Friday 18 December 2009

The Register: Ten years of .NET - Did Microsoft deliver?

The always excellent Tim Anderson, writing for the always excellent The Register, has put together a nice article on the relative success and failure of .NET as a platform and as a Java-killer.

I've made it clear in the past that I'm no fan of .NET and I don't see any clear benefit to our industry by its introduction. This paragraph sums it up nicely:

A long-standing gripe is that Microsoft itself has been slow to adopt .NET. "It will be the framework that Microsoft itself uses going forward" Microsoft's Tony Goodhew told TechEd in 2000. The company, though, has continued to use native code and C++ as the primary development platform for its crown jewels, Windows and Office. COM has never gone away, and .NET developers who want to use new Windows 7 APIs, for example, have to use an interop library to do so.

Seeing as CodeGear/Embarcadero came to the same conclusion when they decided to stop playing catch-up with .NET in Delphi, I can justify my decision never to take our software into the .NET arena.

7 comments:

codecolony said...

yeah, but there are a lot of major financial corporations using it, because of the move from Excel VBA Macros, into VB6, into Dot Net... so it still continues to pay the bills!

Unknown said...

I agree that they have started a whole industry with .NET and that won't ever go away now. Unfortunately!

Anonymous said...

Whtever you may say about .NET, it is a fantastic platform.

Look at MONO, for example. If the .NET framework wan't so good, why would Linux developers be so concerned about supporting it???

Unknown said...

I think the goal posts moved. When .net was born, it was to take on J2EE in a world with plenty of money to spend on expensive servers to run massive integration projects built on highly abstracted frameworks and platforms. At the end of the decade, the smart money is on simple loosely integrated solutions using a mix of frameworks rather than a one-size fits all approach. The future lies with platforms such Google, Facebook, Amazon et al, and with corporations building their own flexible cloud-like general-purpose platforms rather than locked-down single vendor ones.

Computing power is becoming a utility, like electricity rather than a tooled-up manufacturing plant.

codecolony said...

I agree with the cloud-based platforms coming down the line, but they will never become ubiquitous until they are better at hiding the complexity of scalability so that developers can create systems that "just work" and "just scale".

MS will do this with Azure and the dot net platform will plug straight in - but it's a shame it's so proprietary!

Unknown said...

Azure will also support PHP et al, so will further undermine .NET-only languages.

I think the future for .NET is the same as the JVM; as a platform for interpreted languages.

Dmitry said...

Microsoft has collected in the .net two minuses. At first - not a native (relatively slow) execution. At second - platform dependendance. Official .net now works only on the Win and Win Mobile. And i think we never seen support of other platforms in the future because of Microsoft politic.
Therefor for what we can use .net? For a native code we may use the Delphi/C++. For a platfrom independense we may use the java.
I don't know the special needs of using the non-native frameworks in the platform dependend environment.