State of DotNet

[Gerhard Häring]

Hung Jung Lu <hungjunglu at yahoo.com> wrote:
> As I have suspected, DotNet is not faring well, as can be seen from a
> recent thread in microsoft.public.dotnet.general.

<rant>
If Microsoft newsgroups were representative, then Outlook Express would be
the preferred newsreader, top-posting and broken quoting would be the way
to post on Usenet and there were some reason to not post with your real
name.
</rant>

IMO newsgroups are hardly representative of the user base. In particular,
the developers hooked on MS technologies aren't heavy usenet users in my
experience.

> I am just wondering, what IF Microsoft has erred on this bet??

I'm pretty sure .NET will be a great success for Microsoft, eventually.

> (The choice of the name ".net" was an horrible mistake from a beginning:
> it made it hard to search on the web. Not a good sign.) Also, the idea of
> telling programmers to bite the bullet and rely on a CLR a.k.a. "we know
> what's good for you" just does not seem that attractive, especially for
> people that have seen the rise and fall of Java.

Microsoft learnt from the mistakes Java made.

> Is it unthinkable that DotNet may be a mistake? What if it IS a mistake?
> Total chaos?

No, just loss of income for Microsoft.

> What would the implications for Python be?

Hopefully, .NET won't have much impact on Python at all.

> Stick with VC6 for a while?

Stick with gcc on FreeBSD, for a while? ;-)


I personally like the .NET technologies quite a lot. ADO.NET is about the
best database framework I've seen so far and it particularly shines in its
integration with Windows Forms and ASP.NET. Something similarly on top of
the DB-API is still lacking for Python.

I'm just now learning ASP.NET and find it a very productive way to write
web applications. Microsoft did some neat innovations here.

Windows Forms is also neat, though some controls (in particular, the
fscking DataGrid, aren't as usable as they should be).

So if all you target is Windows Clients (web- or thick clients) and
servers, .NET with Visual Studio is a very good option. Thinking about it,
I probably wouldn't even bother about .NET *without* Visual Studio.

-- Gerhard