwise at a loss for how to keep making the same kind of profit off their content in this new medium.
As the original post mentioned, be careful you're not just "sitting around discussing the language without discussing the problem." As you just demonstrated, even design has its buzzwords. No one methodology is ideal for solving all problems. Choose the best tool for the task, and this includes methodology.
Beware of just abstracting the language debate to a higher level.
Unless your development team is a bunch of seasoned object oriented pros, multiple inheritance will probably cause more problems than it solves. Other items on the check-list may present similar "user error" problems.
You boss's check-list is a common phenomenon in the tech world. Each person has their own preferred techonological hammer they like to throw at every problem they come across, without considering what it the best fit.
Your boss sounds like a language-feature elitist. I know it's not your concern as much as his, but those features come at a cost. Unless he has budgeted for his discerning tastes, your project may very well be over-budget before you start.
Use the simplest thing that could possibly work.
As we move from one protocol (linear television) to another (PVRs, embedded metadata), media corporations will struggle to keep the ad-pushing "micro-payment" advantages of the original protocol.
<Magic-8-Ball>
This will eventually result in the creation of a low-level protocol where enforced advertisement display is a part of the protocol itself. People will find ways to hack around it, but they will continue to "enhance" the protocol so it becomes either very difficult to circumvent it, or, more likely, making it illegal to circumvent it (bullet-proof-protocol-by-fiat).
</Magic-8-Ball>
Which one is easier to create? You be the judge.
High-speed Internet Access: Power Lines For Real
Linksys Incorporates HomePlug Networking
Download Steve Gibson's UnPlug n' Pray here. That will do the trick. The page also contains a good description of exactly what is wrong with UPnP.
Microsoft's CLR is actually based on Colusa Software's CVM, which Microsoft got when they acquired Colusa. Read about it here
Nobody has mentioned this yet, so I will. A research version of the CLR implements true generics, but because they only have limited resources, they decided not to include it in the first release. The following is quoted from this interview with Chief C# Language Architect Anders Hejlsberg:
Hejlsberg:
But with respect to the generics that you asked about, I definitely think generics are a very useful concept and you can certainly tell that from all the generics research that's taking place in academia and industry. Templates are one solution to the problem. In our internal discussions, we concluded that we wanted to do it right for this new platform. But what we would really like is to have generics understood by the underlying runtime. This is different from how some of the generic prototypes have been built. Take Java's notions of "erasure" where there's really no knowledge of generics in the system. By having the common language runtime understand the concept of generics, multiple languages can share the functionality. You can write a generic class in C# over in one place and someone else using a different language can use it. But making generics part of the runtime also enables you to do certain things much more efficiently. Instantiation of generics should ideally happen at runtime. With C++, instantiation of templates happens at compile time, and then you have two options: you can either let your code bloat or you can try, in the linker, to get rid of some of the bloat. But, if you have multiple applications, you can forget about it. You're just going to get bloated code.
If you push the knowledge of generics into the common language runtime, then the runtime can understand that when an application or a component asks for a list of "Foo's," it should first ask: "Do I already have an instantiation of a list of "Foo?" If so, use that one. Indeed, if Foo is a reference type, and if we do the design right, we can share the instantiation for all reference types. For value types, such as ints and floats, and we can create one instantiation per value type. But only when an application asks for it. We've done a lot of the design work and groundwork necessary to add generics to the runtime.
It's interesting you asked earlier about the IL because deciding to add generics impacts the design of the IL. If the instructions in the IL embed type information -- if, for example, an Add instruction is not an Add, but is an Add int or an Add float or an Add double -- then you've baked the type into the instruction stream and the IL is not generic at that point. Our IL format is actually truly type neutral. And, by keeping it type neutral, we can add generics later and not get ourselves into trouble, at least not as much trouble. That's one of the reasons our IL looks different from Java byte code. We have type neutral IL. The Add instruction adds whatever the two things are on top of the stack. In a generic world, that could translate into different code when the generic is instantiated.
Osborn: Is that available to all .NET languages?
Hejlsberg:
Yes. Microsoft Research in Cambridge has created a generics version of the common language runtime and the C# compiler. We're looking at how to move that forward right now. It's not going to happen in the first release, that much we know, but we are working on making sure that we do things right for the first release so that generics fit into the picture.
What about the thousands of trees that won't get sent to Vermont residents in the form of snail-mail spam? That should lower costs.
COBOL for .NET has already been done by Fujitsu.
Security in .NET has been built into the foundations of the CLR, not added as an afterthought as Bill Joy implies. Read more about it at the .NET Framework Security Overview. The reason Microsoft seems so cocky about their new "trustworthy computing" crusade is because they know their new framework makes it a lot easier to follow through on their promises. Although there is still room for programmer error, that room is now the size of a broom closet, not a stadium.
The Java Pet Store, Sun's J2EE best practices blueprint application, was rewritten in C#. It took 1/4 the code and performs anywhere from 15 to 28 times faster than J2EE. Check it out here. Debate on how it was done can be found here.
Ok, here's my facts.
Anders Hejlsberg won the 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. Quote: "Hejlsberg is best known as author of Borland's Turbo Pascal"
Anders Hejlsberg wrote the Pascal compiler core. Quote: "Borland licensed the Pascal compiler core, written by Anders Hejlsberg (Poly Data was the name of his company in Denmark), and added the user interface and editor."
And, "Anders Hejlsberg is famous in the programming world for creating the Turbo Pascal compiler and leading the team that designed Delphi."
Your turn.
Yep, I can see now that's what happened to the definition of NFA. Thanks for making the case for it and causing me to go digging for a better understanding of it. O'Reilly's book acknowledges the misuse of the term, and then goes ahead and misuses it anyway!
I do see your point, in theory... Here's yet another quote from chapter 4 of Mastering Regular Expressions:
The true mathematical and computational meaning of "NFA'' is different from what is commonly called an "NFA regex engine.'' In theory, NFA and DFA engines should match exactly the same text and have exactly the same features. In practice, the desire for richer, more expressive regular expressions has caused their semantics to diverge. We'll see several examples later in this chapter, but one right off the top is support for backreferences.
As a programmer, if you have a true (mathematically speaking) NFA regex engine, it is a relatively small task to add support for backreferences. A DFA's engine's design precludes the adding of this support, but an NFA's common implementation makes it trivial. In doing so, you create a more powerful tool, but you also make it decidedly nonregular (mathematically speaking). What does this mean? At most, that you should probably stop calling it an NFA, and start using the phrase "nonregular expressions,'' since that describes (mathematically speaking) the new situation. No one has actually done this, so the name "NFA'' has lingered, even though the implementation is no longer (mathematically speaking) an NFA.
When it comes right down to the implementation though, a DFA would be the preferred choice for Google. Another quote:
Three things come to my mind when describing a DFA engine:
Not entirely accurate. Here's a quote from chapter 4 of O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions: "The way a DFA engine works completely precludes the concept of backreferences and capturing parentheses. It just can't happen."
is a relatively simple proof to show transformations between them.
Between some of them. If you expression contains backreferences or counted subexpressions, then you can't go from NFA to DFA.
Keep in mind this is version one of the CLR. In a very informative interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of C#, as well as Turbo Pascal and Delphi, he says that some of the higher-end language features such as generics were implemented in a research version of the CLR but were cut for the current release. After reading that interview, it looks to me like they will implement the more exotic language features in future releases of the CLR, but they just didn't have the time or resources to implement their entire language feature wish list.