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Microsoft Books Media Book Reviews

Understanding .NET: A Tutorial and Analysis 292

Posted by timothy from the well-it's-this-thing-see dept.
benjiboo writes "This is one of the many books designed to help the average technical manager or developer get a feel for what the .NET framework means for them. Primarily geared towards developers and technical managers, this book aims to cut through the marketing hype. But, does it succeed? Read on for Benjiboo's answer to that question.
Understanding .NET: A Tutorial and Analysis
author David Chappell
pages 288
publisher Addison-Wesley
rating 4
reviewer Benjiboo
ISBN 0201741628
summary A summary of the .NET framework

Firstly, this book doesn't attempt to act as a programming tutorial, and as a result is thin on code examples. Instead, the book takes a highly summative approach to the main technologies of the framework, broadly dividing them into: web services, the CLR and languages, the class library, data access, ASP.net and .NET my services.

Having said this, the central theme through the book is that of XML and web services, accurately reflecting their importance in the .net framework. It frustrates me how web services are often described as revolutionary, when built on technologies such as UDDI and WDSL which in turn are based on relatively mature technologies such as XML and HTTP. This book falls into the same trap of pandering to the hype surrounding web services, without really managing to convince me of what is so revolutionary about them.

The author dedicates a chapter to a summary of the main .NET languages, Visual Basic .NET, C#, and the managed extensions of C++. The author concludes that "Managed C++ adds even more complexity to an already complex language." Some may have reservations with this statement; garbage collection, interfaces, attributes and the managed types are only likely to result in less work for the developer even after a relatively short learning curve. The author appears to come out in favour of C# over the "more complex" Visual Basic. I would like to have seen some discussion on other .NET languages under development.

The chapter on the class libraries makes a relatively good job of summarising the massive .NET libraries. It's a fleeting overview of the most useful and interesting parts of the libraries. Remoting (remote method calls), reflection and the ubiquitous GUI libraries are just a few examples. This is one of the stronger sections of the book in my opinion, though this is coming from a developer's perspective.

There is a concise chapter on ADO .NET. The author acknowledges the fact that this is the latest in a long line of Microsoft data access libraries but fails to indicate why this one is better. The controversial .NET My Services is also detailed. The book doesn't really ponder the politics surrounding My Services, which is surprising as this element was always likely to be its downfall.

In parts, this book is overwhelmingly pro-Microsoft. In a particularly gushing moment, the author implies that COM was successful in its goals of interoperable component software, only failing to reach critical mass due to a failure by other vendors to support it. OMG's corba on the other hand was based on an incomplete standard, destined to failure due to Microsoft's decision not to support this 'doomed' standard. I would whole-heartedly disagree with this. Firstly, the distributed object technologies of CORBA are applicable to a different range of problems. Even overlooking the validity of this comparison, CORBA has seen massive support and is generally considered to be more successful than COM.

On a more positive note however, this book does provide isolated moments of insight. Some of the sidebars, for instance, tend to delve a little deeper, providing a little bit of the insight I was hoping to gain by reading this book. A brief look at the differences between MSIL and Java's VMs for instance led me to research further. Apparently future versions of SQL server are set to host a version of the .NET CLR natively, similarly to how Oracle 9i can run its own Java VM. For me, these insights go beyond the information which I could have picked up on any number of white-papers out there on the net.

In hindsight this book is perhaps too shallow, falling into the trap of using a barrage of acronyms and buzzwords without delving deep enough into any one topic. There is no mention of cross-language interoperability, and more importantly no mention of cross platform interoperability efforts -- which do exist. Also, even with a book so Microsoft oriented, I would expect to see either a distinct section, or at least more comments, on the pitfalls and barriers to takeup of the framework. A more critical and less Microsoft-centric text would for me have made this book more authoritative.

Table Of Contents

Preface
1. An Overview of .NET. 2. Web Services.
3. The Common Language Runtime.
4. .NET Languages.
5. The .NET Framework Class Library.
6. Accessing Data- ADO.NET.
7. Building Web Applications- ASP.NET.
8. .NET My Services.
Conclusion

You can purchase Understanding .NET: A Tutorial and Analysis from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Understanding .NET: A Tutorial and Analysis

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  • well (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:48AM (#5270350) Homepage Journal
    I might buy this book, except my managers won't touch .net with a ten foot pole, as once your in, you apparently can't get out.

    • Re:well (Score:5, Interesting)

      by xyzzy ( 10685 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:52AM (#5270376) Homepage
      Not particularly any more or less than any other Microsoft technology. In fact, if you do any Microsoft-centric work in your shop, .Net is a significant improvement over (COM | ASP | etc). If you live for cross-platform portability, you won't be using any of these anyway.

      • Re:well (Score:2, Informative)

        by tshak ( 173364 )
        Beyond the less proprietary nature of .NET (ECMA standards, minmal tie to Win32), it's also possible to any investment of .NET with any future technology through some form of XML (SOAP, etc.)

      • Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:21AM (#5271035)
        .NET locks your applications up onto a particular platform (arguable, since Mono does do ASP.Net, and a lot of the stuff is either currently ECMA and IEEE certified, or on track to be.)

        What .NET doesn't do though is lock your data up on a particular platform. As long as you have SOAP libraries for other platforms/languages you can easily mix and match heterogenous systems.

    • Re:well (Score:4, Funny)

      by Kris Warkentin ( 15136 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:52AM (#5270381) Homepage
      > I might buy this book, except my managers
      > won't touch .net with a ten foot pole, as
      > once your in, you apparently can't get out.

      Hence the name, "dot NET".

    • I second that... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sirshannon ( 616247 )
      Once I got "in" .net, I began doing everything in my power to keep from ever having to use VB6, VBScript, and/or "ASP Classic" ever again. The improvements are too great for me to go backwards unless I absolutely have to. Luckily, most of my clients are worried about the results more than the technologies used so I get to make that call.

    • Re:well (Score:3, Insightful)

      by krumms ( 613921 )
      It's a shame so many people are taking this "oh god don't lock us in" stance. To me, and people will disagree with this, .NET is the Sun/Java 'write once, run anywhere' concept done right because it's:

      - Language Independant (although I would agree that C# seems best suited to it for me)
      - Potentially Platform Independant (not yet, maybe not soon, but possible - well done to the Mono team)
      - Generally runs faster than Java on Windows ('big surprise' you say - but see how Mono goes)

      This isn't even mentioning the fact that developers can gather together to work on a software project using .NET, and can contribute regardless of their language of choice.

      Naturally there's barriers to such a thing actually happenning. For example, imagine reading the source code to a large project developed in such a manner: where My.Namespace.Person is written in C#, My.Namespace.BusDriver is written in J#, My.Namespace.BusinessManager is written in VB.NET and My.Namespace.HospitalityManager is written in Managed C++. In such a scenario, Person would be the base class of BusDriver and BusinessManager, and HospitalityManager would be derived from BusinessManager.

      Thus to understand that relatively small section of a project (four classes!) you need to know four separate languages. Obviously, a good design will save a person from having to do such a thing. Unfortunately, good designs are hard to come by. Harder still is following a good design to the letter. Although you can argue otherwise, the fact of the matter is that we haven't yet perfected the art/science of software engineering at its current level of complexity - why make it more complex?

      That said, there's nothing to stop you from developing with, for example, C# as your main language then using Python [python.net] or Perl [activestate.com] for handling complex text files.

      As previously stated, so far as I'm aware there's no more 'lock-in' to .NET than there is to other Microsoft (and indeed some non-Microsoft) software. I've spoken to various companies here in Australia and few of them are even thinking about installing the .NET CLR on their Windows systems - let alone their servers.

      I think the biggest problem with .NET for managers is a lack of understanding. .NET has a bit of an identity crisis in that it seems hard to define what it is in layman terms, and the technical terms tend to evolve from simple two-line explanations into long, drawn-out descriptions of the CLR and assemblies.

      It's a simple concept that I feel is hard to convey. How do others feel regarding this?

      Anyway I'm rambling now. Outies :)

      Tom L
      • "... .NET is the Sun/Java 'write once, run anywhere' concept done right because it's:
        ...
        - Potentially Platform Independant (not yet, maybe not soon ....

        Hmmm, I think that platform independence is a key characteristic of the "write once, run anywhere" (WORA) concept. In fact, I think it's the key characteristic. Java (to some degree) qualifies as WORA; .NET does not yet qualify as WORA, (mono notwithstanding). Anyone who thinks that .NET is a serious competitor to Java for WORA is either delusional or counting on something that doesn't exist yet. Of course, Microsoft has a long history of convincing people to adbandon working technologies in favor of their promised, cheaper solutions. E.G. see the roll-out of windows NT and industry reaction.

      • Re:well (Score:3, Informative)

        by j3110 ( 193209 )
        "NET is the Sun/Java 'write once, run anywhere' concept done right because it's:"

        --Oh really?

        "- Language Independant (although I would agree that C# seems best suited to it for me)"

        There are even LISP compilers for Java. If you haven't found what you are looking for, you just haven't looked hard enough.

        "- Potentially Platform Independant (not yet, maybe not soon, but possible - well done to the Mono team)"

        No it's not. Not as much as Java. Looking at the way MS treated Java (changing the core java.* libraries) I doubt it ever will be. You'll have to excuse me for looking at MS's track record to gauge their future conduct instead of fairy-tale hype told to managers to try to persuade them to buy.

        "- Generally runs faster than Java on Windows ('big surprise' you say - but see how Mono goes)"

        No it doesn't. As far as I can tell, MS really doesn't want to benchmark this at all. There have been no C# vs anything benchmarks. Not even the falsified for the public kind. There have been benchmarks of 2.5 Tier .Net web applications against broken, obfiscated J2EE implementations though. They tend to suggest that you can use 10x the LOC and still only be 2x slower. Sounds to me like Java cat run 5x more code per clock. I don't doubt the UI will be faster for .Net when you write a GUI. No faster than SWT, but faster than Swing by some ammount. .Net programs will start faster because it will be loaded at boot time like explorer(22M). Java will have this capability, and shared VM capability soon though, and most of my Java programs, with the VM, only use 11-14M of RAM.

  • Chapter 1: Security (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:48AM (#5270352)
    Full-text follows:

    "Security is job one at Microsoft. Make sure you make secure programs, and don't let anyone see the source code. Access to source code results in insecurity as the viewer may find holes in your application that they can exploit."

  • Let me get this straight.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rinikusu ( 28164 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:50AM (#5270362)
    "less-Microsoft oriented.."

    Hrm. MS invented the technology, there's no complete "alternative" .NET implementation, this book is about .NET...

    I'm just not sure how this couldn't help but be "Microsoft" oriented.

    • Re:Let me get this straight.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:59AM (#5270435) Journal
      I think what he means (as opposed to what he says which, you're right, makes no sense) is that he wanted the book to be more even-handed about the downside of .NET, and less cheerleading.

      At any rate, this book does sound potentially useful. It's a year (two years?) since .NET was introduced and every .NET story here still has multiple +5 posts asking "Could someone finally explain what the hell .NET is?", each responded to by multiple +5 posts providing barely overlapping explanations. Good for karma, I guess, but so far the only value I've gotten from .NET is the KDE theme copying it.

      • Well, you can still be "microsoft" centric and not cheerlead, you know? I think it's mostly a matter of semantics at this point. "Pro-Microsoft" and "Microsoft-centric" aren't the same thing and it's possible to write an article that "Microsoft-centric" and be very very very critical of them. :)
      • It's a year (two years?) since .NET was introduced ...
        So why do I keep seeing job ads that say, "Required: 2 years experience with .NET"?

        • Re:How long? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by bbqBrain ( 107591 )
          Because hiring managers often don't know much about the technology their departments use. For instance, I saw listings in 2000 for people with 2-3 years J2EE experience...uh, sure some people qualify, but they all work in Sun R&D.

          I think it's just a ploy to keep the really inexperienced would-be applicants from wasting the employer's time.
        • ``So why do I keep seeing job ads that say, "Required: 2 years experience with .NET"?''

          Perhaps what they're really saying is that folks who haven't been with the .NET group at Microsoft from the get go need not apply.

      • .NET is a collection of class libraries with less functionality* than what you can get in existing libraries.

        That's what .NET is.

        Once someone does some programming on .NET, it will also be a collection of web-accessible service daemons built with the .NET libraries.

        * - just yesterday I wanted to write a small app to resize my screen, and the functions to enumerate and change display parameters aren't there. Sounds like a security-paranoid defeature to me. So .NET is not Windows. I wonder what else it's .NOT...
    • We have trudged through lame names like My Computer and My Network Places. Now we get ".NET My Services". Is there a MS manager out there who got a bonus for that idea? I don't know - it's like a murky security blanket. Microsoft keeps saying it's mine, but I know it really belongs to them.

  • So, a poll... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Frothy Walrus ( 534163 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:50AM (#5270365)
    How long before MS changes .NET in order to break Mono?

    • No how long SOAP changes... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:05AM (#5270479) Homepage

      To break Microsoft... actually this is EXACTLY what the next spec does. Microsoft were the only people who went for literal encoding, which is a bit naff. The next SOAP spec does away with literal and enforces the use of RPC encoding.

      So actually this standards adherence stuff is already biting MS. But to compete in the enterprise space they have to adhere. Mono however is screwed.
      • Commenting on a sig is always going to be offtopic, but having
        read this one so many times, I am going to finally take the bait.

        It is basically a true statement. You are much less likely to
        get shot if you are not carrying a gun. But it is also basically
        a misleading statement, designed to lead the reader to a false
        conclusion, specifically, that it is therefore unwise to carry
        a gun.

        Firstly, if one employs a weapon, and thereby becomes a
        combatant, it is because the conclusion has been made that
        it is better to assume the risks of combat than to abstain.
        Personal safety is not the sole and overriding human value.
        In fact, it is one of the basest human values. The quote
        appeals to the lowest and most primitive factors in human
        nature. Defense of defenseless others is a higher value.

        Secondly, it glosses the distinction between open and concealed
        carry. While open carry attracts attention and may thereby
        entrain combat, concealed carry does not.

        I might continue, but for the press of time. I will be
        satisfied at least that I have not left the deceptive qualities
        of these words entirely unchallenged.


        • And read this book To Kill a Mockingbird [amazon.com], its a classic. The quote actually appeals to the highest principles that a man can hold. Namely peace in the face of aggression.

          And the kicker is that Atticus Finch is the best shot in the whole town... go figure.

    • I guess I'll take the CowboyNeal option on that please.

    • When will people learn this? They can't do that without changing the APIs which would not only break Mono but every single .NET app in the world.

      Why do you think they haven't changed Windows to break Wine? Because they can't. That's not the way it works.

  • Well, there's a chance that it's not full of crap (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TWX_the_Linux_Zealot ( 227666 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:51AM (#5270370) Journal
    The publisher appears to be Pearson Education, and not Microsoft Press, who really isn't trustable anymore in my opinion. I'm kind of surprised that they're reviewing a book that is a year old now, as far as Microsoft-oriented books go, this is almost an antique.

    • ...Microsoft Press, who really isn't trustable anymore...

      You mean they were trustworthy till now ? Oh... looks like I slept too much ;)
    • Microsoft Press publishes one of the most useful books I've ever seen - "Writing Secure Code", by a MS engineer. No, stop laughing, I'm serious. It's a great book. It even goes into great detail on how important it is to force secure coding practices onto the rest of the project team, and how you have to resist the temptation to add features or push up the release date at the expense of code review and good coding practices. It's usefullness is only enhanced by the delicious sense of irony you get when reading it.
      • ``It even goes into great detail on how important it is to force secure coding practices onto the rest of the project team, and how you have to resist the temptation to add features or push up the release date at the expense of code review and good coding practices.''

        Of course Microsoft Press agreed to publish the book under the condition that the author wouldn't follow the practices that he wrote about as they certainly impact the inclusion of nifty marketroid requested features and possibly push back their product delivery dates.

  • writer (Score:2, Funny)

    by AyeFly ( 242460 )
    The writer of the article is Dave Chappell? hm, isn't he a comedian with Comedy Central? .NET really is a joke!

  • Web services (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zero_offset ( 200586 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:03AM (#5270464) Homepage
    the central theme through the book is that of XML and web services, accurately reflecting their importance in the .net framework.

    Except for the minor problem that web services are not a central theme of the .NET framework. They are there, and they are well supported, but the majority of the framework would work unchanged if they didn't exist or are not used.

  • When I first glanced at the author's name it looked like Dave Chappelle [davechapelle.com].. wouldn't that be an interesting book to read..
  • and reading the blurb on this review was way more descriptive. The student consultant at my University gave a tech talk on .NET and Tablet PC's and asked the audience what .NET was? A hush fell over the audience. Someone suggested "web services" and the presenter said "yes... exactly. Web Services". He stopped fielding answers cause to him that's all .NET was.

  • Too early in the morning (Score:5, Funny)

    by sunset ( 182117 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:04AM (#5270475) Homepage
    After reading this article I caught myself looking for Mozilla's "delete" button....

  • The following is meant to be humor (Score:3, Funny)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:05AM (#5270476) Homepage Journal
    so don't take it any other way.

    >>...this book aims to cut through the marketing hype....

    But that's all I've ever seen on .net.
  • ...help the average technical manager or developer get a feel for what the .NET framework means for them.

    Probably nothing to users who read this site.
  • When reading a book about .NET, the following is not a critique:
    A more critical and less Microsoft-centric text would for me have made this book more authoritative.
    This stupidity is really wearing thin.
  • I thought MS dropped the .NET name???
  • Ok, there is no doubt that technology is about to have a major impact on the way companies do business.

    Trouble is, for your company to benefit from it, you need board level "gut instinct" and understanding of how this technology can work for you.

    Just reading a .NET brochure or attending a glitzy Microsoft Senior Management seminar luncheon is nowhere near enough.

    As an analogy, let's say that the chances of your company succeeding in developing a world class information technology platform over the next 10 years were proportional to your board members ability to play the piano.

    You cannot attend a seminar luncheon and learn how to play the piano. You might be able to play 3 blind mice, but that's not enough.

  • Understanding .NET (Score:5, Interesting)

    by scotch ( 102596 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:31AM (#5270632) Homepage
    "... comparing [C# and Java] is like comparing Pepsi and Coke: you don't drink the cola -- you drink the advertising" - unknown

    HTH

    • Well, Pepsi's commercials are better, but I simply prefer Coke.

    • Yeah, but [Pepsi] gives me indigestion. Sure, it [tastes] pretty similar to [Coke] but has all this [syntactic] sugar which seems too much like other evil things like [cough syrup]. And when I'm [drinking Coke], I don't feel as much like I'm supporting an evil scofflaw corporation that confuses innovation and litigation.

  • .net (Score:2, Informative)

    by MagicMerlin ( 576324 )
    Well, as a developer, I think .net is pretty good. My happiness with .net goes up with the implementation of mono. .net is standardized, and open source is built on portability. There is nothing more portable than being able to run a binary (sort of) on a host of different machines. C# is pretty good all around, it got right a lot of the things java got wrong, and choosing .net for your (windows) database app is never a bad decision, even if it may not be the best one. In a way its a lot like xml: there's a lot of hype, but the overall philosophy is good. Very unmicrosoftian in implementation. When they get generics I will probably write all my own personal stuff in C#.

    • Re:.net (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bygimis ( 576467 )
      "There is nothing more portable than being able to run a binary (sort of) on a host of different machines" Which is just what you can't do with .net - or can you send me a binary I can run on my Mac, Linux box and Win2K box? "My happiness with .net goes up with the implementation of mono. .net is standardized, and open source is built on portability. " From what I've heard its almost impossible to write anything in .net without using the Windows API as well. So you'll end up with Windows .net Apps that are no more portable than at present, and Open Source Mono apps that run well on all platforms with a recompile (just like most current Open Source Apps).

  • revolutionary (Score:5, Funny)

    by syle ( 638903 ) <syle.waygate@org> on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:41AM (#5270719) Homepage
    It frustrates me how web services are often described as revolutionary, when built on technologies such as UDDI and WDSL which in turn are based on relatively mature technologies such as XML and HTTP.

    Remember, revolutionary also means to go in circles.

  • .Net Framework Essentials (Score:3, Informative)

    by andynms ( 564072 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:48AM (#5270766)
    For a similar, but maybe more technical overview, see .Net Framework Essentials [oreilly.com] from O'Reilly. It's a nice short book with a good number of simple code examples. I'm about half-way through it, and I've learned a lot.

  • In a nutshell (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nemeosis ( 259734 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:50AM (#5270786)
    .NET is language independent, platform centric.
    Java is language centric, platform independent.

    • Platform centric for now!

      Ximian is working on the port now it is called MONO or something like that. .NET is made to run on any platform just do think M$ was going to front the application costs of porting it to other platforms?

    • Re:In a nutshell (Score:3, Informative)

      by will_die ( 586523 )
      So the Ada code converted into java bytecode that some of my programs use is not really there??
      Sorry but Java is actually language and platform independent, however it is not as language independent as the .NET bytecode, but then again .NET forces languages to change to be compatible.

    • Java is language centric

      The java bytecode is not language centric. Programming languages for the java virtual machine. [tu-berlin.de] There are 50+ languages listed in the above link. I would bet there are many more languages currently available for the java bytecode than for the .NET bytecode.

      People need to realize that .NET and the java VM are just virtual machines that run bytecode and have huge libraries associated with them. The bytecode for either VM can be generated from many different languages.

      It is correct to point out that much of .NET's library is not portable while java's library is 100% portable to many different platforms.

      • Java's bytecode has limitations that make implementing some languages efficiently difficult. In particular:

        1. The only mechanism you can use to implement closures is a class. For functional languages, which make intense use of closures, this is not good enough. The Scheme and Lisp implementations on the JVM, for instance, are substantially less performant than those based on more appropriate VMs.

        2. There is no way to optimise tail recursion. Again, functional languages use tail recursion a lot.

    • ugh, I don't get why people compare .Net to java, why don't we compare C to J2EE while were at it?

      .Net can be compared to J2EE, Java can be compared to C#. Architecture or framework is very seperate from a language utilizing that architecture or framework.

  • What did you expect? (Score:5, Informative)

    by brickbat ( 64506 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:52AM (#5270812) Homepage Journal
    Also, even with a book so Microsoft oriented, I would expect to see either a distinct section, or at least more comments, on the pitfalls and barriers to takeup of the framework. A more critical and less Microsoft-centric text would for me have made this book more authoritative.

    Did you read the author's bio--even the short one on bn.com?

    David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates and the best-selling author of Understanding ActiveX and OLE (Microsoft Press, 1996) and Understanding Microsoft Windows 2000 Distributed Services (Microsoft Press, 2000). Through his keynotes, seminars, writing, and consulting, David helps IT professionals around the world understand, use, market, and make better decisions about enterprise software technologies.

    He's been published by Microsoft, fer chrissakes. He makes a living as a consultant on MS technologies. You can't possibly expect him to be coolly objective about anything coming from Redmond.

    Reading the author bio will often give you a clue about his or her technology bias, although it's no guarantee that the book will provide an objective perspective. I wouldn't expect Richard Stallman to write a wholly bias-free book about .NET, either.
    • Well then can you recommend some non-bias .NET books?

    • Re:What did you expect? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by GroovBird ( 209391 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:21AM (#5271034) Homepage Journal
      I heard him speak at the .NET convention in Brussels last friday! He did an introductory peptalk in front of the entire audience, and then spoke at a session about the differences between .NET and J2EE.

      Well, even though even lunch was paid for by the .NET campaign budget, he really didn't step over the edge by spreading FUD or anything like that. It seemed quite honest and unbiased.

      (Allthough he DID call Linux nothing more than a broken light instead of a real fire, but that was another session.)

      But he writes mostly books about Microsoft technologies and not very deep ones at that...

      I also don't agree with the reviewer's thoughts on the success of COM. COM was a successful piece of crap, but you wouldn't hear about it if you weren't in the Microsoft camp.

      Dave

  • Built on WDSL? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ortholattice ( 175065 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:57AM (#5270847)
    "when built on technologies such as UDDI and WDSL..."

    Acronyms, acronyms... For the unitiated:

    WDSL Wireless Digital Subscriber Line
    WSDL Web Services Description Language
    UDDI Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (not Description and Discovery Interface)
    ASP Active Server Page
    CLR Common Language Runtime
    CORBA Common Object Request Broker Architecture
    OMG Object Management Group
    XML eXtensible Markup Language
    MSIL Micro$oft Intermediate Language
    ADO ActiveX* Data Object
    .NET ?

    * The correct spelling is a skull-and-crossbones character in place of the X but slashdot filters out Unicode 9760

  • Lots of reasons why I want .NET to fail (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:20AM (#5271022)
    This note was originally published at John Munsch weblog on January the 14th.

    Lots of reasons why I want .NET to fail and fail badly

    It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
    P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.

    Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
    If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.

    When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?

    I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.

    When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
    Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the .NET "rebuttal" that I linked to above, "For non-profit use VS.NET can be had pretty cheaply, especially if you know anyone that is in college somewhere." Pretty cheaply? For a non-profit (that means charities, churches, universities, the hobbiest who is going to give away his work for FREE)... pretty cheaply? Wow. That is well and truly pathetic. To try and justify it, and say, oh well, you can try to scam an educational discount so it won't be so dear, is even more pathetic.

    Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the .NET commercials with William H. Gacy telling you how great it is without really ever telling you anything about it? Microsoft doesn't trust .NET to stand on its own technical merits and it knows it may go like cod-liver oil down the gullets of a lot of people who have seen how the company works behind closed doors even if it were the tech shiznit.
    So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.

    They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support .NET just in case there wasn't any grassroots community who actually wanted to do it. Or maybe just in case there was and they couldn't control it.
    Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?

    A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?

    It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of .NET for other platforms? If those same people were working on giving us new libraries and new tools for an already existing language instead of pouring in the thousands of man hours it's going to take to build a copy of the C# compiler or a .NET version of Ant and JUnit?

    In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.

    • Re:Lots of reasons why I want .NET to fail (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You are an idiot. What do you know about the case with Stac Electronics? I was there at Stac. They lied about everything. I remember Gary (the CEO) talking about how they could say whatever they wanted because the case was going to be spun as David vs. Golliath and the facts were secondard. He actually laughed about it. I left Stac after that because it made me sick to sit in a room with the executives.

      And the patent that was the basis of the lawsuit? Stac bought it as a pre-emptive strike against Microsoft and to protect themselves (since virtually everyone who had implemented fast compression infringed on the patent, including Stac). Stac knew this because they had illegally obtained early info from Microsoft regarding their plans for compression in the OS.

      Given your total misrepresentation of the Stac case, I give the rest of your message no credibility.
  • The book is a good survey of the very large .net world. It is not an in-depth view of any particular part, but gave me a very good overview of just what the parts *are*, so I could build a conceptual framework on which I could hang the detailed knowledge I got from other books. It was a quick read, too. .net is a bunch of different things, including languages, language-independent libraries, a virtual machine, and standards for interoperability. The book covers all of that, walking the line between "too high-level to be useful" and "too detailed to grasp easily". It is trying to cover several different audiences, and succeeds pretty well, I think.

    The book has "executive overview" summary sentences beside each paragraph, which are obviously aimed at, well, executives. But at the same time, the paragraphs themselves have good solid information about how the CLR works, how the libraries are structured, how VB.NET and C# are similar and where they differ, including actual code examples. It makes you aware of what pieces are out there, so when you need an encryption algorithm (for example), you know there are some standard library routines you can check out before coding one from scratch.

    Don't get the book if all you want is a C# reference (get the O'Reilly book for that). As a matter of fact, don't get the book if you want a really in-depth discussion of any particular part.

    *DO* get the book (or borrow it from the library, like I did) if you want to know more about the whole .net system and how it all fits together, and have a good base for the rest of the knowledge you need to collect.
  • Oh my... a bucket full of "Q: What's .NET?" "A:[insert synonym for crap here]" postings...

    If you can't figure out what .NET is, you don't know what software deveopment is. What's Java? (besides the slang for coffee or the Indonesian Island). A language? true. But also a platform. .NET is a platform. Not a language, but a set of api's, functionality if you will. So it compares to 'Java, The Platform (tm)'. C# compares to 'Java, The Language (tm)'.

    So there. Now we got that out of the way, can we discuss the review instead of the crippleness of MS' marketing-droids? thanks.
  • Also found Here [drivel.net]

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