Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 20th Feb 2002 18:45 UTC
A lot of people have trouble understanding what .NET really is and what its goals are. Mostly because Microsoft has done a good job of confusing everybody using terms that are not self-explanatory or with terms that mean more that one thing. This editorial will present my thoughts on .NET, what it really is, what its motivations and goals are, and why it is the next "big thing." Should we embrace it or fear it? Both, I daresay.
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Thank you for your oppertunism, Eugenia. It all seems too good to be true. It is indeed the next step in evolution. But I still see a very strong need for an operating system. How are we going to interact with these applications? Mind melt?
What I'm afraid for is:
a) .NET will enable apps to talk to each other, but there is such a large misfit in all these libraries, objects and such that it will become one big soup that will happily digest your yesteryear's undies.
I had my share of experience letting apps talke togheter. I did it in Arena, Access and VBA (Arena is simulation software) with OLE and RMI in Java. I can say one thing: interapp communication sucks so far: undocumented functions that don't work properly, crashing apps etc. Don't pull open the MFC hell.
People have been talking about re-use of code for years, component based development yada yada. That was the previous programming 'heaven'. And the reasons CBD hasn't become heaven, isn't because you couldn't 'talk' to other libraries. It has more todo with reasons of trust ("not invented here" syndrome) and the fit between your demands and the other libraries or applications capabilities. I see it as the previous step in the evolution, and it was (is) slow and painful. I don't see how .NET can change this fundamentally.
b) Having had experience with Microsoft, it will propably take another 3 releases (and years) before anything exciting will come up (that works).This has been a trademark of Microsoft: at first it doesn't seem that bad at all, but once you dig deaper, you fall into the trenches. I'm totally technology wise speaking, not business wise! I don't have any programming experience in .NET, so flame me if I'm wrong here.