.NET Reality Check...

I agree with Frans Bouma that there is a significant amount of hype around Whidbey, Yukon, Longhorn, etc, and it isn't all that useful for what we do today.

However, I think the work of the Prescriptive Architecture Group and the Patterns and Practices are good examples of non-trivial documentation and code that works with today's release bits. The PAG is working on today's problems and with today's bits.

The application blocks have been a tremendous help in many ways for applications and corporate frameworks we are developing for our clients.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/practices/

I still find the discussion of the new stuff interesting, and I try to keep up so that when it becomes real bits, I have less to learn, and when I am building stuff today, I can think about how the nextGen stuff will be built, and design todays stuff in anticipation of that (to some degree). I find myself learning a bit more of the .NET Framework on each project I work on. And it has only been about six months since the last VB6 project I worked on.

SOA, for example, doesn't mean that I have to use Indigo. I can do SOA today, building framework pieces and components in a similar fashion to how Indigo is doing it. Those guys have already done a bunch of the design for me, so why wouldn't I leverage that? When Indigo arrives, I can adapt my pieces to use it instead of the “roll-your-own” that I built.

Mike

An interesting stat: there are about 28,000 method calls in the Win32 API, and about 184,000 method calls in the .NET Framework.

2 Comments

  • Both great groups, who produce good stuff but it seems like you are comparing the qualities of apples to those of oranges.

  • THe problem is this: there are serious issues with today's tools like VS.NET, .NET 1.1 etc. Instead of cranking out fixes for those issues (I mean, read the newsgroups and you run into a lot of them), we get hype about next-gen technology which seems to fix the issues we have today. That's not helping us one bit :), it leaves us with the feeling that there is no customer support.



    Also, how many people have the whidbey alpha bits? 10,000 people? For those 10,000 people Microsoft puts up articles how to do this and that. For the other 6 million people using .NET today these articles are completely useless. However 50% of the articles are for these 10,000 people, and NO fixes are released.



    It thus comes down to this:

    - there are issues, we ignore them

    - instead of fixing the issues, we hype the next-gen tool which will fix the issues eventually.



    That's no customer support, something that is also part of 'quality'. Microsoft is so eager to tell everybody that they listen to their customers. Well, I really don't see a lot of customers demanding NO support and hype instead.



    "When indigo arrives", that's at least 2 years away. Do you remember what you wrote 2 years ago? Was it targeting 2004 tech? I don't think so, because you can't make a living from writing software that is ready to rock in 2006, today, and that's what's this is all about: we need solutions TODAY, because the majority of the customers of .NET deal with issues TODAY with today's technology.

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