Tag: .net

.net on the desktop is dead

today, my feed reader died. it only showed me an empty window where my feeds should be. So i tried Google Reader again. amazingly, it felt more responsive than RSS Bandit. my archive of read posts is in the 1000s. I like having access to them, and often use them in searches. This puts a heavy toll on memory usage. What hope is there for .net if an application written by a microsoft employee is such a memory hog, and gets its clock cleaned by an online application? none.

big words and small talk

Innumerable pundits and programmers have pointed out the similarities between the most popular .NET languages (currently VB.NET and C#), and some like to focus on the relatively minor differences between them. S# is different. Not only is its syntax different, following the model of classic Smalltalks, but its underlying design and capabilities differ as well.
In 1999, Simmons was invited along with experts in 10 to 15 other languages, to join a then-secret project at Microsoft called Project 7 Lightning. Project 7 Lightening involved creating test implementations of these languages on the nascent .NET Framework code base to help Microsoft discover what features the framework needed to fully implement these languages in the future.

the .net platform (and by extension, mono) are getting more interesting every day. as more and more non-mainstream languages such as eiffel, scheme, haskell, ruby, python and now smalltalk get a .net port, the options increase. every self-respecting software engineer tries to learn several languages, but practicalities and a lack of a rich framework in the more research-oriented choices made this impractical in the past.
i am hopeful that we will see a day soon when there is a unified, cross-language and cross-platform class library. it wont be java, so my bets are increasingly on .net. in a perfect world, this library would incorporate CPAN, PEAR, and others. still missing: php.net

miguel on mono

ben has lifted far too many weights again by single handedly bringing miguel de icaza of mono to university of zurich. the event will be on nov. 13th at noon. i wonder how many of the lazy & stupid icu members will show up. i am highly disappointed about them at this point, and believe ICU has reached the end of its life. it served its purpose (networking) for those that were active, but now that computer science students are dumb enough to use hotmail little hope remains. anyway, that’s their problem, not mine, and i will definitely vote for dissolution at the next general assembly.

.net and community mind share

microsoft is trying something new. asp had the downside that there were zero interesting open source apps beyond “hello world”. apparently, this shall not happen with .net, and several initiatives suggest that.


is a free ASP.net IDE that features wysiwyg web forms, web services support and much more.

mono
mono is making quick progress. a lot of the core libraries have already been implemented.

rotor
rotor is a complete CLI implementation that will help the mono effort.

.net beta 2 first impressions

scott guthrie (ms):

Our goal with Beta2 is to have as high-quality release as possible. Specifically, we have decided to not postpone any bugs to be fixed after the Beta2 milestone — and instead try to get all known V1 bugs fixed for the beta2 release. An ambitious goal — but one that we think will really deliver a great quality product.
We are also doing a lot of work to make sure that ASP.NET Beta2 will support production deployment of high-volume projects. Specifically, we are working with 11 MSN Applications (each with a significant customer volume) that will go live before Beta2 ships — to allow us to find any nasty stress issues remaining (ones that just don’t show up in a simulated test lab).

it looks like MS did their homework on this release. a quick look into the help files does not show any TBDs like it did with beta 1. also, many stupid bugs that were in visual studio beta 1 seem to have been eliminated. i think that with the missing docs in place and critical bugs fixed, .net will reveal its secrets more willingly than before.

GPL .net?

miguel de icaza has stirred up the unix community before with his famous unix sucks speech.
in that paper, he argued that unix needs higher-level code reuse and object-orientation. so it seems very reasonable that he wants to clone .net.

the mono project aims to implement several technologies developed by Microsoft that have now been submitted to the ECMA Standards Body.

for the time being, this is a gnome effort. in order to succeed, mono needs to attract a much wider audience, though. kde comes to mind, as do other projects like soap for apache. dave winer of userland seems to be aware of the project, lets hope they can find areas to work together.

miguel gave an interview to o’reilly where he said some interesting things about .net. With .NET, Microsoft is starting with a clean slate and building for the future. It’s a new development environment for the next 20 years.
Almost anybody could develop a compatible implementation of .NET, because what you need to know is out in the open.
I don’t think we as a community can design something that is going to be as completely thought out as .NET. It’s taken them several years already to design this, and I believe that Microsoft hired a lot of smart people to build it. It would definitely take us a lot of time and debate to get there. He doesn’t believe that the open source community needs to leapfrog .NET, but rather they should make it their own, much as Unix led to GNU/Linux.

dave winer has, as always, interesting commentary on mono. he argues that open source had to come about in the unix world because there are no easy ways for interop at higher levels (like com or corba provide) than the source code levels. integration is always done at the source level. this has very much truth to it, and dave goes on to argue that the focus should be on interop with .net first, source level compatibility later. a way to leverage the installed base is indeed missing. the unix culture to keep policy out has hampered any attempts to fix this.