Comments I found useful on Slashdot, hey sorry If I am breaking any laws!! I understand these are public anyway!
NET = Windows API 2.0 (Score:5, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08, @09:14AM (#6390308)
.NET has little to do with anything .NET. It’s a new Windows API designed to turn Windows into a virtual machine like Java so it can be architecture independent. That’s what CLR and C# and all the rest of that stuff is about. It’s about MS getting off x86-32 and into a larger world of ia64, amd64, and maybe even ppc64. CLR is the new Windows runtime. Once the move is complete, Windows will be able to run on anything and apps will not have to be recompiled at all. This will make Windows more portable than *nix.
Heck no they shouldn’t be moving on…. (Score:5, Interesting)
by Asprin (545477) on Tuesday July 08, @09:39AM (#6390600)
(http://slashdot.org/~Asprin | Last Journal: Thursday July 03, @08:39AM)
There are some compelling advantages to .NET — REAL compelling advantages. The thing is that it’s takes a boatload of time for a new development platform to get to the mainstream: You’re looking at two or three years to get the developers comfortable enough to start working with it, then another two or three years to get their apps ported over and another year or two to roll those out to customers.
I figure we should start seeing real concrete examples of the advantages of .NET in, like 2005-06.
Don’t believe me?
USB.
Or even better, how about Win32? We *still* have at least two industry-specific Win16 apps that are under a current maintenance contract. Hell, most of the non-MSOffice Win16 crap was just replaced around four years ago with the Y2K upgrades, so we’re still in the process of depreciating it!
All of MS’s apps will be .NET in November, but contrary to what the open source community believes, MS Office will only get you so far — it is by far not the most important piece of software we run. The developers are the key, and MS understands this. You need to get **THEM** interested in developing on a new platform (.NET, MONO, Java, LAMP, ELF or whatever) about five years before you want anything to happen.
“Lawyers are for sucks.”
– Doug McKenzie
Three years in and I believe it is fair to say that most people do not understand exactly what .Net is — other than a vague “trust me” monolithic solution.
No matter what the MS-bootlickers say, .NET can be summed up easily:
.NET is like Java, only incompatible with everything other than Windows. The only added feature is language-neutrality (you can use more than just C# to code .NET objects) although that exists under Java, too, although to a lesser extent (There are many compilers that take many non-Java programming languages as imput and put out Java bytecode, however those are not very widely used and supported)
To sum up, there isn’t a real reason to use .NET over Java. The Microsofties who have overrun Slashdot already will crucify me for doubting the invincibility of Microsoft, but Java is *the* standard programming language, and the only language that runs on every major and most minor platforms.
75% of webservers don’t run Windows. 100% of cellphones don’t run Windows. 60% of PDAs don’t run Windows. Let’s face it: .NET is just a desktop solution, nothing more.
Using .NET and artificially chaining yourself to one vendor and platform and shrinking your target market is a stupid idea.
What .Net REALLY is (Score:4, Insightful)
by Trolling4Dollars (627073) on Tuesday July 08, @09:49AM (#6390695)
(Last Journal: Wednesday July 02, @04:19PM)
To misquote David Byrne, its, “…same as it ever was…”
Microsoft is simply taking what they already have and making some changes in the way these components work together and within the context of the internet. The end result should be a computing experience that is fairly smooth to the end user and provides a lot of what’s already out there but with different names and faces. This is why they claim to “innovate”. Innovation is taking existing “stuff” and using it in new ways. That’s not exactly what they do though. Instead they take existing stuff and use it in the same ways they are already used but call them something else.
Examples:
In UNIX we have daemons
In Windows they have “Services”
This provides enough of a distinction that the less technically inclined person is going to thing Services are somehow different. But they are really no more than daemons or backgrounded apps.
In X Window System we have “Window Managers”
In Windows XP they have the “Theme Service”
Don’t believe me? Go stop the theme service in XP and tell me what changes. Just the Window widgets and borders and the look and feel of the Start bar.
In UNIX we have “mount points” for file systems.
In Windows 2000/XP they have the ability to mount a drive in an empty NTFS folder.
Microsoft is very good at taking these existing concepts, renaming them and then claiming them as their own innovations even though they haven’t changed how the technologies are actually used. They’ve only renamed them. .Net is no different. It will be internet services integrated into the OS with all the “new security” that Palladium will bring and a big happy Microsoft smiley face on the front.
Unix = Here’s the internet. Go learn some stuff and have fun.
Microsoft = Here’s .Net. It’s all ready to go… have fun! :)))
Personally I prefer the Unix approach, but that’s just me.
Oh, I almost forgot:
In Soviet Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was pro da. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.
— Yakov Smirnoff