"One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year. We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, XML, and WPF. We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License."
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Member since:2007-07-13
> Yet they fraud their developpers and supporter telling them that people really like swing and that it's fast.
Actually sanctus, Swing is quite fast when done correctly. The greatest problem are Swing developers that don't correctly deal with the event dispatch thread that blocks repainting. With Sun JDK 1.6 update 5 (currently in early release testing) the *entirety* of Swing is rendered in hardware with DirectX on Windows. Pretty hard to get faster than that (unless you continue to block the Event Dispatch Thread).
If we forget the consumer desktop for a moment and consider the corporate/enterprise/government world, Java applications are very widely deployed. I have seen some .NET projects in the enterprises I deal with, and this restricted opening of the .NET libraries is definitely a help for them, but Java is still the "800 lb" gorilla in this space and will probably be for some time.
Edited 2007-10-04 20:30
Member since:2005-08-31
When SWT came out, swing was slow (even if done correctly) and looked not only foreign, but unappealing. People were complaining about swing for years and Sun just didn't care a bit. Then IBM creates an amazing alternative that was faster than swing and the interface look native on every platform out of the box. IBM had listened.
It was too late, like Sun often do, before they start improving their product, they wait until customers were frustrated enough and create an alternative. Swing isn't alone, the whole jvm get nearly stagnant until .net was unveil.
They invest just more money where competition and development effort weren't needed.
Sun could have work with IBM to make the whole jvm more appealing for developers, business apps as well as end user in one shot. But they didn't want IBM to receive any credit. They politically played, against java and their customers.
Still today, swing feel foreign even with the nice themes, especially on Linux where it still look crap. Plus, it keeps burden the developer with extra work.
That is true, but as a consultant, I work for different clients, big enterprise and government. Java is still being use to develop server application, but when it comes to user interface, .net is becoming the standard. I worked for a government entity with more than 20000 employees that switch officially to .net. The look and feel wasn’t the only issue, but it played big time. What people see is the GUI, if the GUI suck, they entire application/framework get tagged. Sadly, a very large amount of people dislike swing. That’s good for consumer desktop and corporate.
I just hope the open source of the jvm will be more “open” and stop this over political attitude.
Edited 2007-10-05 14:39
Member since:
2005-08-31
The reason .net gui dont suck,
1. unlike Sun, Microsoft have a complete system with nice librairies. Microsoft need to keep its gui "modern" against competition (aqua, gtk, qt)
2. Sun is too political. SWT offer a far better alternative (wx in mono/.net/aqua/python), but because it is IBM's solution, Sun decide not to support it. Yet they fraud their developpers and supporter telling them that people really like swing and that it's fast.