http://www.osnews.com/story/9441/Microsoft_NET_The_Big_Picture Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:25:26 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Web Services at its Heart
The fundamental new technology at the core of .NET is web services."

Thank God that's it. I was getting worried until I read that. :-)

/me runs to create and consume some webservices. And you? Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Where did this text came from?
Microsoft website?

How can .net be so secure if anyone can just decompile the .net binaries and just expose my code? Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "It is widely acknowledged that Microsoft's tools are superior to its competitors' offerings in both learning curve and productivity. Microsoft made a prolonged and concerted effort to extend its IDE's so developers could have access to core .NET features "

mmm I expeted a neutral article about the .Net framework but after reading it. I am certainly that you are a Microsoft fanboy :s, common its just like a Microsoft Ad! Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Java is proprietary yet those who claim they are free software supporters support it. CLI is a standard. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Name one (1) IDE that is better than Visual Studio. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Vi! ;-D Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? edlin RULEZ... Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Name one (1) IDE that is better than Visual Studio.

IntelliJ IDEA
Eclipse
Delphi 2005

There's three! Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Name one (1) IDE that is better than Visual Studio"

IntelliJ (for Java though) ) Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Name one (1) IDE that is better than Visual Studio.

Yeah, Visual studio, and .NET in general, are the things that MS has certainly done very well. VS is Better than Java IDEs, C# is better than Java etc. also because they were intentionally meant to improve those Java-based tecnologies (i.e. best Java and C++ features together -> C#). Why would Mono & dotgnu people try to implement or copy the same ideas to their products so much if it wasn't good? Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That's right. Maybe they implemented Mono and DotGNU so they could use and create webservices. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Don't Net is Secure? Yeah right! Last I tried you can p/invoke win32 api calls from it ergo its no safer than the existing win32 API. Do you honestly expect virus writers not to p/invoke to hack your system?

MS IDEs are not bad but they are certainly not the best though most bloated perhaps. Delphi 2005 for one is far easier to use and every bit more productive.

A word about managed code and especially "Dont Net" in particular - they are extremely inefficient and abysmally slow in execution compared to unmanaged. If you think Office is slow and bloated now wait for the Dont Net version - it will be at least 3x slower!

Another myth I would like to dispell is that managed code is claimed to be a more productive environment than unmanaged ones - thats total cobblers as anyone who has used Delphi knows you get the fastest and most productive environment without all the runtimes, frameworks etc. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Name one (1) IDE that is better than Visual Studio"

Eclipse, but mainly because I am a Java developer. I have experimented somewhat with c# but in my opinion it is just a cheap ripoff of Java. I don't know about coding in c(++) with visual studio.
But the point remains the author only mentions positive facts and how great Microsoft products are. I don't want to look like a total Microsoft hater orso but its just the same tha what I would read in a cheap microsoft ad! Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Java is proprietary yet those who claim they are free software supporters support it. CLI is a standard."

You miss the point. CLI was a token standardization to fool people, while Microsoft goes on and creates a gigantic non-standard API system to make that CLI useful. Does Microsoft provide conformance testing for the .NET _platform_?

Java is actually quite non-proprietary. Sun controls the brand, the conformance tests, and provides the reference implementation, but anyone is completely free to implement Java and license the brand. This is light-years ahead of .NET, where lots of companies like BEA and IBM are independent vendors for J2EE and actually compete against Sun for market share. The source code to a large part of J2SE is also available, which is quite nice for troubleshooting. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Can I put my term papers on OSNews too? Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think you are too quick to brand the author. The article was pretty critical of MS for the most part, clearly pointing out the lock-in strategy that .NET is built on. If anything, it leaned to the anti-MS side. At worst, it is merely neutral. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Is Microsoft going to succeed in making .Net a hit and at the same time keeping it under control? I think so... To a large extent. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Part History, part marketing material, and part honesty...
"Although .NET makes liberal use of standards, it is essentially a lock-in mechanism for Microsoft products."

Its not the rah rah MS rulez article that some of you seem to think it is. Read the whole thing.

I say either be impartial, write for it, or write against it. This seems a little too much of all of the above. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "The introduction of Microsoft web services is an acknowledgement that the future of applications has moved from desktop GUI applications to web-centric browser based applications run across the internet, on .NET enabled servers." - no way.
How about all this stuff with Smart Client? May be web services are for opposite goals? Smart cliens can communicate with a server using web services and render of a client. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Here is what Bertrand Meyer said about .net:
http://archive.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/bmarticles/sd/dotn...
And since unlike most of the oss trolls around here he actually knows what he is talking about, i'll go with his opinion.
Truth is, that politics aside .net is quite good. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >But the point remains the author only mentions positive facts and how great Microsoft products are.

As the author of this article I would like to say that I have been critical of various Microsoft products and technologies and I am by no means anyone's fanboy. I cut my teeth on BSD UNIX, I have earned a paycheck developing in Java as well as writing Microsoft applications. I have developed on both proprietary and open source platforms.

As the first paragraph points out, this article is about the business strategy of .NET, not about its particular technologies or even their implementations. If you keep reading into the middle of the article, I think what you have to give Microsoft credit for is adopting their competitors' strengths and using their competitors' weaknesses. This is the brilliance of .NET, it's the business strategy, not the technology. It's not whether .NET runs slowly or whether non-managed code can circumvent security measures. It's about getting and keeping .NET in large and medium sized businesses.

This is what the Open Source community should learn. Microsoft is a reactive institution and has a brutal defense of thier product lines. And they have billions of dollars to spend on their strategies. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "How can .net be so secure if anyone can just decompile the .net binaries and just expose my code?"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dotfuscator/dotf3e5x.asp Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? .NET is only free if your time costs nothing...


(sorry, someone had to say it) Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Haven't some predictions of Linux come up with a number like 28 *billions* of dollars by 2008... (Googles)...

Oops, it seems to be more. 36 billions. See:

http://www.webwarrior.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&...

So who is going to win this battle of numbers and advertisements.

I've got some coins on Linux. :-) Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A word about managed code and especially "Dont Net" in particular - they are extremely inefficient and abysmally slow in execution compared to unmanaged. If you think Office is slow and bloated now wait for the Dont Net version - it will be at least 3x slower!

Uninformed lie, plan and simple. Both C# and Java programs are close to C/C++ speeds on most general apps. Memory usage is another story.

Another myth I would like to dispell is that managed code is claimed to be a more productive environment than unmanaged ones - thats total cobblers as anyone who has used Delphi knows you get the fastest and most productive environment without all the runtimes, frameworks etc.

I've never used Delphi, but you're telling me that it's productive because it doesn't have a framework?

Eclipse, but mainly because I am a Java developer. I have experimented somewhat with c# but in my opinion it is just a cheap ripoff of Java.

Another bitter java developer who can't stand that C# and the CLR are a little bit better than Java and the JVM and really can't challenge that on technical arguments, so is called "a cheap ripoff". Weakness.

You miss the point. CLI was a token standardization to fool people, while Microsoft goes on and creates a gigantic non-standard API system to make that CLI useful. Does Microsoft provide conformance testing for the .NET _platform_?

Oh yeah...Gates and company were gleefully rubbing their hands together while concocting their Dr. Evil plan to fool people by releasing ecma 334 and 335. Any more insightful comments from you? Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? And since unlike most of the oss trolls around here he actually knows what he is talking about, i'll go with his opinion.
Truth is, that politics aside .net is quite good.

Yeah, it's quite good...nothing revolutionary, but a step up from Java and the JVM. Of course the Microsoft haters don't even challenge .NET on the technical merits, so will scream lock-in and other assorted kook conspiracy theories about world domination.

I guess they hate Mono too, because it's Microsoft technology Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Actually almost ANY sentence!

>...future of applications has moved from desktop GUI >applications to web-centric browser based applications run
>across the internet, on .NET enabled servers.

All the future applications??? ;-)

>CLR adopted most of Java's features and virtually eliminated
>Java's competitive advantages.

Apples to bananas - should be readed VM, not Java...

>It also adopted Java's superior memory management garbage
>collection techniques...

Parallel GC please? Still several years behind...

>J2EE was a powerful enabling technology...

Where are the all those IBM, BEA, Sun, Oracle, SAP, Resin, JBoss, Jonas... now? It's funny to here about J2EE in the past anyway...

>Microsoft has long been the leader in developing powerful,
>usable, and consistent integrated development environments >(IDEs) for Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual J++

The best!!! Microsoft Visual Basic is the best of all Visual Basic in the world! :-)

>It is widely acknowledged that Microsoft's tools are
>superior to its competitors

Well even it has been posted before here... Just NOT!
I'm still waiting the Microsoft fix a 2 years old bug in Visual C# ASP - when you are trying to make html 4.0 compatible page with css styles it just rip it all after reopening a project! The solution proposed by Microsoft - don't do it! Do you get it? You can't do your ASP.NET html 4.0 compatible!

>One .NET feature which was to benefit end customers across
>the internet was Passport

That's true - WAS.

>Passport was a web service that would allow users to have
>the same user ID and password across the entire internet >for services like web mail, purchases on eBay and Amazon.

Not the best example. As far as I know eBay uses Java. Not sure about Amazon (but not Windows anyway).

I'm tired, sorry...

NET has a long long way ahead and not a fact that tomorrow Microsoft "invent" a new, better cool technology (i.e. longears) and AGAIN abandon it's customers. Amen. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Now that the author replied here I figured that it might actually be worth to read the article and I was not disappointed. How anybody can accuse the author of being a Microsoft fanboy is beyond me.

It really is a good overview over Microsofts strenght, if you want to call them that way and bussiness practices.

"Microsoft has shown that its strengths are not in introducing innovative technologies or revolutionary products. Its strengths lie in its ability to pick and choose technologies and products from the marketplace, to integrate them into its own product lineup and to execute brilliant market strategies against its competitors. Microsoft has shown yet again how it can formulate a strategy across a large part of its product lineup and successfully achieve that strategy."

Unfortunately nobody picked up on what this article was really about yet and we were instead treated to the old boring MS vs. M$ flamewars. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Unfortunately nobody picked up on what this article was really about yet and we were instead treated to the old boring MS vs. M$ flamewars.

Amen to that, Brother! Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Let me point out some of the key failures of .NET:

It´s not even platform independent from a MS OS point of view. Certain parts (specifically, the EnterpriseServices Namespace and others) really heavily on OS resouces (COM+, for this case). That means your .NET application might not even run on Windows 2000 to the full extent. JAVA has proven that a lot of the services offered by EnterpriseServices can be implemented platform independent.

And I don´t want to even think about .NET 2.0, or whatever will come AFTER Longhorn has shipped. I fully expect that the then new ".NET" will be incompatible with Windows XP or Windows 2003. On the same track, there are parts of .NET which might not be continued in furture versions. Talk about vendor-lock-in?

C# is some nice cross between Java and C++. But why, for god´s sake, would anyone introduce the concept of "unsafe" code into an otherwise nice and secure language?

Oh yeah, web services. Just who is using them? And bravo, brilliant inter-op...

I think the artice itself is quite all right, it represents large parts of MS business strategy.

And for my part, I was quite impressed when trying COM+ via C#. Probably by far the (easiest) way to do, even without VS. But even though I think .NET is the way to go for windows programmers (and a lot of smaller freeware apps are going .NET), I prefer Java. Even though it´s less appealing for desktop programming (although SWT is looking well in that area), it offers me plenty of choices: Lot´s of different IDEs (and programming concepts), lot´s of different APIs for allmost everything (XML e.g.), and it´s a lot less "dirty". Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? And criticize where you (MS) have failed with .Net and what's the next big step to improve it. I'm mostly interested in the later. What is, is. What will be is what is interesting.
For example, what are the expectations for Longhorn once it's stablished, from the .Net point of view. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? C# is some nice cross between Java and C++. But why, for god´s sake, would anyone introduce the concept of "unsafe" code into an otherwise nice and secure language?

Is it any less unsafe than JNI? Of course C# has a superior system of calling native code. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I liked very much of this article. It is not M$ propaganda but presents what M$ made to lock people to windows platform.

Unfortunatelly there are some M$ fanboys like Miguel Icaza who thins .Net is good for linux and free software.

Free software community should made another alternative, cloning Java and completing the features to be comparable (but not compatible) with M$ .Net. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The unsafe code blocks are one of the best things about C#. Take webcames with java. Generally you can only access them via pointers. If you want some functionality that deals with webcams, you have two choices: 1). hope Sun has provided some API support for it, 2). forget about it. If you want to do anything low level, this is a problem that shows up again and again. Unsafe code blocks are the solution to this problem.

Another very useful property of them: If you're very concerned about efficiency, you can just drop down and take care of object deletion yourself rather than wait for the garbage collector to do it for you.

Finally, it's not like anyone is forcing you to use unsafe code blocks. VS encourages you not use them and you have to set a compiler flag to use them at all. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In other words, it's formalized vaporware. :-) Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? CLI is an acronym for ``Command Line Interface.'' What you are meaning to refer to is ``CLR'' or ``Common Language Runtime.'' Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Free software community should made another alternative, cloning Java and completing the features to be comparable (but not compatible) with M$ .Net.

And when are we supposed to start using your hypothetical framework that competes with Java and .NET. 20-30 years from now? Think before you type. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What I'd like to see is an overview of the .NET platform in general. Something that isn't tied to MS technologies or keeps referring back to it. .NET is supposed to be platform-agnostic (or an independent platform in itself that can interoperate with others).

I'd like to see what .NET has to offer for software companies that have no intention of developing on MS platforms in particular. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'd like to see what .NET has to offer for software companies that have no intention of developing on MS platforms in particular.

First I'd like to see a company that "has no intention of developing on MS platforms in particular". Sounds like development platforms is the least of their worries. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Check out mono http://www.mono-project.com. Most of the framework is there. Windows Forms is getting a managed rewrite since they screwed up and chose a Wine-based implementation before. Most of the Microsoft namespaces won't be there, but you don't really need them. ASP.NET is there I think. Not sure about ADO.NET. Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Is it any less unsafe than JNI? Of course C# has a superior system of calling native code.

Of course JNI is safe... it doesn't work Actually I'm not kidding too much there. Anything other than "Hello World" using JNI can be a bit of a nightmare, especially as far as memory management goes. You have to make sure that every variable used in the native code has a Java object referencing it, else it's liable to get garbage collected and bring the house down. I've found that this particular issue is an awful pain to debug.

I've only used Mono's implementation of native code interface (not played with .Net itself), and i have to say it's much nicer. I believe that this alone will cause Mono/.Net to be a more popular option than Java on the desktop.

I still prefer to write my server side Java.... but that's another story... Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "CLI is an acronym for ``Command Line Interface.'' What you are meaning to refer to is ``CLR'' or ``Common Language Runtime."

CLI = Common Language Infrastructure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? CLI = Command Line Interface Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, I think the author did a great job. The article is well writen, with bibliography to support its statements. If we agree or disagree with the author's opinions, that's our business, not his. We all deserve, on the other hand, to state our ideas. And for this, I will say: I don't hate MS, neither admire its ways. But the idea of .Net is good. Its downside is, as the author said, the lock in with MS technology, but come on, even some guys in the open source community are trying to copy the concept (and even the whole framework), which I think is not a good idea. Open source people talk a lot about freedom of choice, and try to go against all MS represents, yet they try to create this "mono" thing. Well, maybe I'm an ignorant, but, aren't this people capable of creating something completely new, fully functional and original? I think they can, but instead they go the easy way... risking themselves to be a victim of MS and its IP war... Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Java is actually quite non-proprietary. Sun controls the brand, the conformance tests, and provides the reference implementation, but anyone is completely free to implement Java and license the brand. This is light-years ahead of .NET, where lots of companies like BEA and IBM are independent vendors for J2EE and actually compete against Sun for market share. The source code to a large part of J2SE is also available, which is quite nice for troubleshooting. "

Yea sure... just ask the FreeBSD folks... Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Uninformed lie, plan and simple. Both C# and Java programs are close to C/C++ speeds on most general apps. Memory usage is another story.

Not true. Managed code is only fast like that when you dont mix unmanaged with managed code (marshalling penalty) AND you dont create many objects (when you pass an object by reference it has to lookup up the pointer address from a list ergo the more objects you have the bigger that list and therefore the more expensive referencing an object becomes). Thats why java/Dont Net can be fast on the server but they are very slow in Gui apps which are heavily OO based.

I've never used Delphi, but you're telling me that it's productive because it doesn't have a framework?

No it has a VCL component library but it is statically and smart linked into the executable so there are no runtime distributables like the .Net framework. The static linking adds only a small amount to the size (typically less than 500kb to an executable).

Delphi 2005 has twin compilers for win32 and .Net so you can write the same code and compile in under both. Its great for comparing the performance difference between the two and dont net is definitely a LOT slower (by at least 3x for a large app). Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That was blown out of proportion. Sun doesent plan to discontinue FreeBSD's Java license, its being renewed. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Not true. Managed code is only fast like that when you dont mix unmanaged with managed code (marshalling penalty) AND you dont create many objects (when you pass an object by reference it has to lookup up the pointer address from a list ergo the more objects you have the bigger that list and therefore the more expensive referencing an object becomes). Thats why java/Dont Net can be fast on the server but they are very slow in Gui apps which are heavily OO based.

In .NET there are user-defined value types which live on the stack. Swing has been notorious for being sluggish in the past. Windows Forms are not slow for me, and SWT isn't slow.

No it has a VCL component library but it is statically and smart linked into the executable so there are no runtime distributables like the .Net framework. The static linking adds only a small amount to the size (typically less than 500kb to an executable).

I wish MS would put out a linker for .NET, even if it isn't crossplatform then and the resulting binary is huge.

Delphi 2005 has twin compilers for win32 and .Net so you can write the same code and compile in under both. Its great for comparing the performance difference between the two and dont net is definitely a LOT slower (by at least 3x for a large app).

Where are you coming up with the 3x number? I doubt that figure. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 01:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Java threatened to destroy Microsoft's competitive barriers."

Sooo, MSFT repsonded by introducing yet another "competitive barrier". Problem solved, no? Wed, 19 Jan 2005 03:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In .NET there are user-defined value types which live on the stack. Swing has been notorious for being sluggish in the past. Windows Forms are not slow for me, and SWT isn't slow.


Yes but user-defined value types have to be passed by value (you cant just pass a pointer to them as in unmanaged). That means you have to push all its members onto the stack - thats also slow and inefficient unless the value type is small.

Window.Forms is slowish on all but the most modern of machines when you create a large number of controls.

SWT wasn't too bad speed wise because it was very primitive. The richer and more object based the API the slower it will be.


Where are you coming up with the 3x number? I doubt that figure.
Again comparing the same code in Delphi 2005 compiled as win32 and .Net produces a significant performance difference in largish apps. The startup time of large .net apps is roughly 30 secs on my machine too which is more than three times slower than office so Im not simply picking a number at randomn. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 11:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't think so. Thats like saying sockets are at the heart of c programming. Sure they are important but they are just a library on top of the CLR the same way that sockets are a library on top of the c runtime. People might have fallen for the .net == web services spiel 3 years ago when it was launched - but now ? give me a break. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 12:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes but user-defined value types have to be passed by value (you cant just pass a pointer to them as in unmanaged).

Please do yourself a favor and stop talking. You've obviously never programmed for the .NET framework. There aren't pointers, but there are references.
public struct Moron { int i; }
public void Idiot(ref Moron m) {}

Avalon, being a completely .NET based UI library, is very fast, there are no performance problems with it. And the other advantages of managed code make any performance differences completely unimportant. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Your comments regarding the 3x slower performance for .NET is a bit ignorant... Anyone who knows anything about .NET is aware that when a .NET program loads for the FIRST time, the Just In Time (JIT) compiler is invoked to compile its assemblies. There are options and tools that come with the framework SDK to prevent this from happening... but of course you woundn't know that.

Subsequent loads of the binaries are not compiled.

Why don't you do a benchmark of processes after loading or subsequent executions. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? )Please do yourself a favor and stop talking. You've obviously never programmed for the .NET framework. There aren't pointers, but there are references.

It does not matter whether they are boxed or unboxed they are still slow. (unboxed have to be passed by value, boxed by reference - which is a slow process when you have loads of objects). I have programmed for .Net and it is a lot slower in heavy OO situations.

Your comments regarding the 3x slower performance for .NET is a bit ignorant... Anyone who knows anything about .NET is aware that when a .NET program loads for the FIRST time, the Just In Time (JIT) compiler is invoked to compile its assemblies. There are options and tools that come with the framework SDK to prevent this from happening... but of course you woundn't know that.

That is irrelevant to me as I dont care what its doing and I dont wanna wait ages for an app to start! Show me a .net GUI app that can load fast for the first time and then I will shut up. Oh by the way the ahead of time compiler cannot compile everything so there will always be a need for a JIT so it will always be slow loading first time - QED - I rest my case - .Net is *SLOW* Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 1. KDevelop is a better IDE than VS.NET

2. this whole article is a flamebait, and lots of people will bite it, just like me.

3. Please, ELQ, don't do this. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "First I'd like to see a company that "has no intention of developing on MS platforms in particular". Sounds like development platforms is the least of their worries."

The software world is larger than the desktop and small server space.

The company I work for specializes in global networking and large application solutions for airlines (we provide services for over 400 smaller airlines worldwide, and we maintain one of the largest communications networks on the planet), and most of our application infrastructure is living on either Unisys mainframes or on various Unix platforms.

Windows is simply not a viable option for certain kinds of software deployment. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? MS come with innovations!!!
Where's Java and Linux innovations?? nothing...

MS create billions of jobs!!! Your job too!

Linux come to destroy you life!!! Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "MS come with innovations!!!"

Humor me. List two innovations from Microsoft.

"MS create billions of jobs!!! Your job too!"

My job has little to do with Microsoft. The compiler we use, the operating system and development tools that we use, the general application environment that our software runs on, and the hardware platform living underneath it all is completely unrelated to Microsoft's offerings.

The same was true of my last contract job (even though that client was using a completely different language, environment, and hardware platform than we use in my current position), and it has been true of all of the programming positions I've held since 1988 (this is my fifth).

Microsoft influences many things, but not everything. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Some note...

Linux fans are KIDs... when you will go a MAN/Engineer and have an family you see who MS and Windows Tek save your lifes!

.NET its more produtive than Java, Delphi, etc.
.NET and VS.NET its the best dev environment that i have see. I am many old years of experience on Java/Linux/.NET/Win32 development... and I can tell that Windows Teks is the best and come to save my life!

ALL YOUR PCs, TEKs, ENTERPRISES, JOBS... ARE MADE BY MS TEKs!!!

Linux are only an stupid copy of Windows/Unix...

MS Windows Longhorn come to the best innovation/system of world... that linux can't copy!

Where's linux innovations? Where's linux responce to Avalon?! Linux create your enterprise/job? Are linux making PC and PC future?! NOOOOO

Linux its bad for economy, world security, enterprises, jobs, etc...
Linux come to free? NO... will come to cost more than Windows. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 17:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This discussion here is really a shame. First the author gets called a MS fanboy and the article a flaimbait. The only reason for this kind of behavior seems to be that the people commenting seem to lack even the most basic text comprehension skills.

On top of that we get to witness yet an other M$ suX0rs / MS ru10rs discussion with such gems as:
.net is slow
no it isn't
it is
it isn't
...

And still nobody (me included I admit) had anything usefull, interesting, insightful to say about the actual article.

I really think that serves as a reminder that you shouldn't post anything that goes beyond "Let me describe the installation of this new distribution in detail", or maybe "That's why I like WinXP" on a site like OSNews. It simply isn't fair to the author otherwise. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 17:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? No really. It seems this guy has been completely blinded by Microsoft's FUD.

He makes many many comparisons to Java. Why? Surely if the benefits of .NET were that great he could advocate the product without needing to compare and contrast with the language and approach that MS clearly gained "inspiration" from.

.NET is not the future of computer as this article seems to make out. An Java GUI application will run on Window, Linux, OS X, etc without any code modifications; A .NET application on the other hand won't. If has already been proven with Paint.NET

No offence but how old is this guy? Does he have any experience of working within a commericial environment using a multitude of vendors' tools and solutions. I doubt it.

.NET is ideal for a software solution that replies purely on Microsoft products. Not even Microsoft uses a 100% pure Microsoft solution (Xbox 2 development is undertaken by Apple Macs).

While companies are using .NET more I doubt we will ever see a large transition to Server 2003 when Linux is cheaper, faster and more secure. Typically Linux servers will then be running Java for their enterprise solution. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 17:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? He is mentioning Java a lot because Java was one of the main reason for MS' .net strategy in the first place.
And as the author clearly states, they took a whole lot from Java.

It's right there on the first page for Christ sake:
" A Tools Strategy
The Common Language Runtime (CLR) was a major advance from the previous Microsoft development environment and was also a move to counter the threat from Sun's "write once, run anywhere" Java development environment. The introduction of Java meant that the Java code written on a PC could also run on Linux, Novell, Macintosh, Sun workstations, and even IBM mainframes. Java threatened to destroy Microsoft's competitive barriers. Java started as a client-oriented application language but evolved to support web services and eventually provided a rich set of tools to create web-centric applications. Since its introduction Java has also gained great market share in back office operations, further cutting into Microsoft's profits.

Countering Rival Technologies
CLR adopted most of Java's features and virtually eliminated Java's competitive advantages. Specifically, CLR moved to a "managed code" paradigm, where applications run within a safe virtual area. It also adopted Java's superior memory management garbage collection techniques, increasing reliability of applications."

So what exactly is your problem?

Further the author doesn't make the point that .net is the future of computing, he makes the point that MS is selling it as the future of computing, but these subtle differences seem to be hard to grasp for some people here.

No offense but how old are you?

Read the article, try to understand it and you will see that all you've written is completly unjustified and of base. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 18:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't think the article is accurate for many important issues. The author says Microsoft buys products in the marketplace, yet there is no such product and he doesn't talk about any in his article. The last paragraph and some others seem to be a Microsoft basher's last effort to put a spin on the facts.

Couple of important things:

.net is not something copied from java. That's a clever marketing done by the Sun corporation.

.net is much better than java, and c# is a true standard.

the word "proprietary" is used meaninglessly so many times. If you are expecting a free service from companies you are living in a different planet or maybe you are a communist. Every individual has the right to innovate and profit from their innovations.

Microsoft is an innovative company. It is more innovative than any other company in its industry. It is not good at marketing though. Wed, 19 Jan 2005 23:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? To the author:

Thankd for the article (and to all the previous commentors).

MS has a strategic plan and put it to work. You proved it.

But somewhere in the process, MS consciously made lies (as FTC proved) and bold (unfullfiled) promises.

I would like you analize the importance of this lies and promises in the marketing process.

Are the lies necessary or are simply errors? Was the plan based in unfullfillment of promises?

Maybe the success is based in some critical doubtful ethical procedures. I do not judge, I just do not want to follow maquiavelian procedures.

Thanks in advance Thu, 20 Jan 2005 01:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes but user-defined value types have to be passed by value (you cant just pass a pointer to them as in unmanaged). That means you have to push all its members onto the stack - thats also slow and inefficient unless the value type is small.

That's the whole point of user-defined value types. They are supposed to be small and used for such things as a large array of them where it can be inefficient for the garbage collector to collect a million such objects in a language like Java.

Window.Forms is slowish on all but the most modern of machines when you create a large number of controls.

SWT wasn't too bad speed wise because it was very primitive. The richer and more object based the API the slower it will be.


Slowness is in the eye of the beholder I guess, but I've run SWF apps on very weak machines and they have, for the most part, run acceptable. Remember, it's not like Swing where it gets a handle to a brush and paints everything itself (at least that's how it used to be, not sure about now).

SWT is only half the story. JFaces is the other half.

Again comparing the same code in Delphi 2005 compiled as win32 and .Net produces a significant performance difference in largish apps. The startup time of large .net apps is roughly 30 secs on my machine too which is more than three times slower than office so Im not simply picking a number at randomn.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Startup time vs. execution time. .NET just like Java is JIT'd and has longer startup times, but .NET assemblies can also have machine code cached to reduce that JIT time. You need to be more specific about what is exactly 3x slower. Once the app is loaded it's typically not 3x slower. Thu, 20 Jan 2005 12:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't think many people here actually have the ability to make an informed decision on the matter.

Ask a Technical Architect on either side of the argument which platform is most cost effective and delivers the product on time and in budget and you'll get the answer. There is only one conclusion. Thu, 20 Jan 2005 14:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >.net is not something copied from java. That's a clever marketing done by the Sun corporation.

do you know java and c#? obviously not. "inspired" would be the polite term....

>.net is much better than java, and c# is a true standard.

are you on crack? the industry standard for enterprise webapps is j2ee. java is under a non-royalty liscence agreement. .net IS under ECMA, but ECMA allows ownership to stay in the hands of the people who submit it. to say that parts of the cli beyond under ECMA makes .net more of a standard the java is pretty silly, no matter what way you are using the word standard. and better how? last time i checked the .net api doesnt hold a candle to the java api. maybe its matured a bit, but i doubt it.

>the word "proprietary" is used meaninglessly so many times. If you are expecting a free service from companies you are living in a different planet or maybe you are a communist. Every individual has the right to innovate and profit from their innovations.

propriatary is over used, but it is not meaningless. its only meaningless on tech sites populated by thirteen year olds who use it as a synonym for bad.

>Microsoft is an innovative company. It is more innovative than any other company in its industry.

ROFL! this line was actually why i took the time to respond, totally cracked me up. as was asked earlier, how exactly does ms innovate? ms is not a big idea company. ms likes to wait for other people to come up with good ideas, and then do their own implementations. sometimes they are good, usually they are mediocre, often they are terrible. microsofts actual "innovation" tends to be along the lines of stuff like activex, which is a big part of the reason that windows users have such a huge problem with spyware/malware.

>It is not good at marketing though.

and this is the statement that explains everything. microsoft is a MUCH better marketing company then a technology company.

hehe, not sure if your a troll or not, if you are, good job, i enjoyed responding. Thu, 20 Jan 2005 15:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I read a lot of articles about .net and Longhorn the last few years and about what I read I couldn't find anything that is completely new, doesn't existing on the Linux platform or is being worked on also.

People who buy Windows product dig there own hole and this hole becomes deeper and deeper everytime the buy one of there new products.

Goverments, companies, people should try to become independent. So use open standards and opensource software. Thu, 20 Jan 2005 17:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A well written article from a historical and marketing standpoint - two thumbs up. Thu, 20 Jan 2005 17:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I am afraid that many of the posters here have never used .NET or are Java (or C++ or Delphi or etc..) programmers who tested .NET a little bit, but never got really involved in a mid-huge project.
--Disclaimer: Please notice I've said ´many of the´ not *all*--

As a Senior .NET developer involved in a huge medicine application developed in C# (and some VB.NET stuff written by ´legacy VB6 programmers´) and relying in both ASP.NET and Windows Forms (heavily), I consider myself capable of speaking about .NET in general; I know not only C# but .NET (always under Windows Environments, I have little or no experience with Mono, DotGNU, etc.). I have read books, tested, learned, inspected and dissected many of the .NET Framework classes in an attempt to understand the way it works. True is that I lack Java knowledge (I was in C++'s realm before .NET).

I can't comment on .NET's performance without facts, I can't compare VStudio Vs. Eclipse (or any other ide because there are none), since the other alternative is either use your editor of choice and command line utilities or SharpDevelop which, as good as it looks, it's still not as powerful as VStudio -tho it's faster sometimes-.

I do not LOVE Microsoft. In fact I have a Powerbook as a personal computer. But I work with microsoft products, and I learned to admire the good things, and criticize the bad things. .NET has both. I won't go into detail here, but I can assure you that there are a *lot* of things inside .NET that are crap but on the other hand, there are loads of good things that will make your life easier (sometimes for a penalty). Is it slow? You can't tell, maybe it's not the FASTEST thing on earth; surely will not travel to mars in the next rocket; possibly will not run in your Sun server. But one thing I am positively sure about, it will slowly attract VB 6.0 developers, push them to the OOP world and in the end it will reign as much as VB did (and does). Is it the right tool to replace Java? Nah! who said that. It's just another tool, and every Microsoft tool gets what it deservs.

I'm tired, excuse my poor grammar...

Be happy! .NET is not too bad Fri, 21 Jan 2005 01:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments