Re: What Borland should stop wasting their time on

By the way, what are you think about next:

"So if you've reached this far, you will get the impression that I have a very cynical opinion of .NET. The framework has a lot of promise, but I think Microsoft was far too ambitious releasing far too many assemblies much too quickly. As a result design suffered, but to provide backward compatibility, Microsoft could not simply redesign the whole library and deprecate the old one. So we are stuck with the library we have. Microsoft has allowed marketing to take precedence over technology: They created and promoted VB.NET simply as an attempt to get the bulk of Windows developers to use .NET, and not because there was any need for the language. The framework has become Visual Basic—it's intended for users to develop applications, but not for Microsoft to create operating systems or the revenue generating products that they base their profits on."

http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9204/ddj050201dnn/


Alex



Sorry to *** in. I've been following your discussion thread about .NET and I felt the need to offer my opinion on the subject.

Yes. That is correct. .NET not the same class of programming language as C/C++. Take a minute answer the following question:

"What language is .NET written in?"

C/C++ programmers are on a different league as .NET. They program at a much lower level. They have the choice to use predefined libraries but they can also choose to ignore them completely. Plus lower level code is much faster.

..NET programmers use a framework which sits on code that was written in C/C++. The reason why they choose so is:

1. The framework is better organized and structured. .NET helps beginner programmers in choosing the right libraries for the right tasks. This concept is pioneered by Delphi and Java.

2. It's got all these advanced concepts out of the box(garbage collection, etc). C/C++ programmers have to integrate such code into their projects. Again, pioneered by Delphi and Java.

3. .NET code gets executed on a virtual machine. That's so that we don't have random shutdown of Windows boxen because of bad code.. just a clean termination of the program. Concept pioneered by Java.

Mr Grimes is basically saying: "Microsoft doesn't use .NET to write Windows and Office, so .NET must suck".

Microsoft is absolutely correct not to use .NET for Windows or Office. That's not what .NET is for.

..NET is for a whole lotta other things.

Basically, .NET is Microsoft's answer to Java, not Microsoft's replacement for C/C++.

Moni

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