The end of last month marked the third anniversary of Microsoft’s launch of its .Net strategy, which executives such as Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said at the time was a “bet-the-company thing.” But three years later, reactions are mixed as to whether that strategy, along with the vision that accompanied it, has played out as the Redmond, Wash., software developer had hoped.
.Net: 3 Years of the ‘Vision’ Thing
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I would have to say that the .Net phenenom(did I spell that right?) is just hype with a lot of buzz words. Don’t get me wrong, folks are using .Net, but are they using it they way Microsoft envisioned it? No, it is not.
Secondly, the platform was hyped so much that a lot of confusion took place on “what is .Net?” Even Uncle Bill and I believe the Sweating Dancing Monkey admit this. Some folks balked and some actually bought into it. The question is, can Microsoft recover from this blunder of over-hyping .Net? This will remain to be seen.
and I haven’t heard much lately (really at all this year I think) about .Net. I’ve heard rumblings that Explorer for Longhorn is being rewritten (at least in part) with C# and/or the .Net frameworks, which might be .Net’s first Killer App, assuming it is true. Anyone else know about this?
And in other news, water is wet, the sun will rise in the east tommorrow, and citizens will continue to pay government mandated taxes for the forseeable future.
But I have to wonder… has Microsoft lost interest in .NET because they didn’t expect an alternative, open source .NET framework to sprout up as fast as Mono has? At least in part, it seems like a logical hypothesis.
You want to know what .NET was all about? Microsoft expected it to replace java, and soon. It didn’t succeed, so the technology and synergy, I love that word, around it is basicly worthless. It will die off slowly without Microsoft continuing their belief that they can make it replace java.
Personally I think Microsoft should just throw more money at it. Who knows, maybe one it will replace java or the next best thing. I don’t care.
But I think Microsoft has more to worry about from Linux than java, these days. We’ll see.
One of our systems at work is running .Nuts. Initially we weren’t told that it would require .Nuts framework to be loaded. Later on we found out that it was needed for the software to run. The support people are logging in remotely through VPN and working on it. Several months (not kidding) later and several updates later they are STILL working on it. We don’t even consider it anymore as we now never expect it to ever really work or be productive. .Nuts…what a joke!
(I really am refering to .Net)
and remarkably its the same software with a new name and ppl pay money hmmm
3 years down the road, and after several millions were confused as to what was .NET (a server? an OS? a framework? always kinda asking “what is the matrix?” but applied to real-life stuff), it has got to earn the award for best screwed-up marketing strategy.
Anytime, Microsoft has a “bet the company” product, you know it is going to be extremely bad for the computer industry. In fact, while Microsoft hypes the changes and revolution their products will bring the industry, the sad truth is that the success of their products can only be measured by how little the industry changes. Microsoft is only interested in one thing and that is to mantain their desktop monopoly. The only way to keep this monopoly is to keep the computer paradigm the same.
The last time Microsoft had a “bet the company” product was Internet Explorer. Yet, besides gaining marketshare, it failed to reinvent the internet as it was promised to do. Microsoft promised a fully interactive internet, one where the line where your computer ends and the internet begin was completely blurred. It was supposed to reinvent computers. It didn’t do any such thing. Instead, it killed off the competition. Since that time, the internet has had no innovation. We are stuck were we were in 95, using the same static web pages using the same web browser design. In effect, Microsoft has succeeded in making the internet just another application you run on your desktop, a small part of the overall Operating System.
So if you want to measure the success of .NET, you won’t find it in any revolution in coding. You won’t find a new paradigm in computing that has revolutionized the entire industry. The way you will be able to measure the success is on how little the industry changes. It would be considered a success if people are still stuck using proprietary languages and proprietary operating systems. It would be considered a success if programs still cannot talk to each other. It will be considered a success if nothing changes yet people are still forced to use Windows for compatibility sakes.
…and I hope they stick to it. There’s a potential for unification there that just didn’t exist with Java. You can choose your own favorite language, get great interoperability with other languages (even C), fast and portable executables…and even pointer math if you want it!
C++ and Java have gone out the window for me. C for speed-critical code, and C# for the rest.
And you can get C# standard edition for $100. MS has really changed my opinion of them.
…is the same as all other Windows technologies – inconsistency. I tried to using C#. I was spending more time resolving inconsistencies between the API documentation and it’s actual behaviour.
blah.
QT all the way!
“…using the same static web pages…”
Has nothing to do with MS. I mean, if you want to see what they’re idea of a modern web page is, you know where to go. Personally, I think the “dynamic” nature of their site is infuriating, and the speed and simplicity of static web pages is refreshing after browsing ms.com for a while.
“…using the same web browser design.”
Because it works. If you’re going to complain that browsers haven’t changed, you’ll have to look further than MS as there are many other browsers that use the same basic concept. Why not blame Be Inc for making NetPositive, as it’s even (gasp) *simpler* than IE!
“In effect, Microsoft has succeeded in making the internet just another application you run on your desktop, a small part of the overall Operating System.”
That seems to be what people want. Seriously, how often have you heard somebody say, “gee, I wish the internet were more integrated with my operating system”? Maybe MS just thought people might like more integration, and it turned out that they didn’t care, or worse, were annoyed by the “Web channels”-style ideas in Win98 first edition. And again, you’ll have to look further than MS if you want to place blame. You’ll have to blame most of the competition for not innovating either. You think, say, Mandrake has better web integration?
“It would be considered a success if people are still stuck using proprietary languages and proprietary operating systems.”
Wow, it must be a real failure then, since C# is on its way to ANSI standardization and Mono is in great working shape. Do you suppose MS considers that a failure? I wonder why they’d work to have C# standardized then…
Could be .Net is “a better Java than Java”, which sounds good until you remember that OS/2 was billed as a better Windows than Windows. Then as now, the business aspects of multi-vendor, industrywide support and interoperability are more compelling than narrow technical claims. As for multiple languages, I don’t see much advantage in getting a choice between VB.NET, managed C++, and C# since you have to code against the same libraries and virtual machine environment in each case.
“Bet the company” is just Microsoft marketing speak for any major new initiative. They’ll do quite well regardless of whether .NET tanks or not.
“That seems to be what people want.”
Most people don’t know what they want. They take what is given to them, and use what their friends are using, they get what is at the local megastore (like Best Buy) because it is convenient.
Most people don’t know what they want.
And I guess you know what’s best for people…or maybe you would like Richard Stallman deciding what’s “best” for people.
If you want to see what a .NET application looks like, take a gander at the Microsoft CRM, uh, thing. Needs a P4-based server and client to run reasonably well. And don’t mind the occasional script errors popping up in IE either… Blech.
Three Step process to find out if you are a troll:
1. Take a look at the old Windows APIs (like, for example, MFC, ATL, COM, OLE etc). Makes you vomit, doesn’t it?
2. Then take a look at the .NET framework APIs that replaced them.
3. And then tell me that .NET is not a *huge* improvement.
Either you have no clue at all, or you are lying.
.NET is a *huge* improvement for Microsoft Developers. The branding strategy of naming everything .NET was totally fucked up, but the underlying technology is great and will have a huge impact in computing even 20 years from now.
Ximian have the right approach: take the best technology and build on top of it. And they should not be ashamed of copying .NET, since .NET itself copied quite a few things from the Unix way, and Linux is a Unix clone after all…
But I came here for an argument!
Oh, I’m sorry… this is abuse!
But seriously… The .NET framework is a correction of something Sun messed up w/in Java. .NET’s concept of allowing any language to be used with a single framework is good. Anyone who’s taken the time to identify what the .NET framework is, and what makes it unique, would be hard pressed to argue that, I think. It is a logical progression from the write-once-run-anywhere concept.
I’m glad the Mono project is advancing. I am looking forward to it supporting Java and C.
“However, GM’s Scott issued a strong warning to Microsoft, Sun and the other players in the Web services industry, that enterprises will not tolerate the standards wars of the past. “We have no appetite for it,” he said.”
Kind of makes you wonder if this guy crawled out of a cave yesterday or what. Is this what reading 10 years of CIO magazine does to your powers of observation? It’s everyone else’s fault that MS refuses to adhere to standards that were N.I.H.
.NET’s concept of allowing any language to be used with a single framework is good.
No it isn’t.
.NET’s concept of allowing any language to be used with a single framework is good.
No it isn’t.
Now that is just the damn best argument I have heard in a long time.
.NET’s concept of allowing any language to be used with a single framework is good.
No it isn’t.
Personally I think the idea of being able to use which ever language that you prefer is good, after all different languages are focused at different things. Unfortunantly the way MS has done it means that you cannot really use any language. You have to use the .NET version of that language which will have some subtle differences to work with the framework. Kind of what they did to their Java but now many more languages.
A bad Monty Python reference (per martin’s post), sorry.
I agree with chrisb. DCOM actually did allow multiple implementation languages, at the cost of rather crufty interface logic for non-Visual Basic programmers. .Net’s approach is superficial – “skinned languages” is an apt term I’ve heard people use to describe it.
.NET’s concept of allowing any language to be used with a single framework is good.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is.
Speaking of Python, I understand de Icaza & Co. will be working on a compiler for it as well. Could be interesting if they don’t force significant platform (as in .NET) dependencies into the syntax, as y’all are suggesting.
is a standard set of window APIs and a Srcypting environmnet for windows that is powerful enough to write full blown apps with it….woo a replacemnet for Basic with system level calls!!!!
The best approach to application development is still native code applications using well established langiages for the purpose like C or C++ if you are a professional and
FreePascal (www.freepascal.org) or compiled BASIC (www.powerbasic.com) if you are still in the learning phase of development. However if you insist on “managed” application development I believe that Java is still the best bet because Sun is allowing for at least some true cross platform capability including to free software platforms. .Net however is simple another Windows lock in device designed to mantain a monopoly, and don’t tell me about “Mono” or dotGNU. Those are just highly dangerous patent traps waiting to blow up in our faces like another SCO.
I like Java better because I will only use Linux and Microsoft wants total control at all costs. That’s where all or nothing strategies come from, the idea that they want to control everyone.
The .Net framework API is much nicer than the system API (which is being reduced in Longhorn). Microsoft will not conform to standards however Sun’s Java probably will and therefore it is a better choice for compatibility and reliability. Web standards will evolve, over time, and that’s how technology progresses rather than hype and marketing.
10 PRINT “The Commodore will rise again!!!”
20 GOTO 10
All .Net provided is just a wrapper for VB. To us as developer .Net projects has been a total failure and waste of time.
We are sticking to J2EE which is scalable, stable and portable.
I don’t think Microsoft will kill it off. Instead they’ll do what most companies do and flog it like a dead horse. A few suckers will jump on board because they’re too computer illiterate to question the technical aspects of .NET, however, the majority have stuck with Java.
Unlike .NET, SUN, the main pusher actually develops a JVM for THREE DIFFERENT OPERATING SYSTEMS, Solaris (x86 and SPARC), Linux and Windows. Here are some questions for the .net fan boys:
1) When is .NET framework for Itanium going to be delivered? Java has already arrived for Itanium.
2) Where are the multiple versions for different platforms Microsoft promised? and don’t point to the SharedSource implementation, it lacks winforms, COM+ support, asp.net etc etc. All the goodies that are available only on Windows.
3) Where are all these .NET backers? How come after THREE years we don’t see any 100% pure .NET applications from either Microsoft or any of their sycophants?
4) Office 2003 is still native, how come it isn’t .NET Framework based? didn’t they hype managed C++ as a simple tweak and a recompile away?
5) Where are the .NET orientated mobile phone devices? they’ve been hyped for how long yet none actually exist?
…and I hope they stick to it. There’s a potential for unification there that just didn’t exist with Java. You can choose your own favorite language, get great interoperability with other languages (even C), fast and portable executables…and even pointer math if you want it!
C++ and Java have gone out the window for me. C for speed-critical code, and C# for the rest.
And you can get C# standard edition for $100. MS has really changed my opinion of them.
1) Netbeans is free. I use it all the time for my java programming with sheading a drop of sweat. I’ve recently had a look at Eclipse and all I can say is WOW! and as for 3.0, Microsoft you better start investment boot loads of money into VS IDE because Eclipse 3.0 will make your current IDE obsolete, even for the point-n-drool programmer.
2) Pointers, GREEEEEEEEEEEEAT, buffer overflow heaven. If you want to do mathematical caculations, get a clue and use Fortran. That is what is was designed for.
Better yet, I was screwing around with it and rang up to ask a question to a “Microsoft guru” asking what is the quivilant to :
dim strFooBah as string
FooBah = InputBox(“Please enter foobah”)
no one at Microsoft could give me a work around or an euqivilant function using C#. Btw, this was the Microsoft Canberra Office.
Is there ANY so-called “C# guru” who can help me, or are people being quiet because of a deficiency.
.NET’s concept of allowing any language to be used with a single framework is good.
No it isn’t.
Now that is just the damn best argument I have heard in a long time.
No it isn’t.
FWIW, here’s my opinion of .Net. I started using it when it was just the PDC, and then was on a production project that used it for ASP.Net development beginning while it was still in Beta. Most recently, I wrote a .Net service to act as an interface between two systems.
VB.Net: VB is finally a real language. I hated all versions of VB up to VB.Net (I had taken a compiler class in college and I strongly felt that VB was a hacked [in the bad sense] together language). VB.Net is internally consistent (at least for my needs).
ASP.Net: I never coded in ASP, but found going to ASP.Net to be frustrating. There are significant improvements over ASP — and if you are stuck in ASP, it is very worthwhile to migrate to ASP.Net… however, I personally felt that there had to be a better way to do web development. I’m not sure yet what that better way is yet:-)
Windows Services: It was very easy to make a multi-threaded, networking service w/ .Net. My understanding that to do it in VC++ is not fun, but it is very simple to create a service w/ VB.Net. I was allowed to focus on the unique functionality of my service rather than on the boilerplate.
All in all, if you are stuck in a MS world, going to .Net from a previous MS development product is not a bad route to go. If you have a choice though, you might want to pick up some other technology. Personally, I have been working w/ Python for the last month, and have been loving it and have found myself to be more productive than I was with .Net — so looking at alternatives is not a bad route to go.
My 2 cents..
Sean
The .NET “platform” is a bit of a non-issue, I think… XML web services are (unfortunately, IMHO) catching on, and a “big” thing for businesses, even if they’re mostly meaningless to personal desktop users.
As a developer, the .NET Framework, C#, and VisualStudio.NET are awesome. I like them a lot, even if I’m at work documenting XML web service stuff.
And as spooky as it may seem, C# is more “open” than Java (it’s an ECMA standard, soon to be an ISO standard), and there are two open-source implementations of C# and the .NET Framework (Mono and dotGNU; dotGNU seems to be the furthest along).
With these technologies, Microsoft has done a very good thing.
– chrish
I forgot to mention… the .NET Framework SDK costs you as much as a Java SDK… nothing. You get the command-line C# compiler, command-line WSDL tools, and a bunch of other goodies.
Not nearly as nice as working in VisualStudio, but it’s all there.
Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t run on other platforms; grab dotGNU instead and go to town.
– chrish
There are some very strange comments about .NET here, ranging from .NET is a wrapper for VB to .NET being a scripting environment, all very odd, seems people don’t understand what .NET is.
Anyway, I’d like to say that multilanguage support is very useful, we currently have an application that is a mix of Java, C++, C, FORTRAN and Delphi. To be able to deal with all these in one dev environment and seamless integrate them would be very useful.
Having used both Java nd .NET I have to admit that I think .NET seems to be the more flexible of the two, calling out to legacy code is much easier, GUI development is much easier (I’ve only dabbled in Java GUI development but I have colleagues who seems to spend months just developing the most basic GUI interfaces using SWING), building web services is trivial and C# removes some of the issues which Java has although most of these will be resolved in Java 1.5 by the looks of it, etc, etc. Of course the big issue for many is cross-platform development but mono has that base covered.
As for .NET being a microsoft baby I don’t think that matters (I don’t get all worked up over that sort of thing as so many do), even if they drop the ball and loose interest in .NET (god knows what they’d replace it with anyway), we have mono et al, which has all the .NET benefits plus it’s cross platform and being open-source it is here to stay. I also don’t fret over the patent issues that people are so fond of bringing up. In the current climate, if microsft even attempts to muzzle mono through legal action there would be such a huge outcry that it would probably significantly damage microsoft’s image, something they can’t afford to happen.
Note that the recent stirrings from SUN to imporve Java, particularly the changes going into 1.5 look like they’re a direct result of competition from .NET, so even if you don’t like .NET be thankful that at least it means Java will improve as a result.
There are some very strange comments about .NET here, ranging from .NET is a wrapper for VB to .NET being a scripting environment, all very odd, seems people don’t understand what .NET is.
One of th big problems is that MS has surrounded .Net with so much vapour that nobody understands what it is. Not even MS. That was their big problem. Is it renting applications? A new branding stratergy? XML Web Services? Seemless intergration of web apps to the desktop (e.g. passport logins of network apps)? A better MFC? A better Java? All have been touted as what .Net is from time to time.
As a consultant for a VB and Java software house, I have to say .NET and especially VB.NET is a real breath of fresh air. We use Java because our software needs to scale to the level of large AIX DB2 boxes and because our larger customers trust J2EE software and are used to working with it. However for the smaller datacentric applications, using VB.NET and web services has been easy and quick to migrate to from VB.
Microsoft is really supporting this push to dotNet and the amount of documentation and training available is staggering. It’s certainly a radical departure from the old COM days and I personally am enjoying not only being looked after by the MS boys but also being listened to as well.
.NET implementations ARE appearing in the large corporate circles. Of course it’s going to take some time before it becomes widely accepted, but remember corporations are always slow to accept new technologies, these are slow moving beasts who are probably still running and supporting COBOL apps. Java has had quite a lengthy headstart in this area.
Anyway, good luck to MS on this one.
.NET’s concept of allowing any language to be used with a single framework is good.
No it isn’t.
Now that is just the damn best argument I have heard in a long time.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is.
Is there ANY so-called “C# guru” who can help me, or are people being quiet because of a deficiency.
Firstly, this has nothing to do with C#, what you’re talking about is the .NET Framework. From your VB example, you’d be best relating it to VB.NET, which is the OO equivalent. That being said, you’re not going to find a function per se that does what you’re looking for, you’d have to look in the .NET Framework class library for such a thing. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t find an InputBox class, or anything of the sort. The only premade dialog boxes are Color, File, Folder, Font, PageSetup, and Print dialogs ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cp… ).
Luckily, there is an abstract class CommonDialog which you’d be able to subclass yourself, allowing a custom form which interacts exactly as a system dialog would (be sure to use the DialogResult property). You probably won’t like that answer, because it takes more than two lines of code, but it’s the answer. On the other hand though, the InputBox function in VB is pretty clunky looking, and with .NET, you could spruce up your dialog pretty nicely with GDI+, painting it with a custom bitmap brush for that suave look-n-feel. Granted, you could do something similar in VB, but the standard Windows GDI isn’t all that inviting to the average VB programmer.
> “and even pointer math if you want it!”
>> “Pointers, GREEEEEEEEEEEEAT, buffer overflow heaven. If you want to do mathematical caculations, get a clue and use Fortran. That is what is was designed for.”
Erm..What?
Hot Tip #1: pointer arithmetic is not pointers + math, and in effect, has little to do with conventional mathematics at all.
He wasn’t talking about performing the kind of mathematical calculations Fortran is good at, he was saying that even in the managed world of .NET, C# allows you to not only reference unmanaged code, but create some of your own in ‘unsafe’ blocks.
Many of you seem to be still confused about what .NET is, which is understandable, cause .NET was and still is the name of the technology sorrounding the CLR and the .NET framework. It is technology for software developers, not for casual users, OS beta testers or journalists.
We all agree that Microsoft did a very bad marketing job by trying to blend everything in .NET. But .NET as a technology is extremely successful. It has been such a competitive treat for Java that Sun is changing Java to be more C# like. The open source implementation based on the .NET specification, Mono, also rocks. Forget about Microsoft abandoning it. It is their one and only software development story. If you don’t hear a lot about .NET in the media, don’t worry. When was the last time you heard about HTML?