“Get the core information you need to get the most out of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET, including tips and tricks on the new data access system (ADO.NET) and Web application system (ASP.NET). The articles focus particularly on the Visual Basic developer, but apply across all languages.” Read the interesting article at MSDN, among four more .NET-related articles.
Upgrading to .NET – Article at MSDN
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
.NET is a very nice concept. If it goes multiplatform, and there are indications that it will (due to independant initiatives as well as possible official ports) it will seriously compete with Java. I’ve been playing a fair bit with .NET and love it so far. The Visual Studio .NET IDE is the best I’ve tried (better than JBuilder, which was my previous favourite).
Disclaimer: I just installed Visual Studio .NET yesterday and have only used it now for about 8 hours.
Perhaps I’m not getting it yet, but I just don’t see what everyone thinks is so cool about .NET. I have been able to do this kind of thing for years now with Java, only better (from a cross-platform standpoint).
As for C# being a Java killer, I don’t think so. A VB killer, perhaps, but Java? I don’t think so. C# is a better VB, and with C# Microsoft will finally be able to compete with Borland’s Delphi and C++Builder. They never were able to before since VB never has been truly object oriented (or even cool for that matter) and both Delphi and C++Builder are.
The cross-platform concepts of CLR seem cool, but are not ready to be realized yet (at least not as far as I can tell). I tend to believe that, as usual, cross platform to Microsoft means Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/.NET.
Well, thankfully we still have Java.
.NET is still a little nebulous to me (most likely another reworking of the tired OLE technology with yet another new name), however, I agree with you. I do like Visual Studio .NET. It is very bloated though, weighing in at over 2GB for a full install.
As I said earlier, C# makes a very nice VB replacement. I have always used Visual C++ for C/C++ development, so it is nice to finally have a RAD tool as part of the suite that doesn’t suck like VB.
As far as being serious competition with Java, I just don’t see it. The main reason why is that C# is tied too much to Windows. They could create virtual machines to handle all the Windows specific stuff that C# does, but then the VM would be quite bloated and slow and crappy.
C# should signify the death of VB though. Hooray C#!!!
C# won’t kill VB. VB will be used for GUI devel. .NET allows you to program in six or so langauges. All the code from the various languages gets compile to Microsoft’s byte code.