Even if your app is 100% standard compliant, it may not be cross browser. Not even if you pull IE out of the equation. Not even if you ONLY TARGET FIREFOX (there are differences between FF2 and FF3. FF2 doesn't even fully implement CSS 2 itself...)
So by now, devs have reverted to another philosophy: make websites that are crossbrowser, and -mostly- standard compliants.
If you look at some of the most heavily cross browser web sites out there, especially the ones that are extremely backward compatible (down to Netscape 4), they are in HTML 4 quirk mode, and not standard at all. But they work better than most.
The standard also doesn't dictate defaults, which is quite the big hole. Being standard compliant doesn't help too much. Add that the standard evolves extremely slowly, and if you want to get the job done, you need to bypass it.
Thats why the W3C stuff is a standard proposition. No one "has" to adopt it. There are good standards out there, but as a general rule, anything coming out of the W3C is a joke of a swiss cheeze. Looked at the XQuery specs lately? My significant other works on a project to implement a full XQuery engine. A -lot- is left to interpretation, is loosely defined, etc. Same with XHTML and CSS. Even fully implemented, its vague, poorly designed (hellllooo.... versioning anyone? API 101?), and all around pathetic.
The faster we get rid of it, the better. Either by a proprietary spec (Flash may not be open source, but at least it freagin work, mostly cross platform if you don't care to use the latest version at all time...better than XHTML/CSS anyway...), either by a new standard body that doesn't suck at -everything- they do. XQuery, XHTML, CSS, SOAP, XSD, XML... can they do ANYTHING right?
Thats because you're using WinForms, a component of mono that is A) new, B) not pure managed at -all- Its all Win32 APIs in the back), C) a legal minefield.
Basically everything UI, so you need to use an open source UI framework like GTK# or something (if memory serves), Moonlight, etc.
And then it will take another year or two before you're in a position to move up, and by then, that company will be in the same damn situation (unable to replace the QAs), and make the same decision.
Oh, some companies will be different. All 3 of em. Good luck finding them. Its like that with everything. I've seen a guy (in his late 20s) who was hired as a cobol programmer, with the promise he'd be promoted to a.NET or Java dev if he proved himself for a bit. But a cobol programmer with modern technologies knowledge (especially useful for interop with newer systems) are extremely rare, so they never wanted him in another position. He eventually had to quit, and he did all that for nothing.
I had already posted about the 3.5SP1 thing (replying to myself) right after posting the above, if you didn't notice:)
And yeah, 4.0 will be a major version, but it could be a major version like 3.5, which cannot break backward compatibility, or only breaks a little, and thus doesn't end up running side by side. They didn't decide yet, from what I was told in discussions with various managers at Microsoft.
It -does- break compatibility more so than 3.5, thats for sure. Bugs I reported from 2.0 that were put as "Won't fix" because of the compatibility constraints were reopened and fixed for 4.0. So I guess you're right, they won't have much choice but to make it side by side... but its not officially decided, not even internally, as far as I'm told.
oh, and between 3.5 and 4.0, we have 3.5 SP1, which is about as big a change as 2.0 to 3.0 (actually, bigger changes), and has some regressions. Again, doesn't make any fucking sense.
That still doesn't beat the.NET framework naming convention.
1.0 -> 1.1, breaking change, run side by side. 2.0 breaking change, change of the compiler (ok, so that makes sense. 3.0, just an extra set of libs for 2.0, no change beyond that (wtf) 3.5, NOT a breaking change over 2.0, but an extremely major version (bigger changes than for all of the previous versions, though non-breaking). Still refered to 2.0 for configuration purposes, like in IIS, as the CLR didn't change. 4.0 (tentative, most likely will run side by side).
Most companies won't let you do that. Why? A good QA is a -lot- harder to find than a good programmer. We only have one QA where I work, and at this point, she has gathered enough knowledge and skill to be a senior architect or maybe a business analyst. They won't move her, she's the only QA we can get. She's already QA-in for 3 teams on her own because we can't find anyone else worth their salt.
So she gets the shaft. The guy who submitted the article is probably in the same situation. All "good" QAs are.
Silverlight 1.0 had no data controls in general, it was just for vectorial drawing and animations. Just a marketing trick to get the name out there... originally, Silverlight 2.0 was supposed to be the "first". It went from being WPF/E, to Silverlight, to Silverlight 1.1, to Silverlight 2.0.
Wasn't the xceed grid for WPF, not Silverlight, though?
As long as its safe, simple, and not too expensive... its fine. Your example of shaving is one of em... its pretty much a standard, and its been accepted over hundreds of years. Another example is how african-american women will very commonly get their hair strenghtened. More awkward, but ok.
Where its going to be a mess is when kids get made fun at and shunned because their parents didn't have the 50000$ to get their genes fixed up while they were in the womb to fit some new standard of beauty.
As with everything, the problem with these technologies aren't the technologies themselves: its that human society and moral rules are VERY slow to evolve, while technology comes fast. If this is introduced gradually, very slowly over 200 years...it would fit in -just fine-. If its introduced and within the span of 20 years it goes from inexistant to 30%+ of people using it, we're screwed.
So what you're saying is, since I'm using the longest freagin key that my router allows, and I used a cryptosecure generator to create it (its totally random), I'm more or less safe?
Microsoft has a bunch of labs/departments dedicated to just making stuff until one catches on... a bit like Google, but instead of being "everyone", its some departments. So they'll make stuff like this or DeepZoom, which may or may not catch on... others like Spec# may have more potential.
No, it doesn't. It prompt you for each and every change you try to do in a non-elevated window. In that situation, Linux will simply tell you "tough luck!"
If you run the actual -explorer- as administrator (just one window, which is more or less as easy to do as it is in other OSs), then you will only get the prompt once: to open the explorer. Then you can do whatever as much as you want.
Oh that would be something. They need to let us register domain names that look like IP addresses... add sub domains, and I could map something in the format XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX to some IPv6 address! Epic!
LINQ maps to the extension methods defined in System.Core, but you can bundle that DLL with your app. Even more so, most of the extension methods it maps to are trivial, you can create them yourself. So yes, it -will- work, and I have working prototypes of it running on 2.0. Even more so, there are blog entries from MS's employees on how to do it (its not supported, but it IS possible).
For redistributing with my programs, I'd redistribute the.NET 3.5 client profile, which weights around 30 megs.
And finally,.NET 3.0 has 4 components, and one of em is fully supported in VS2005. There's more apps using it than you'd think.
PowerShell is sick. If you have.NET programmers, its even better. Making custom command-lets is amazingly easy in C# (a couple of lines of code at most). In PowerShell 2, you can make the commandlets directly in PowerShell too (since PowerShell -is-.NET anyway).
I'm using Powershell embedded in my applications (as a script host), as well as through PowerGUI (if you never tried it, do so, its wicked to make administration consoles in a RAD fashion), and well, anything that doesn't require a full application (such as complex database update scripts that wouldn't be trivial in raw SQL, even for a DBA)... totally loving it. There's even some IDEs now that makes it easy to use PowerShell to make WinForm apps!
The Mono team plays both catchup and innovator. On one side they have to catch up with Microsoft's specs to stay compatible. On the other side, since they come afterward, they can do some stuff better, learning from the original's mistake. There's a Reflection-like API for Mono that totally one-up Microsoft's version in every ways, shape and form (I don't think its quite complete yet, but its almost there). Of course, since Mono is "pure managed code", usually that stuff will work on the "real".NET, but still. Its good stuff.
Hmm no. Pinvokes and COMs are freakishly obvious when you use them (you may end up using native code by using a wrapped library, yes. But thats by far the rarer scenarios, and are usually obvious...such as trying to connect to Active Directory), AND every last bits of documentation on MSDN discourage you from it. And a lot of the "hidden" ones (let say GDI+ in System.Drawing) are actually not even SUPPORTED in server environments (as in, MSDN clearly tells you "If you use this in a service or in a web app, and something blows up, you're shit out of luck).
B).NET 3.5 is nowhere close to 300 megs. ALL of the.NEt 3.5 version, including 32 and 64 bit versions, bundled together in one redistributable package is 300-350 megs. If you use the bootstrapper, its more like 60 megs. It will also be pushed via Windows Update once the SP1 bugs are fixed, and there's a much smaller "Client Profile" (as you mentionned) for desktop applications.
C) LINQ is part of the compiler, not the runtime. You can actually make an app for.NET 2.0 with LINQ, because once compiled, the runtime doesn't even know you used it, so of COURSE the client-only subset supports LINQ.
D) Since the vast majority of.NET apps are server side anyway, a -lot- of people are using.NET 3.5 already, as its almost 100% (not quite) backward compatible with only a few regressions...There's almost no reasons to upgrade. The 1.1 to 2.0 migration was a LOT more painful, and most companies did it within a year according to the statistics I read....NET 3.5 is even easier to migrate to, and the gain is greater.
What you are right on: yes, a lot of the incompatibilities will be because of p/invoke... one of the great feature of.NET is backward compatibility with native code and with COM... I've seen very few apps that didn't have at least a COM reference or two.
Well, no. The vast majority of times, it is either because A) Microsoft cough out new versions of.NET faster than you can blink, and Mono is always playing catching up... and the fact that if your fact has anything involving p/invoke (calling native code), a Mono port goes out of the Windows (unless you rewrite that part). Both of those situations are very common, and probably account for 90%+ of the incompatibilities.
Whats the point of comparing this with Adobe Air? Adobe Air is to leverage your web programming skills (yes, including jquery!), to make desktop applications (applications that normally are impossible on the web...for example, one that needs to access local ressources). Its complementary to everything else, it doesn't replace anything.
For things like Silverlight, the goal isn't even the result the end user sees. Ignoring the joke that was Silverlight 1, the idea is to be able to reuse.NET code (or to some extent,.NET skills if you don't have any code to reuse) in a browser. If you don't have any already existing code to reuse, and you're just as good in javascript as you are in another programming language, then of course Silverlight is pointless.
The decision here wouldn't even have to do with open source or abandoning a project or anything.
If you are in a situation where you have a choice (and can still feed your family) of not having a non-competition contract under your belt, then you want to make sure to never sign one, ever.
Why would you reduce your long term worth for a temporary position (in this day and age, even so called permanent positions are temporary)? Not worth it. You'll lose money in the long run.
As the other person who answered you stated...people don't give a flying duck about laws in general. If they won't get caught, they'll break it. Only heavy criminal offense such as murder (and even then...) will not be ignored even if you can't get caught.
the UI is the most insignificant change that was made to Vista. The graphic sub system (not the part you see, but the "engine"), the security architecture, the network stack, all of the management tools (even the task manager!), all of the enterprise services (mostly useful for developers, but IIS jumped up 2 full numbered versions between XP and Vista, but its not the only one that was upgraded... a large part of the COM+ stack did, and its not only useful for servers), new multi-threading primitive, enhanced.NET integration, IPv6 used for everything that can use it by default, enhanced diagnostic tools (like the ability to do a hang dump without extra tools), on top of all of the new WinServer 2008 integration...
The GUI part could go away and it wouldn't matter. That said, for a home user, the GUI is virtually the only thing that matters, so a lot of the "under the hood" changes that MacOSX undertakes don't matter all that much either, compared to the new shiny keyboard shortcuts and shell features.
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Even if your app is 100% standard compliant, it may not be cross browser. Not even if you pull IE out of the equation. Not even if you ONLY TARGET FIREFOX (there are differences between FF2 and FF3. FF2 doesn't even fully implement CSS 2 itself...)
So by now, devs have reverted to another philosophy: make websites that are crossbrowser, and -mostly- standard compliants.
If you look at some of the most heavily cross browser web sites out there, especially the ones that are extremely backward compatible (down to Netscape 4), they are in HTML 4 quirk mode, and not standard at all. But they work better than most.
The standard also doesn't dictate defaults, which is quite the big hole. Being standard compliant doesn't help too much. Add that the standard evolves extremely slowly, and if you want to get the job done, you need to bypass it.
Thats why the W3C stuff is a standard proposition. No one "has" to adopt it. There are good standards out there, but as a general rule, anything coming out of the W3C is a joke of a swiss cheeze. Looked at the XQuery specs lately? My significant other works on a project to implement a full XQuery engine. A -lot- is left to interpretation, is loosely defined, etc. Same with XHTML and CSS. Even fully implemented, its vague, poorly designed (hellllooo.... versioning anyone? API 101?), and all around pathetic.
The faster we get rid of it, the better. Either by a proprietary spec (Flash may not be open source, but at least it freagin work, mostly cross platform if you don't care to use the latest version at all time...better than XHTML/CSS anyway...), either by a new standard body that doesn't suck at -everything- they do. XQuery, XHTML, CSS, SOAP, XSD, XML... can they do ANYTHING right?
Ahh sorry, I worded it wrong. I meant that the Windows variant was not pure managed, thus making it really hard to "copy".
Im interested btw on what exactly your app choked in WinForm? Just for personal reference.
Thats because you're using WinForms, a component of mono that is A) new, B) not pure managed at -all- Its all Win32 APIs in the back), C) a legal minefield.
Basically everything UI, so you need to use an open source UI framework like GTK# or something (if memory serves), Moonlight, etc.
IP Addresses on everything is useful so you can ping the chocolate cake you made to see if your significant other stole it.
And then it will take another year or two before you're in a position to move up, and by then, that company will be in the same damn situation (unable to replace the QAs), and make the same decision.
Oh, some companies will be different. All 3 of em. Good luck finding them. Its like that with everything. I've seen a guy (in his late 20s) who was hired as a cobol programmer, with the promise he'd be promoted to a .NET or Java dev if he proved himself for a bit. But a cobol programmer with modern technologies knowledge (especially useful for interop with newer systems) are extremely rare, so they never wanted him in another position. He eventually had to quit, and he did all that for nothing.
Repeat for all similar scenarios.
I had already posted about the 3.5SP1 thing (replying to myself) right after posting the above, if you didn't notice :)
And yeah, 4.0 will be a major version, but it could be a major version like 3.5, which cannot break backward compatibility, or only breaks a little, and thus doesn't end up running side by side. They didn't decide yet, from what I was told in discussions with various managers at Microsoft.
It -does- break compatibility more so than 3.5, thats for sure. Bugs I reported from 2.0 that were put as "Won't fix" because of the compatibility constraints were reopened and fixed for 4.0. So I guess you're right, they won't have much choice but to make it side by side... but its not officially decided, not even internally, as far as I'm told.
oh, and between 3.5 and 4.0, we have 3.5 SP1, which is about as big a change as 2.0 to 3.0 (actually, bigger changes), and has some regressions. Again, doesn't make any fucking sense.
That still doesn't beat the .NET framework naming convention.
1.0 -> 1.1, breaking change, run side by side.
2.0 breaking change, change of the compiler (ok, so that makes sense.
3.0, just an extra set of libs for 2.0, no change beyond that (wtf)
3.5, NOT a breaking change over 2.0, but an extremely major version (bigger changes than for all of the previous versions, though non-breaking). Still refered to 2.0 for configuration purposes, like in IIS, as the CLR didn't change.
4.0 (tentative, most likely will run side by side).
It doesn't make any fucking sense.
Most companies won't let you do that. Why? A good QA is a -lot- harder to find than a good programmer. We only have one QA where I work, and at this point, she has gathered enough knowledge and skill to be a senior architect or maybe a business analyst. They won't move her, she's the only QA we can get. She's already QA-in for 3 teams on her own because we can't find anyone else worth their salt.
So she gets the shaft. The guy who submitted the article is probably in the same situation. All "good" QAs are.
Silverlight 1.0 had no data controls in general, it was just for vectorial drawing and animations. Just a marketing trick to get the name out there... originally, Silverlight 2.0 was supposed to be the "first". It went from being WPF/E, to Silverlight, to Silverlight 1.1, to Silverlight 2.0.
Wasn't the xceed grid for WPF, not Silverlight, though?
As long as its safe, simple, and not too expensive... its fine. Your example of shaving is one of em... its pretty much a standard, and its been accepted over hundreds of years. Another example is how african-american women will very commonly get their hair strenghtened. More awkward, but ok.
Where its going to be a mess is when kids get made fun at and shunned because their parents didn't have the 50000$ to get their genes fixed up while they were in the womb to fit some new standard of beauty.
As with everything, the problem with these technologies aren't the technologies themselves: its that human society and moral rules are VERY slow to evolve, while technology comes fast. If this is introduced gradually, very slowly over 200 years...it would fit in -just fine-. If its introduced and within the span of 20 years it goes from inexistant to 30%+ of people using it, we're screwed.
So what you're saying is, since I'm using the longest freagin key that my router allows, and I used a cryptosecure generator to create it (its totally random), I'm more or less safe?
Microsoft has a bunch of labs/departments dedicated to just making stuff until one catches on... a bit like Google, but instead of being "everyone", its some departments. So they'll make stuff like this or DeepZoom, which may or may not catch on... others like Spec# may have more potential.
No, it doesn't. It prompt you for each and every change you try to do in a non-elevated window. In that situation, Linux will simply tell you "tough luck!"
If you run the actual -explorer- as administrator (just one window, which is more or less as easy to do as it is in other OSs), then you will only get the prompt once: to open the explorer. Then you can do whatever as much as you want.
Oh that would be something. They need to let us register domain names that look like IP addresses... add sub domains, and I could map something in the format XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX to some IPv6 address! Epic!
LINQ maps to the extension methods defined in System.Core, but you can bundle that DLL with your app. Even more so, most of the extension methods it maps to are trivial, you can create them yourself. So yes, it -will- work, and I have working prototypes of it running on 2.0. Even more so, there are blog entries from MS's employees on how to do it (its not supported, but it IS possible).
For redistributing with my programs, I'd redistribute the .NET 3.5 client profile, which weights around 30 megs.
And finally, .NET 3.0 has 4 components, and one of em is fully supported in VS2005. There's more apps using it than you'd think.
PowerShell is sick. If you have .NET programmers, its even better. Making custom command-lets is amazingly easy in C# (a couple of lines of code at most). In PowerShell 2, you can make the commandlets directly in PowerShell too (since PowerShell -is- .NET anyway).
I'm using Powershell embedded in my applications (as a script host), as well as through PowerGUI (if you never tried it, do so, its wicked to make administration consoles in a RAD fashion), and well, anything that doesn't require a full application (such as complex database update scripts that wouldn't be trivial in raw SQL, even for a DBA)... totally loving it. There's even some IDEs now that makes it easy to use PowerShell to make WinForm apps!
The Mono team plays both catchup and innovator. On one side they have to catch up with Microsoft's specs to stay compatible. On the other side, since they come afterward, they can do some stuff better, learning from the original's mistake. There's a Reflection-like API for Mono that totally one-up Microsoft's version in every ways, shape and form (I don't think its quite complete yet, but its almost there). Of course, since Mono is "pure managed code", usually that stuff will work on the "real" .NET, but still. Its good stuff.
Hmm no. Pinvokes and COMs are freakishly obvious when you use them (you may end up using native code by using a wrapped library, yes. But thats by far the rarer scenarios, and are usually obvious...such as trying to connect to Active Directory), AND every last bits of documentation on MSDN discourage you from it. And a lot of the "hidden" ones (let say GDI+ in System.Drawing) are actually not even SUPPORTED in server environments (as in, MSDN clearly tells you "If you use this in a service or in a web app, and something blows up, you're shit out of luck).
Thats very wrong.
A) .NET 3.0 is included with Vista
B) .NET 3.5 is nowhere close to 300 megs. ALL of the .NEt 3.5 version, including 32 and 64 bit versions, bundled together in one redistributable package is 300-350 megs. If you use the bootstrapper, its more like 60 megs. It will also be pushed via Windows Update once the SP1 bugs are fixed, and there's a much smaller "Client Profile" (as you mentionned) for desktop applications.
C) LINQ is part of the compiler, not the runtime. You can actually make an app for .NET 2.0 with LINQ, because once compiled, the runtime doesn't even know you used it, so of COURSE the client-only subset supports LINQ.
D) Since the vast majority of .NET apps are server side anyway, a -lot- of people are using .NET 3.5 already, as its almost 100% (not quite) backward compatible with only a few regressions...There's almost no reasons to upgrade. The 1.1 to 2.0 migration was a LOT more painful, and most companies did it within a year according to the statistics I read... .NET 3.5 is even easier to migrate to, and the gain is greater.
What you are right on: yes, a lot of the incompatibilities will be because of p/invoke... one of the great feature of .NET is backward compatibility with native code and with COM... I've seen very few apps that didn't have at least a COM reference or two.
Well, no. The vast majority of times, it is either because A) Microsoft cough out new versions of .NET faster than you can blink, and Mono is always playing catching up... and the fact that if your fact has anything involving p/invoke (calling native code), a Mono port goes out of the Windows (unless you rewrite that part). Both of those situations are very common, and probably account for 90%+ of the incompatibilities.
Whats the point of comparing this with Adobe Air? Adobe Air is to leverage your web programming skills (yes, including jquery!), to make desktop applications (applications that normally are impossible on the web...for example, one that needs to access local ressources). Its complementary to everything else, it doesn't replace anything.
For things like Silverlight, the goal isn't even the result the end user sees. Ignoring the joke that was Silverlight 1, the idea is to be able to reuse .NET code (or to some extent, .NET skills if you don't have any code to reuse) in a browser. If you don't have any already existing code to reuse, and you're just as good in javascript as you are in another programming language, then of course Silverlight is pointless.
Different problems, different solutions.
The decision here wouldn't even have to do with open source or abandoning a project or anything.
If you are in a situation where you have a choice (and can still feed your family) of not having a non-competition contract under your belt, then you want to make sure to never sign one, ever.
Why would you reduce your long term worth for a temporary position (in this day and age, even so called permanent positions are temporary)? Not worth it. You'll lose money in the long run.
As the other person who answered you stated...people don't give a flying duck about laws in general. If they won't get caught, they'll break it. Only heavy criminal offense such as murder (and even then...) will not be ignored even if you can't get caught.
the UI is the most insignificant change that was made to Vista. The graphic sub system (not the part you see, but the "engine"), the security architecture, the network stack, all of the management tools (even the task manager!), all of the enterprise services (mostly useful for developers, but IIS jumped up 2 full numbered versions between XP and Vista, but its not the only one that was upgraded... a large part of the COM+ stack did, and its not only useful for servers), new multi-threading primitive, enhanced .NET integration, IPv6 used for everything that can use it by default, enhanced diagnostic tools (like the ability to do a hang dump without extra tools), on top of all of the new WinServer 2008 integration...
The GUI part could go away and it wouldn't matter. That said, for a home user, the GUI is virtually the only thing that matters, so a lot of the "under the hood" changes that MacOSX undertakes don't matter all that much either, compared to the new shiny keyboard shortcuts and shell features.