The Longhorn Dream Reborn 254
gbjbaanb writes "Early this month, Microsoft dropped something of a bombshell on Windows developers: the new Windows 8 touch-friendly immersive style would use a developer platform not based on .NET. Cue howls of outrage from .NET developers everywhere, but here Ars Technica describes what's more likely to have been going on and why Microsoft is finally getting its act together for developers."
Re:So then, (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Standard modus operandi (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm happy to report that read(2), write(2), and all the other syscalls that make up POSIX, and its derivatives, still work the same as they did decades ago.
Great, so it's dead too since it hasn't changed for decades? Same as with COM, there's nothing stopping you from using it and it still works the same as it did many years ago. You can still use all the old technologies and they still all work just the same as they used to.
Re:Not quite... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, because they looked at Windows 8. And because anybody who's not, literally, mentally defective knows Microsoft isn't going to abandon .NET. You have to be a little smarter (say, 105 IQ) to know they're not going to abandon Silverlight, so I'll cut you a little slack there.
The idea is ridiculous. You seriously think people are going to write complex end user and enterprise apps in JS/HTML5? Seriously?
Re:Standard modus operandi (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft makes a lot of money from selling its development tools, documentation, etc... to its developer base. Microsoft simply runs the whole show. They are in full control, and call all the shots. And they understand perfectly well that if they keep the same technology platform in place, over time, they lose a good chunk of their revenue stream. That's why they have to obsolete their technology platforms, time and time again. They need revenue. It makes perfect sense. If you are a Microsoft Windows developer, one of your primary job functions is to generate revenue to Microsoft. Perhaps not from you, directly; maybe from your company. Whoever pays the bills for Visual Studio, MSDN, and all the other development tools. Maybe it's not you, personally, but it's going to be someone, that's for sure.
So your argument is that Microsoft intentionally periodically obsoletes languages in order to make money? Am I reading this correctly?
You do understand that:
I think your theory has some holes. Now, Microsoft has definitely obsoleted languages - Visual Basic for one (and good riddance) - but they did that because the language had shortcomings. I'd detail them but we have a nice article that already does that. The .NET framework and language stack, C# in particular, is on the same general level as Java: it is a language that more or less suits the needs of every platform developer. Why the hell would they want to obsolete that?
No, languages aren't the issue with MS development, nor are they the theme of the article; frameworks are. A perfectly good language can be horrendous to use if it is unable to properly interact with its host environment to accomplish what it needs to accomplish. In this case (once again FTFA) C++ could interact worlds better with Windows than .NET could, and so .NET use suffered. This was an implementation failure on Microsoft's part. The article stipulates that Windows 8 intends to bring .NET back on-par with C++ as a development language, which (if true) means that it will be stronger than ever.
It's also worth mentioning that in terms of accumulated skills and experience, learning a new language is trivial compared to truly learning a new framework. How you interact with the system and cause it to give you the resources and services that you want in the manner in which you want them is the heart of all modern systems programming, regardless of language. If Microsoft emphasizes .NET in their APIs, then .NET will be a viable Windows development platform; if not, then who knows? None of that reflects on the language itself, but rather on its appeal over other languages.
Now, eventually every language will be obsoleted ... probably? I suppose we haven't been through that many generations of languages to know for sure, but that seems to be the case so far. There are various reasons languages die ... they suck, better ones come out, nobody likes them, no frameworks support them, or their target developer group gives up on it. .NET's main backer is cu
So what's better? (Score:1, Insightful)
Currently I am working in a software project that is cross platform with Mac and Windows. I alone do the WPF/.Net side of things, a few other guys work on the Cocoa side of things. I am getting really tired of hearing them complain that it is hard or even impossible to create a rich and custom UI experience on OS X because of the lousy tools and development platform Apple offers. The Mac product is full of bugs and is about a good month behind on parity, and this is with 2 guys working on. I am sure they are equally tired of hearing me tell my project manager that I have just finished whatever feature they dreamed up of using WPF and .Net. Bottom line is, there is something wrong with a person or developer that prefers constant headaches and lack of productivity over something that offers rapid development, quality code, and ability to develop a rich applications without limitations. I should mention there is a small team looking to port to Linux and they are so lost they are at least a year behind to even reach parity with the Windows version.
I know everybody hates Microsoft at Slashdot, but you don't know sh*t about f*ck when it comes to software development if you are bitching about how bad C# or .Net or WPF is for developing applications. Bottom line is I get paid to develop software for Windows, and I can do it quickly, easily, and have a lot of fun doing it, but if I had to use the OS X or Linux tools for developing software, I would probably shoot myself.