If you pay attention to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at all, you'll know he always frames fact and opinion in a way to try to make you think Microsoft is evil and bad and about to die. He has zero credibility.
I've played with a developer phone in the last month and I'm currently an iPhone user. I have to say I think they're on to something. I like the iPhone, but I'm probably going to switch to WP7 in November. The integration between app and data is an order of magnitude higher than any other phone out there.
Silverlight is just out of beta and the real big 2.0 release is still months away. I somehow doubt MS is "desperate" about anything.
The article about MS adopting themselves is great, the desperation comment is really just flamebait.
DC
I think "E" should inherently exclude all games that contain what I would deem "regular and consistant violence as a part of the strategy of the game". An example of something I would forgive is in Mario Party 7, which has the occasional cartoon of Donkey Kong jumping on you and flattening you if you lose a mini-game. But none of the game play in Mario Party 7 is violent in nature.
But to one of the other replies I agree...as the parent it's is my responsibility. I have no wish to see any law restrict the creation of games. I wouldn't mind seeing an independent review of games rated from a parents perspective though. Of course "which parents?" is the next question and we all know that there are parents that either ignore or encourage playing even the most violent games at a young age.
Have you ever heard about the 5 year old playing GTA? I have. I find that bordering on child-abuse.
But I agree....I am responsible. This is why Shrek II got sold at a garage sale for $1 and my kids play Mario Party 7, Crazy Machines, Marble Madness, and Nemo.
Now Crazy Machines.....that is truly a great game.
I disagree with this assessment. I purchased Shrek II for my girls because it had the "E" rating. The game is _entirely_ based on the concept of bashing men in the head.
This is violent behavoir I wish not to teach my kids.
I would have expected the rating to be T at least or have a synopsys of what the game play is like. "Shek bashes his enemies while..." would have properly sent me away from the game.
But of course ratings are about sales and there's no way a Shrek II game was going to get anything but an "E" rating.
Sometimes I think/. starts these little wars for traffic. Sort of like the stock market. The brokers hate it when the stock market does nothing. But when there is a downward trend or an upward trend, they're happy. So when MS announces _anything_, it will get spin on/. and twisted immediately to start a flamewar.
I've been using the last two releases of Vista and I also own a Mac-Mini and a Windows XP box. I ran Linux for three years (Debian) before giving up. I agree that there are still irritating aspects to Vista, but overall I would say that it is a sizable step forward. I would also say that as a Windows user, it feels much nicer than OS X has (as opposed to being a regular OS X user). I like OS X, but I get frustrated by the Finder and how apps get installed.
The fact that MS is locking Windows down should bring a huge cheer from all technical people. This of course will make some developers unhappy because (and I include myself in this group) we like to install stuff all the time. We also like to muck with the internals of the OS to see what's going on. This will probably become more cumbersome, but in the end, this is a necessary progression. Most Windows installations are in large corporations where the IT staff has to rigidly control how their PC's are used. With Vista, some of this heat will be taken off of that rigidity. I can see a lot of IT people reading about Vista and salivating at the prospect of lowering their hackable target area.
I think what's missing from the Vista discussion is the application paradigms that will be enabled. I don't think the/. crowd has taken stock in some of the things coming available in Windows, some of which were back-ported to XP. These include the new Presentation API (Windows Presentation Foundation), the new communications API (Windows Communication Foundation), and other things such as Windows Workflow Foundation. These tools will make creating Windows applications a lot easier, a lot more fun, and will give us the ability to create applications that simply don't exist today.
I think everyone needs to take a deep breath and calm down. Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Windows Vista is going to succeed one way or another. If you don't like the company or the product, then don't buy it. If you want to comment on it, try to ask real questions and refrain from simple negative exclamations.
Personally, I cycle through very ambitious work periods and then into very home/family oriented periods. I still work hard, but I'm less focused on my career and "getting ahead" and more interested in the tasks at hand. During the ambitious times, I'm usually pushing my managers, owners, coworkers, and myself to get better at everything.
I think Americans work hard, but I think there's also a selfishness across the board. Corporations are less inclined to care about work/life balance and employees are less inclined to care about where they work or for how long.
No one is really investing in this relationship anymore.
Maybe it's because more people now understand that the only way to make "real" money is to own your own business. Or maybe corporations have become greedy bastards that don't care about our communities anymore.
I think we all know how to work hard, but only do so when the need arises. We're not a country of hardworkers just because that's what you're supposed to do. We cut corners because we can and because we see everyone else cutting corners.
It's probably not a healthy thing for the future of our country.
If.NET would have failed, I would agree with this sentiment, but by all accounts,.NET is wildly successful in Fortune 1000 businesses and VB6 developers are beginning to adopt VB.NET and C# in greater numbers. The surveys of top CIO's shows that.NET has enormous respect and that Microsoft has garnered the trust needed to move development along their chosen lines.
Even Microsoft's horrible security track record hasn't kept businesses from adopting.NET. If that doesn't kill them, nothing will.
With the.NET foundation in place and Vista coming at a time when many shops are ready to upgrade their hardware, the next MS development platform is not only very likely to succeed, but also likely to become a standard.
Finally....if you don't think MS is aware of the factors involving the downfall of past corporations you're a fool. They have made enormous changes in the way they do business based on market factors. They have never rested on assumptions for long periods of time and they have never pushed their assumptions onto businesses without having a reasonable plan B.
I suggest you start learning C# because the vast majority of programming positions will be using that language in 5 years.
If Microsoft gave a rats ass about Mono or any of the work done related to Mono, they would have squashed it a long time ago. From all reports, Bill is flattered by Mono...and although Ballmer gets irritated when people ask him questions about it, I suspect he doesn't really care either.
Folks. Microsoft spends $6 billion dollars on R&D every year. They are building C# 3.0 and designing C# 4.0. The direction of C# is going towards a more functional programming capability. They are on the verge of delivering XAML, WPF, and WCF which will alter the way applications are designed and developed on Windows Vista. The new technologies will have no relation to what mono is doing now or even what.NET 1.1 is doing now.
They don't care because they're taking the whole development game up a notch. If you're developing applications in anything these days you should be paying attention not to what we develop in today, but what we will develop in 5 years from now. It will not resemble anything available today.
There's an article by Carl Zetie at Forrester on these new technologies and how they will impact future development. I highly recommend reading it:
This makes sense to me, but it still leaves an opening. TrueBASIC is nice, but it's no VB. I tried monkeying around with AppleScript and the GUI builder thingy and was lost almost immediately. It's all separate tools that I can't see how it all pulls together.
With a VB like tool or one-stop-shop IDE, you'd have a lot more people building semi-professional apps and then the Mac might do some crossover into the commercial desktop user. It's probably too late, but it might also open up the shareware/educational markets more to teachers and such.
No matter what, I just don't see enough software for me to take the Mac seriously beyond being a toy for my iPod or for my girls to play Nanosaur or my wife to manage her PTO work.
All of us developers have personal preferences and employment reasons for adhering to a certain technology standard. I write.NET code (VB or C#) and although there is voodoo within the IDE, it's not so horrible that I would choose another platform.
I can't speak for Objective C, but I know a few developers that love it and say more or less the same thing about it...that it has warts, but they prefer it over anything else.
So the evalutation should be in another area....and I will pick on the lack of choice where Mac software is concerned.
I bought a mac-mini for my wife and kids, feeling it provided a more stable environment for there mistake-probe usage. I feel vindicated over the past few months in that I have had almost no interaction with the mac and they've been happily doing their thing.
But when it comes to finding software for it, I have a huge problem. There is almost no kids software for OSX. Not only is there a ton of commercial software for Windows, but there is also a ton of shareware software for Windows. Where is the shareware software for the Mac.
I still believe that one of the primary reasons Windows proliferated over other OS's is that Microsoft created Visual Basic. The original VB made the creation of windowing software easy enough so that nearly anyone could do it. Obviously some of these efforts were a joke, but many of these efforts ended up being extremely useful applications. There was a period of time, in the BBS days and pre-Internet, that VB shareware was everywhere and had an enormous impact on why people purchased Windows computer systems.
So Objective C may be a wonderful platform for developers, but it has a fairly high learning curve for the average joe, and this is where you win OS battles. Quality will keep the professionals interested, but quantity of software is where you will win more users.
So if Apple really wanted to put a dent in Windows, they would adopt some platform that would mimic the ease of development that VB gave Windows 15 years ago. Granted, professional developers won't touch it and will likely scoff at it, but all of the entry level and non-professional developers might take a shot at creating one off shareware type applications that there will then be a buzz about all of the really cool apps you can download for your mac.
But a short list would tell you that they added generics and partial classes. The IDE is indescribably efficient at knowing what you want to type using its internal Intellisense functionality. It's sort of a catch-22...it's faster to write code, but if you don't know how to code, it's faster to write bad code.
The higher versions of the IDE include Rational type products like bug-tracking, a new enterprise source control tool, and methodology infrastructures (you can force your team to follow certain rules for coding, checking in code, completing documentation).
The "Express" versions will be $49 so if you want to play around and see what all the fuss is about, that would be the easiest way to go.
Personally this is all wonderful, but the really good bits will come next year when Windows Communications Foundation is completed, which is a framework of WS-* API's that will nearly completely hide xml web service details from the developer and allow for all of the higher end web service functionality.
You can say.NOT all you want, but if you write a few programs in Visual Studio.NET 2005 with C# 2.0, you'll be crying when you go back to Eclipse/J2EE.
I bought Shrek 2 for my girls, thinking it would be a fun kids game. Instead I found a game with the sole premise of bashing humans over the head to make progress. It was rated E for everyone. I'm sorry but my 5 and 6 year old girls don't need to learn that bashing humans over the head is a fun thing to do. I have no problem with the game itself. It's the rating that should clearly point out that "Killing Humans" is a part of the game.
I wouldn't have wasted money on the stupid thing then. But I guess that's the trick. It's not about ratings, it's about money.
I don't think you need to look at just/. for bad behavior. The entire Internet is rife with people trying to do unkind things to other people via there computer systems.
This is why we have firewalls, virus protection, and password protection on our websites.
If anyone thinks the Internet is anything but a malicious frontier, then just put a Windows 98 OS online without a firewall or virus protection and see how long it takes it to become a zombie PC or just hacked to death.
I'd trust a perfect stranger on the sidewalk with my laptop more than the Internet.
Forget the original marketing push to have everyone buy into the application as a service model. That was a bit grandiose and given MS's stature in the overall development community (monopolies are not our friends), that was hardly going to fly.
What.NET is _today_ is a different way of doing application development. It took Microsoft a long time to externalize their own best practices, but they finally realized that they needed to push their Visual Basic audience up a notch into thinking about object-orientation, messaging, services, and overall best practices in architecture.
There was no way to do that with VB6 and there was no way to make C++ pretty enough to get people to mass-adopt it. Let's face it, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. (No offense to all you C++ geeks, it's just that for writing a screen and a report for the accounting department, C++ is a bit of overkill).
Anyway, the folks at MS were working on some third-generation messaging stuff and also saw the benefits of managed code in the Java world. So they're not stupid and they spend $5 or $6 billion per year on doing new suff. Out of this came the CLI, the CLR, C#, and in parallel, web services.
Now the lights started going off. They knew they had security problems and they also knew that the business world had moved past the point where adhoc VB6 systems were acceptable. The business world was adopting Java because it came with serious thinkers and sound architectures (stable, secure, and fast).
So as MS does, they adapted to the needs of the business world. They pushed their new toys to that end. But the thing that makes.NET successful and useful beyond any of the underlying architecture is the IDE. Visual Studio.NET is by far the most useful tool for developing web and windows applications. And in the next version, 2005, it gets even better. A lot better.
This is why Sun failed to steal the VB6 crowd away from MS. They never understood that if you create a great IDE, developers will come. Eclipse has proven this theory, although too late to damage.NET's growing market-base.
In summary,.NET is just a productive platform for developing web and windows applications, along with enterprise architectures, that were previously locked in the C++ world.
At the end of the day, I can say that my job is vastly easier now than it was 5 years ago.
I've read through much of the witty banter on/. regarding Indigo, Longhorn, Avalon, and WinFS.
I can only assume that the people that understand how XML, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Application Integration effect large corporations have remained silent.
The people that have replied have stated clearly that they don't know what Web Services are, have never worked with XML, and don't understand how EAI has changed the way businesses do things.
Indigo is an extraordinary technology that will very likely be copied by IBM for Java (IBM and Microsoft both partnered on all of the WS-* standards) and will usher in a whole new era of interoperability for the business world.
If you're even the slightest bit curious about what this is all about I suggest the following reading material:
A truly paranoid person might believe that all the way back in 1995, Microsoft saw The Internet, installed The Browser, and did Two Things. The first plan was to adopt The Browser paradigm and do it well. The second plan was to start trying to figure out how to move The Customer back to Windows. This has manifested itself in ActiveX Controls first, and now in little over a year, Longhorn with XAML.
We know what a rotting piece of tripe ActiveX was. We shall say no more on that subject.
What do we think will happen with Longhorn and XAML though? Let's speculate!
First of all, I think Longhorn will arrive without Internet Explorer technology embedded into the OS. I still think they will have some html rendering technology in the OS, but it won't be as ugly and insecure as their current Windows incarnations.
I think the.NET Framework 3.0 will be 10 times bigger than 2.0, probably close to a gig in disk space required. Within this not so tiny nut will be all of the necessary compiled components required to render a Windows application from managed code.
Then XAML. You will then be able to click on.xaml files in any browser on a Longhorn machine and control will transfer from the browser to the OS+.NET 3.0 where that xaml code will turn into managed code and render a fully functional and current Windows application.
In looking at XForms, Web Forms 2.0, and then speculating on the nature of Longhorn and XAML, and knowing many business customers as well as I do, I think Microsoft will win a large mindshare of the the Fortune 500.
After that it's all a big toss up because below the "enterprise application level" you could mix and match any of the upcoming technologies.
I almost see a splinter in two directions. The Browser will maintain all e-commerce and global corporation applications and Microsoft will still strongly support this area of development.
But where departmental and Intranet applications come in to play, Longhorn and XAML will win a ton of new development and lock out the newer web technologies.
The simple truth is that most users can't stand web applications. They don't mind doing their online banking in them, but if they're working in the treasury department of a bank, they prefer Windows applications (or office type apps built into Excel or Access).
Anyway, this all hinges on Longhorn being locked down and enormously secure. I think that's the #1 key to its and XAML's success. If MS can pull that off, the W3C people and its splinter groups have a whole other thing to worry about. If Longhorn comes out flaky and insecure, XAML will take years to gain any headway and none of this will matter.
But if I were on the W3C board, I would be hedging bets that XAML and Longhorn will succeed and start planning on how that will play in future efforts. I don't see XForms or Web Forms 2.0 competing with XAML though. Something else will have to do that.
I had lunch with a friend the other day that happens to own a contract recruiting business. She says the market is picking up and she's getting a lot of calls. She said the rates are inching up too. Looks like mostly.NET and J2EE work. She said.NET is picking up fast.
I would just like to note that the IF community is still going strong, still maintaining its IF-specific programming platforms (see TADS 3, Glulx, Inform, Hugo), and have even published books (Inform Designer's Manual, Inform Beginner's Guide, Twisty Little Passages) and has a theoretical analysis book in the works for future publishing. If you're looking for a game, stop by http://www.wurb.com/if/ or check out the archive at http://www.ifarchive.org/ where all of the free games and interpreters are there to be downloaded for free. Visit rec.arts.int.fiction or rec.games.int.fiction if you want to discuss building or playing games and if you're really in need of an IF fix, stop by the ifMUD at ifmud.port4000.com:4000.
I would invite you and anyone else that thinks Linux would be a simple switch from Windows to take a tour through a major corporation and review the number of third party applications that are Windows based and are mission critical, if not legally required. Financial institutions are good example. Although they have a great deal of *nix systems, they also have a ton of Windows-based departmental systems that *nix doesn't offer and yet are required for SEC reporting and basically running their business.
I agree that if you have an environment that requires a limited scope of software which is vertical in nature, Linux is a very viable alternative, but to say this is possible everywhere isn't very forthcoming.
This is why Sun failed and yes, I am saying this in hindsight. If Sun had promoted client-side, windows, _compiled_ development back in the late '90's, they would have pulled in tons of Visual Basic developers and a lot of these third party applications would now be running in Java and therefore portable to *nix platforms.
But the unrealistic passion for cross-platform-ness over basic good business sense overwhelmed Sun and we now see the results of those poor decisions. Some may say there was no way to get in bed with Microsoft with windows and survive, but I disagree....the way to beat Microsoft is to build better _clients_, not better OS's, better compilers, or better office products. You need to have tens of thousands of easily built departmental applications that run efficiently.
Take note of Mono now and start writing Mono WinForms apps. When the Mono people get smart-client technology working, you will see a surge in linux based departmental applications.
Any language that uses whitespace or backslashes for line continuation is madness. This 2004 people. Write a damn compiler that can do the thinking, don't make me screw around with formatting to get my program working.
Moronic.
Stupid.
Jeez. The whole passport, name everything.NET, hailstorm junk is like three years old. MS uses passport for its own verification, but they haven't been pushing it for at least two years now.
Find something else to gripe about.
I've written a blog about this already, but it's my contention that secure personal computers and workstations that connect to hybrid secure networks will revolutionize the world as much as the industrial revolution and the first couple of waves of the computer revolution.
My analogy is the automobile industry.
It started a hundred years ago with the combustible engine, moved to assembly lines, then highly stable machines that rarely need maintenance. When I was growing up, it was extremely common for anyone from 8 to 80 years old to open up the hood of a car and tinker and or actually fix things inside of it. Owning car manuals was common and understanding how to change your own spark plugs and oil was a must.
Today, hardly anyone knows what's going on inside their cars and even if they do, they're still far more likely to take 10 minutes at a Jiffy Lube to have all the routine maintenance taken care of for $30. Sure, you can still get your car manual and do some things on your own, but with embedded computer systems handling much of the fine-tuning of your engine, it's unlikely that the average joe (or jane) could fix anything seriously wrong.
So now we have a computer and network arena where it's common to open up your own PC, build your own network, manage your own servers, and more.
It may take a few years, but eventually this technology will all come wrapped up in your home and the items connecting together will all have security built in at the very lowest circuitry levels.
Everyone reading this post will cry foul and urge a revolt, but in 10 or 20 years our kids aren't going to see what we see. They will see a monitor and maybe a keyboard, no wires, no network. They won't know what an "Internet" is because it will just be _there_. Much like we don't think about telephone lines anymore. We just use the phone, we don't care about the routing and switching. Our kids will just use the tools that are provided by the manufacturing world.
The next revolution is embedded security. It will make all of our lives better and for some of us who want to hide or break the law, well, it's not going to make your life better and I'm sorry.
Of course there's always the big brother problem with this scenario and we will very likely suffer many terrible abuses of this type of system. I see no way to avoid it though. People will always choose comfort and convenience over conspiracy theories.
Buck up friends. DRM is coming and it will change our world in many great and terrible ways.
Slashdot Mirror
If you pay attention to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at all, you'll know he always frames fact and opinion in a way to try to make you think Microsoft is evil and bad and about to die. He has zero credibility.
I've played with a developer phone in the last month and I'm currently an iPhone user. I have to say I think they're on to something. I like the iPhone, but I'm probably going to switch to WP7 in November. The integration between app and data is an order of magnitude higher than any other phone out there.
Silverlight is just out of beta and the real big 2.0 release is still months away. I somehow doubt MS is "desperate" about anything. The article about MS adopting themselves is great, the desperation comment is really just flamebait. DC
I think "E" should inherently exclude all games that contain what I would deem "regular and consistant violence as a part of the strategy of the game". An example of something I would forgive is in Mario Party 7, which has the occasional cartoon of Donkey Kong jumping on you and flattening you if you lose a mini-game. But none of the game play in Mario Party 7 is violent in nature.
But to one of the other replies I agree...as the parent it's is my responsibility. I have no wish to see any law restrict the creation of games. I wouldn't mind seeing an independent review of games rated from a parents perspective though. Of course "which parents?" is the next question and we all know that there are parents that either ignore or encourage playing even the most violent games at a young age.
Have you ever heard about the 5 year old playing GTA? I have. I find that bordering on child-abuse.
But I agree....I am responsible. This is why Shrek II got sold at a garage sale for $1 and my kids play Mario Party 7, Crazy Machines, Marble Madness, and Nemo.
Now Crazy Machines.....that is truly a great game.
I disagree with this assessment. I purchased Shrek II for my girls because it had the "E" rating. The game is _entirely_ based on the concept of bashing men in the head. This is violent behavoir I wish not to teach my kids. I would have expected the rating to be T at least or have a synopsys of what the game play is like. "Shek bashes his enemies while..." would have properly sent me away from the game. But of course ratings are about sales and there's no way a Shrek II game was going to get anything but an "E" rating.
Amen brother.
/. starts these little wars for traffic. Sort of like the stock market. The brokers hate it when the stock market does nothing. But when there is a downward trend or an upward trend, they're happy. So when MS announces _anything_, it will get spin on /. and twisted immediately to start a flamewar.
/. crowd has taken stock in some of the things coming available in Windows, some of which were back-ported to XP. These include the new Presentation API (Windows Presentation Foundation), the new communications API (Windows Communication Foundation), and other things such as Windows Workflow Foundation. These tools will make creating Windows applications a lot easier, a lot more fun, and will give us the ability to create applications that simply don't exist today.
Sometimes I think
I've been using the last two releases of Vista and I also own a Mac-Mini and a Windows XP box. I ran Linux for three years (Debian) before giving up. I agree that there are still irritating aspects to Vista, but overall I would say that it is a sizable step forward. I would also say that as a Windows user, it feels much nicer than OS X has (as opposed to being a regular OS X user). I like OS X, but I get frustrated by the Finder and how apps get installed.
The fact that MS is locking Windows down should bring a huge cheer from all technical people. This of course will make some developers unhappy because (and I include myself in this group) we like to install stuff all the time. We also like to muck with the internals of the OS to see what's going on. This will probably become more cumbersome, but in the end, this is a necessary progression. Most Windows installations are in large corporations where the IT staff has to rigidly control how their PC's are used. With Vista, some of this heat will be taken off of that rigidity. I can see a lot of IT people reading about Vista and salivating at the prospect of lowering their hackable target area.
I think what's missing from the Vista discussion is the application paradigms that will be enabled. I don't think the
I think everyone needs to take a deep breath and calm down. Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Windows Vista is going to succeed one way or another. If you don't like the company or the product, then don't buy it. If you want to comment on it, try to ask real questions and refrain from simple negative exclamations.
That's my two cents.
Personally, I cycle through very ambitious work periods and then into very home/family oriented periods. I still work hard, but I'm less focused on my career and "getting ahead" and more interested in the tasks at hand. During the ambitious times, I'm usually pushing my managers, owners, coworkers, and myself to get better at everything.
I think Americans work hard, but I think there's also a selfishness across the board. Corporations are less inclined to care about work/life balance and employees are less inclined to care about where they work or for how long.
No one is really investing in this relationship anymore.
Maybe it's because more people now understand that the only way to make "real" money is to own your own business. Or maybe corporations have become greedy bastards that don't care about our communities anymore.
I think we all know how to work hard, but only do so when the need arises. We're not a country of hardworkers just because that's what you're supposed to do. We cut corners because we can and because we see everyone else cutting corners.
It's probably not a healthy thing for the future of our country.
If .NET would have failed, I would agree with this sentiment, but by all accounts, .NET is wildly successful in Fortune 1000 businesses and VB6 developers are beginning to adopt VB.NET and C# in greater numbers. The surveys of top CIO's shows that .NET has enormous respect and that Microsoft has garnered the trust needed to move development along their chosen lines.
.NET. If that doesn't kill them, nothing will.
.NET foundation in place and Vista coming at a time when many shops are ready to upgrade their hardware, the next MS development platform is not only very likely to succeed, but also likely to become a standard.
Even Microsoft's horrible security track record hasn't kept businesses from adopting
With the
Finally....if you don't think MS is aware of the factors involving the downfall of past corporations you're a fool. They have made enormous changes in the way they do business based on market factors. They have never rested on assumptions for long periods of time and they have never pushed their assumptions onto businesses without having a reasonable plan B.
I suggest you start learning C# because the vast majority of programming positions will be using that language in 5 years.
If Microsoft gave a rats ass about Mono or any of the work done related to Mono, they would have squashed it a long time ago. From all reports, Bill is flattered by Mono...and although Ballmer gets irritated when people ask him questions about it, I suspect he doesn't really care either.
.NET 1.1 is doing now.
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Folks. Microsoft spends $6 billion dollars on R&D every year. They are building C# 3.0 and designing C# 4.0. The direction of C# is going towards a more functional programming capability. They are on the verge of delivering XAML, WPF, and WCF which will alter the way applications are designed and developed on Windows Vista. The new technologies will have no relation to what mono is doing now or even what
They don't care because they're taking the whole development game up a notch. If you're developing applications in anything these days you should be paying attention not to what we develop in today, but what we will develop in 5 years from now. It will not resemble anything available today.
There's an article by Carl Zetie at Forrester on these new technologies and how they will impact future development. I highly recommend reading it:
The original is here: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerp
The free link is here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/c/5/7c51
Mono is not threatening Microsoft in any way shape or form. Get over it.
David C.
This makes sense to me, but it still leaves an opening. TrueBASIC is nice, but it's no VB. I tried monkeying around with AppleScript and the GUI builder thingy and was lost almost immediately. It's all separate tools that I can't see how it all pulls together.
With a VB like tool or one-stop-shop IDE, you'd have a lot more people building semi-professional apps and then the Mac might do some crossover into the commercial desktop user. It's probably too late, but it might also open up the shareware/educational markets more to teachers and such.
No matter what, I just don't see enough software for me to take the Mac seriously beyond being a toy for my iPod or for my girls to play Nanosaur or my wife to manage her PTO work.
All of us developers have personal preferences and employment reasons for adhering to a certain technology standard. I write .NET code (VB or C#) and although there is voodoo within the IDE, it's not so horrible that I would choose another platform.
I can't speak for Objective C, but I know a few developers that love it and say more or less the same thing about it...that it has warts, but they prefer it over anything else.
So the evalutation should be in another area....and I will pick on the lack of choice where Mac software is concerned.
I bought a mac-mini for my wife and kids, feeling it provided a more stable environment for there mistake-probe usage. I feel vindicated over the past few months in that I have had almost no interaction with the mac and they've been happily doing their thing.
But when it comes to finding software for it, I have a huge problem. There is almost no kids software for OSX. Not only is there a ton of commercial software for Windows, but there is also a ton of shareware software for Windows. Where is the shareware software for the Mac.
I still believe that one of the primary reasons Windows proliferated over other OS's is that Microsoft created Visual Basic. The original VB made the creation of windowing software easy enough so that nearly anyone could do it. Obviously some of these efforts were a joke, but many of these efforts ended up being extremely useful applications. There was a period of time, in the BBS days and pre-Internet, that VB shareware was everywhere and had an enormous impact on why people purchased Windows computer systems.
So Objective C may be a wonderful platform for developers, but it has a fairly high learning curve for the average joe, and this is where you win OS battles. Quality will keep the professionals interested, but quantity of software is where you will win more users.
So if Apple really wanted to put a dent in Windows, they would adopt some platform that would mimic the ease of development that VB gave Windows 15 years ago. Granted, professional developers won't touch it and will likely scoff at it, but all of the entry level and non-professional developers might take a shot at creating one off shareware type applications that there will then be a buzz about all of the really cool apps you can download for your mac.
I was not familiar with the MTV animated version or anything about the story at all.
I thought it was good in the same way that watching someone else win a fantasy video game is fun. The visuals were excellent.
Now if I had been in one of those moods where I needed actual character development, well, I would have asked for my money back.
But I was in a rather low synaptic impulse mood so I enjoyed it.
The changes are listed in the SDK documentation:
a milyID=fe6f2099-b7b4-4f47-a244-c96d69c35dec&Displa yLang=en/
.NOT all you want, but if you write a few programs in Visual Studio .NET 2005 with C# 2.0, you'll be crying when you go back to Eclipse/J2EE.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
But a short list would tell you that they added generics and partial classes. The IDE is indescribably efficient at knowing what you want to type using its internal Intellisense functionality. It's sort of a catch-22...it's faster to write code, but if you don't know how to code, it's faster to write bad code.
The higher versions of the IDE include Rational type products like bug-tracking, a new enterprise source control tool, and methodology infrastructures (you can force your team to follow certain rules for coding, checking in code, completing documentation).
The "Express" versions will be $49 so if you want to play around and see what all the fuss is about, that would be the easiest way to go.
Personally this is all wonderful, but the really good bits will come next year when Windows Communications Foundation is completed, which is a framework of WS-* API's that will nearly completely hide xml web service details from the developer and allow for all of the higher end web service functionality.
You can say
I downloaded it, installed it...didn't really care for it...uninstalled it...now am testing IE7. Jury is out.
I bought Shrek 2 for my girls, thinking it would be a fun kids game. Instead I found a game with the sole premise of bashing humans over the head to make progress. It was rated E for everyone. I'm sorry but my 5 and 6 year old girls don't need to learn that bashing humans over the head is a fun thing to do. I have no problem with the game itself. It's the rating that should clearly point out that "Killing Humans" is a part of the game. I wouldn't have wasted money on the stupid thing then. But I guess that's the trick. It's not about ratings, it's about money.
I don't think you need to look at just /. for bad behavior. The entire Internet is rife with people trying to do unkind things to other people via there computer systems.
This is why we have firewalls, virus protection, and password protection on our websites.
If anyone thinks the Internet is anything but a malicious frontier, then just put a Windows 98 OS online without a firewall or virus protection and see how long it takes it to become a zombie PC or just hacked to death.
I'd trust a perfect stranger on the sidewalk with my laptop more than the Internet.
Forget the original marketing push to have everyone buy into the application as a service model. That was a bit grandiose and given MS's stature in the overall development community (monopolies are not our friends), that was hardly going to fly.
.NET is _today_ is a different way of doing application development. It took Microsoft a long time to externalize their own best practices, but they finally realized that they needed to push their Visual Basic audience up a notch into thinking about object-orientation, messaging, services, and overall best practices in architecture.
.NET successful and useful beyond any of the underlying architecture is the IDE. Visual Studio .NET is by far the most useful tool for developing web and windows applications. And in the next version, 2005, it gets even better. A lot better.
.NET's growing market-base.
.NET is just a productive platform for developing web and windows applications, along with enterprise architectures, that were previously locked in the C++ world.
.NET is.
What
There was no way to do that with VB6 and there was no way to make C++ pretty enough to get people to mass-adopt it. Let's face it, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. (No offense to all you C++ geeks, it's just that for writing a screen and a report for the accounting department, C++ is a bit of overkill).
Anyway, the folks at MS were working on some third-generation messaging stuff and also saw the benefits of managed code in the Java world. So they're not stupid and they spend $5 or $6 billion per year on doing new suff. Out of this came the CLI, the CLR, C#, and in parallel, web services.
Now the lights started going off. They knew they had security problems and they also knew that the business world had moved past the point where adhoc VB6 systems were acceptable. The business world was adopting Java because it came with serious thinkers and sound architectures (stable, secure, and fast).
So as MS does, they adapted to the needs of the business world. They pushed their new toys to that end. But the thing that makes
This is why Sun failed to steal the VB6 crowd away from MS. They never understood that if you create a great IDE, developers will come. Eclipse has proven this theory, although too late to damage
In summary,
At the end of the day, I can say that my job is vastly easier now than it was 5 years ago.
That's what
I can only assume that the people that understand how XML, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Application Integration effect large corporations have remained silent.
The people that have replied have stated clearly that they don't know what Web Services are, have never worked with XML, and don't understand how EAI has changed the way businesses do things.
Indigo is an extraordinary technology that will very likely be copied by IBM for Java (IBM and Microsoft both partnered on all of the WS-* standards) and will usher in a whole new era of interoperability for the business world.
If you're even the slightest bit curious about what this is all about I suggest the following reading material:
http://www.ws-standards.com/
http://community.java.net/java-ws-xml/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/p illars/Indigo/default.aspx
WinFX Indigo Docs
http://pluralsight.com/blogs/tewald/default.aspx I'm sure there is a lot more.
A truly paranoid person might believe that all the way back in 1995, Microsoft saw The Internet, installed The Browser, and did Two Things. The first plan was to adopt The Browser paradigm and do it well. The second plan was to start trying to figure out how to move The Customer back to Windows. This has manifested itself in ActiveX Controls first, and now in little over a year, Longhorn with XAML.
.NET Framework 3.0 will be 10 times bigger than 2.0, probably close to a gig in disk space required. Within this not so tiny nut will be all of the necessary compiled components required to render a Windows application from managed code.
.xaml files in any browser on a Longhorn machine and control will transfer from the browser to the OS+.NET 3.0 where that xaml code will turn into managed code and render a fully functional and current Windows application.
We know what a rotting piece of tripe ActiveX was. We shall say no more on that subject.
What do we think will happen with Longhorn and XAML though? Let's speculate!
First of all, I think Longhorn will arrive without Internet Explorer technology embedded into the OS. I still think they will have some html rendering technology in the OS, but it won't be as ugly and insecure as their current Windows incarnations.
I think the
Then XAML. You will then be able to click on
In looking at XForms, Web Forms 2.0, and then speculating on the nature of Longhorn and XAML, and knowing many business customers as well as I do, I think Microsoft will win a large mindshare of the the Fortune 500.
After that it's all a big toss up because below the "enterprise application level" you could mix and match any of the upcoming technologies.
I almost see a splinter in two directions. The Browser will maintain all e-commerce and global corporation applications and Microsoft will still strongly support this area of development.
But where departmental and Intranet applications come in to play, Longhorn and XAML will win a ton of new development and lock out the newer web technologies.
The simple truth is that most users can't stand web applications. They don't mind doing their online banking in them, but if they're working in the treasury department of a bank, they prefer Windows applications (or office type apps built into Excel or Access).
Anyway, this all hinges on Longhorn being locked down and enormously secure. I think that's the #1 key to its and XAML's success. If MS can pull that off, the W3C people and its splinter groups have a whole other thing to worry about. If Longhorn comes out flaky and insecure, XAML will take years to gain any headway and none of this will matter.
But if I were on the W3C board, I would be hedging bets that XAML and Longhorn will succeed and start planning on how that will play in future efforts. I don't see XForms or Web Forms 2.0 competing with XAML though. Something else will have to do that.
Note: It's just speculation!
I had lunch with a friend the other day that happens to own a contract recruiting business. She says the market is picking up and she's getting a lot of calls. She said the rates are inching up too. Looks like mostly .NET and J2EE work. She said .NET is picking up fast.
I would just like to note that the IF community is still going strong, still maintaining its IF-specific programming platforms (see TADS 3, Glulx, Inform, Hugo), and have even published books (Inform Designer's Manual, Inform Beginner's Guide, Twisty Little Passages) and has a theoretical analysis book in the works for future publishing. If you're looking for a game, stop by http://www.wurb.com/if/ or check out the archive at http://www.ifarchive.org/ where all of the free games and interpreters are there to be downloaded for free. Visit rec.arts.int.fiction or rec.games.int.fiction if you want to discuss building or playing games and if you're really in need of an IF fix, stop by the ifMUD at ifmud.port4000.com:4000.
I would invite you and anyone else that thinks Linux would be a simple switch from Windows to take a tour through a major corporation and review the number of third party applications that are Windows based and are mission critical, if not legally required. Financial institutions are good example. Although they have a great deal of *nix systems, they also have a ton of Windows-based departmental systems that *nix doesn't offer and yet are required for SEC reporting and basically running their business.
I agree that if you have an environment that requires a limited scope of software which is vertical in nature, Linux is a very viable alternative, but to say this is possible everywhere isn't very forthcoming.
This is why Sun failed and yes, I am saying this in hindsight. If Sun had promoted client-side, windows, _compiled_ development back in the late '90's, they would have pulled in tons of Visual Basic developers and a lot of these third party applications would now be running in Java and therefore portable to *nix platforms.
But the unrealistic passion for cross-platform-ness over basic good business sense overwhelmed Sun and we now see the results of those poor decisions. Some may say there was no way to get in bed with Microsoft with windows and survive, but I disagree....the way to beat Microsoft is to build better _clients_, not better OS's, better compilers, or better office products. You need to have tens of thousands of easily built departmental applications that run efficiently.
Take note of Mono now and start writing Mono WinForms apps. When the Mono people get smart-client technology working, you will see a surge in linux based departmental applications.
My two cents.
Any language that uses whitespace or backslashes for line continuation is madness. This 2004 people. Write a damn compiler that can do the thinking, don't make me screw around with formatting to get my program working. Moronic. Stupid.
Jeez. The whole passport, name everything .NET, hailstorm junk is like three years old. MS uses passport for its own verification, but they haven't been pushing it for at least two years now.
Find something else to gripe about.
I've written a blog about this already, but it's my contention that secure personal computers and workstations that connect to hybrid secure networks will revolutionize the world as much as the industrial revolution and the first couple of waves of the computer revolution.
My analogy is the automobile industry.
It started a hundred years ago with the combustible engine, moved to assembly lines, then highly stable machines that rarely need maintenance. When I was growing up, it was extremely common for anyone from 8 to 80 years old to open up the hood of a car and tinker and or actually fix things inside of it. Owning car manuals was common and understanding how to change your own spark plugs and oil was a must.
Today, hardly anyone knows what's going on inside their cars and even if they do, they're still far more likely to take 10 minutes at a Jiffy Lube to have all the routine maintenance taken care of for $30. Sure, you can still get your car manual and do some things on your own, but with embedded computer systems handling much of the fine-tuning of your engine, it's unlikely that the average joe (or jane) could fix anything seriously wrong.
So now we have a computer and network arena where it's common to open up your own PC, build your own network, manage your own servers, and more.
It may take a few years, but eventually this technology will all come wrapped up in your home and the items connecting together will all have security built in at the very lowest circuitry levels.
Everyone reading this post will cry foul and urge a revolt, but in 10 or 20 years our kids aren't going to see what we see. They will see a monitor and maybe a keyboard, no wires, no network. They won't know what an "Internet" is because it will just be _there_. Much like we don't think about telephone lines anymore. We just use the phone, we don't care about the routing and switching. Our kids will just use the tools that are provided by the manufacturing world.
The next revolution is embedded security. It will make all of our lives better and for some of us who want to hide or break the law, well, it's not going to make your life better and I'm sorry.
Of course there's always the big brother problem with this scenario and we will very likely suffer many terrible abuses of this type of system. I see no way to avoid it though. People will always choose comfort and convenience over conspiracy theories.
Buck up friends. DRM is coming and it will change our world in many great and terrible ways.