.NET Second Opinion'

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Sirs,

What is the current opinion about the guys here about .Net from Microsoft? I really liked the idea of plugins for languages in the Visual Studio 7. Webform looks to me like an great improvement in the velocity to develop Web applications. Web Services I need to know better to make an opinion. And I heard sometimes the people calling C# like Java 3.

Camilo

-- Anonymous, December 26, 2000

Answers

Personally, I've never heard anyone tell me straight up what .NET *is*. This includes several people who work for Microsoft.

I'll let you know what I think about it, as soon as someone clues me in to what it *does*. :)

-- Anonymous, December 27, 2000


We actually have a pretty good idea of what .NET will do: it'll be a re-tooling of the Windows interface that centers it around network activity, and a re-tooling of Office that makes it into network activity. I can certainly imagine what that'll look like. (Have a look at http://www.msnbc.com/news/497966.asp?cp1=1 if you can't.)

What I can't imagine is, how it will include third party developers, and how it will address the security concerns of companies that don't much want to run arbitrary code from, or store mission-critical files to, someone else's server.

-- Anonymous, December 27, 2000


> What I can't imagine is, how it will include third party developers

You can't? Amazing, because the .Net framework is the first framework I know of that makes components "first class citizens".

See also "The Future of Components" http://www.futureofsoftware.net/gb30010/gb30010.asp

>, and how it will address the security concerns of companies > that don't much want to run arbitrary code from, or store > mission-critical files to, someone else's server.

.Net is build on top of HTTP using SOAP as the content protocol. Therefor, in communications with others SSL can simply be used.

Whether a company should trust the "arbitrary code" of the other party is up to the company, but my reasoning is that running that code inhouse is not more or less riskier than running it remotely (come to think of it, I would actually argue that running it remotely is less riskier).

Whether a company should trust it's sensitive information to be put on the servers of another party is something that's easily answered: it'll never happen. Companies are too anal about this. Instead, you'll buy the service, but install the service within your own firewalls. You'll get the exact same functionality as running it remotely, but with the advantage that it's trusted and with the disadvantage that maintenance and costs may be higher (though still significantly less if the application would run using fat clients).

-- Anonymous, January 06, 2001


Now that we know VB.NET will mandate trashing, redesigning, and rewriting from scratch one's "legacy" Visual Basic code, even more so than the shift from 16-bit VB 3.0 to 32-bit VB 4.0 did, thanks to such things as C-style arrays and the deliberate sabotage of reference-counting, what is the collective wisdom about where to go from VB 5/6? Did we simply get what we deserved by jumping into bed with Visual Basic 1.0 a decade ago? Forget not that MSVC++, MFC, ATL, and WTL are nearly as proprietary...

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001

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