Re: There is no .NET in Vista Code?

I.P. Nichols wrote:
"Lurkio" wrote:

Jim Cooper wrote:

I imagine it will be, considering that the .NET Framework is already
part of Windows Update.

Is it? Cool bananas.

I think that Joel Spolsky put it best in his classic
"Please Sir May I Have a Linker?" article :

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PleaseLinker.html

This article is just another example of being able to find "expert opinion" on the web that supports one's bias.

Gee, d'ya think ? :-)

It's pretty much par for the course - BTW, you're not shy
yourself in providing "expert" links in order to support
your own arguments ;-P

Anyway, it saves on offering a second-hand regurgitation of
all the points that the original author made. I picked it
because it was a fair-ish mirror of my own views.

Did you read all the back and forth discussion that article caused at that time.
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=108812

First thing I noted is that it was written more than two years ago by someone who doesn't seem to understand that the designers of .NET never intended that it's programs be linked to all it's framework dependencies.

??? I'm not sure I see what you are saying here. The whole argument
is that the /entire/ run-time has to be there on the target machine
whether your app is using 1% or 99% of it. Are you saying that the
fact that we got into this situation is some unforeseen SNAFU on the
framework designers part? :-P

With that said I do believe that today someone sells such a linker and another is free but I have no idea how well they work. Perhaps you have investigated one or both?

I've had a good look at Thinstall but IMO it is pretty expensive
for something (a linker) which has been a provided /gratis/
with development suites for as long as I can remember.

Anyway, the fact that Micro$oft themselves haven't provided
a linker themselves (for reasons justified in the link below)
also makes me a little queasy when going to a third party for
a solution.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2004/01/31/65653.aspx

His rant talks about new versions coming out every six months or so leading to "DDL hell" but IMO the most egregious complaint was that the windows update service required him to update a computer that likely hadn't been updated in some time, if ever, resulting in a long and tedious 70-80MB download with multiple reboots. He could have directly downloaded the runtime package and installed it without all that pain but then he wouldn't have anything to bitch about.

In the context of the previous messages of this thread,
the quote on using Windows Update was quite apposite,
I thought. I agree that in the example he could have gone
straight to M$ and downloaded it but this thread seemed to
be heading in the direction of "well, people won't need to
worry about that as .Next will already have seamlessly come
down the pipe to most users PCs" and I thought I'd add a
little counterweight to that.

I often wonder in today's world what percentage of the targeted market of a commercial .NET program already has the runtime installed. I suspect in most cases it's quite large.

But this is the /very nub/ of the issue. Just what
constitutes "the runtime" ? Is it v1.0, v1.1, or v2.0?
Can you say with a straight face that most of even the
"target market" now have v2.0? One of the major points
in Joel's article was that when a new framework
re-distributable is released, the number of deployed
units of that new framework obviously slips back to
/zero/. As long as the framework is de-coupled from OS
releases, this will /always/ be the case. I had hoped
this would change over time but see no evidence that it
has or even ever will.

If there /was/ guaranteed backwards compatibility between
the different versions then at least you could say that
the latest version would always be a sufficient basic
requirement...but this is simply /not/ the case. If you
wrote an app using 1.1 but allowed it to "float up" to
use the latest version, there is a fair chance that the
installation of a later framework version by another
application can and will break your application. I've
seen that happen first hand.

Of course, the anointed solution to this is to tie
your application to a specific version of the framework...
which means that you /will always/ have to ship that
version to ensure that your application will run on
your customers unknown PC.

I might be overly harsh but it does seem to me that a group of developers who really don't intend to develop for the .NET market seize on the runtime download "problem" to rationalize their decision.

While there is more than a grain of truth in that, there
are plenty of us out here who would quite like to get that
arguable 5% productivity improvement from .NET, and the
greater employability kick-back that goes with it...but
I still see too many gotchas that will keep native Delphi
as my central tool of choice for the foreseeable future.

I might be overly harsh <g> but I think if there was
greater acknowledgement of the frameworks shortcomings
by its horde of acolytes then M$ might actually be forced
to address some of those issues instead of pretending they
don't exist. I can think of at least one Redmond employee
who at one time agreed about some of those .NET problems
but that might have changed post the turn to the dark side :-P

http://scoble.weblogs.com/2002/09/17.html

(Damn, there I go citing "expert" opinion again <g>)
.

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