Does .NET awe the non-.NETers?
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There are several of you who shun .NET like it was the devil herself. Mike Dunn and Colino come to mind. Initially it might have been okay. But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nope, I agree with Mr Dunn, specialized or desktop GUI apps don't qualify for .NET. When developing Data centric applications, .NET and C# make life a whole lot easier. I think in the long run it's Microsoft goal to eradicate Win32/Win64 API programming (except at Microsoft or course ;), otherwise they would never have the edge over the competitors). I'm easy, I'll certainly do .NET programming but I'll insist on using C# as the preferred language.
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There are several of you who shun .NET like it was the devil herself. Mike Dunn and Colino come to mind. Initially it might have been okay. But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nishant S wrote: But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? A lot so-called news sites are doing a lot of MS PR because MS pays well, so may be it's just about us thinking that everything is about .NET. Which is wrong. In fact, MS is using .NET as a sexy title to make sure enterprises upgrade their hardware and software every year, even without a cause. They are basically doing business, but this does a lot harm to other small software companies. The other thing is about the control on APIs. MFC/ATL/WTL/STL/... are out-of-control since we have the source code. But .NET is on the MS side, and every time they decide to make breaking changes, you have to cope with it. The trouble is MS only supports the latest release (let me guess how little time it takes before MS decides that VS.NET 2002 is now unsupported), while us small software companies are expected to support both versions.
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Nishant S wrote: now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET What 'whole world'? Nobody but Microsoft and their trade partners use .NET. It probably will eventually be adopted by many, but for now it's a rather blase non-event. It has great promise, but very little substance, and few are embracing it as tightly as M$ would like. When venture capital was plentiful, vaporware was a salable commodity, but now that the well has dried up people are looking hard at the bottom line, and .NET doesn't contribute to it in any significant way. There's no rush to adopt it, and no technical reason yet to push it - that will come, but it isn't yet time. It is said that 'if you build a better mousetrap, people will beat a path to your door.' Not true these days, but rather 'if you build a better mousetrap, people will keep an eye on it, but will keep on using what has worked for years until you show them a definite benefit to changing to the new model.' I expect .NET to stagnate while M$ works out the bugs for a couple of years, and discovers a few of the serendipitous benefits that it may offer. Only then will it prosper, and in the meantime those of us that deliver solid products built with tried and true tools will prosper. "Please don't put cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light" - Sign in a Bullhead City, AZ Restroom
Roger Wright wrote: Nobody but Microsoft and their trade partners use .NET. Wrong! I know plenty of projects working with .Net in non-MS related companies. Also, if you are producing a software package that is extendable, a development tool or you provide sourced code then your customers will likely be asking for .NET right now. Davy Blog for Software Testing, Bugs, Quality, Security and Stability - www.latedecember.com
News From Angus, Scotland - The Angus Blog
My Personal Blog - Homepage. -
There are several of you who shun .NET like it was the devil herself. Mike Dunn and Colino come to mind. Initially it might have been okay. But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nishant S wrote: do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete There are still COBOL programmers around. Chris thinks we should all be using FORTRAN. ;) For me it is like this; For web development ASP.NET is an absolute no brainer. It has tangible benefits that even business men can understand. For the rest of the IT industry the benefits are nowhere near as tangible as that.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaMacbeth muttered: I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er Shog9: Paul "The human happy pill" Watson
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There are several of you who shun .NET like it was the devil herself. Mike Dunn and Colino come to mind. Initially it might have been okay. But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
I must be getting old, As I still can't think of a way of a small guy like me capitalizing on .NET. Regardz Colin J Davies
Sonork ID 100.9197:Colin
Warning Link to the minion's animation, do not use. It's a real shame that people as stupid as you can work out how to use a computer. said by Christian Graus in the Soapbox
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Nope, I agree with Mr Dunn, specialized or desktop GUI apps don't qualify for .NET. When developing Data centric applications, .NET and C# make life a whole lot easier. I think in the long run it's Microsoft goal to eradicate Win32/Win64 API programming (except at Microsoft or course ;), otherwise they would never have the edge over the competitors). I'm easy, I'll certainly do .NET programming but I'll insist on using C# as the preferred language.
Norm Almond wrote: I think in the long run it's Microsoft goal to eradicate Win32/Win64 API programming (except at Microsoft or course , otherwise they would never have the edge over the competitors). I agree, on that. That must be the long term goal. WinApi is still to close to native code for them to shut 3rd party developers out. MS want to be able to choose what is developed for Windows rather than the customers or developers choosing. Regardz Colin J Davies
Sonork ID 100.9197:Colin
Warning Link to the minion's animation, do not use. It's a real shame that people as stupid as you can work out how to use a computer. said by Christian Graus in the Soapbox
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Au contraire! (your French lesson for the day :)) I don't view .NET as evil or any incarnation thereof. It's simply a case of it not being the right tool for the work I do. I'm gonna say what I always do - just because VC 7 comes out with all the whiz-bang whammy-dyne .NET features, it doesn't mean VC 6 suddenly stops working and I can no longer code in it. For work[^] download size is a huge concern, and right now we're converting our UI from MFC to WTL (yes, at my suggestion) to get our EXE size down. .NET is right out since our users will probably not have the .NET Framework yet and it is unacceptable to make them download it. Now the VS.NET IDE, that's evil. ;) Nishant S wrote: do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Again, why should I? There will always be a need for small apps where requiring the .NET Framework* is unacceptable, either because of the download size (telling modem users that they need to do a 20 MB download is not a good way to win customers), or the developers just don't know the .NET classes yet. From what I've seen, .NET's big strengths are in how it makes code operate transparently a) between languages and b) over the network.** That's all well and good, but I have no interest in those areas. *shrug* I just don't. If there was a job opening for an app that was not using C++ and all network-based and whatnot, I wouldn't go for it in the first place, .NET or no .NET. As for GUIs, you have to learn a whole new class library and do all sorts of conversions just to call APIs. If you're coming from VB where it's all forms-based and all you know how to do is click-drag-drop onto forms, and let the wizard write the handlers for you, then cool. Not for me though. For all the talk about VB being RAD and whatnot, I still have no trouble mocking up GUIs quickly in good ol' C++. In fact, I'm doing it right now at work. Why should I the time to learn the .NET GUI classes? (That's not rhetorical, if you can explain why I should, go right ahead.) IMO, the big strike against GUIs is that when major additions are made to the Windows API, you can't just grab the PSDK and use the new headers. You have to either go through the headers, look for new APIs and structs, and translate them by hand into .NET types, or hope that someone else will do it for you. I can just grab the PSDK
Michael Dunn wrote: Now the VS.NET IDE, that's evil. :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: I don't want to start a big war here but I definitely think the VS.NET IDE is a LOT better than the old IDE (somewhat slower on low-spec machines but blazingly fast on a dual 2.4GHz :P ). There are a LOT of reasons I feel it's better but the main reason being: CTRL-SHIFT-R & CTRL-SHIFT-P If you haven't used this then you're really missing out on one of the most useful features of the new IDE. It saves me TONS of time.
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Au contraire! (your French lesson for the day :)) I don't view .NET as evil or any incarnation thereof. It's simply a case of it not being the right tool for the work I do. I'm gonna say what I always do - just because VC 7 comes out with all the whiz-bang whammy-dyne .NET features, it doesn't mean VC 6 suddenly stops working and I can no longer code in it. For work[^] download size is a huge concern, and right now we're converting our UI from MFC to WTL (yes, at my suggestion) to get our EXE size down. .NET is right out since our users will probably not have the .NET Framework yet and it is unacceptable to make them download it. Now the VS.NET IDE, that's evil. ;) Nishant S wrote: do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Again, why should I? There will always be a need for small apps where requiring the .NET Framework* is unacceptable, either because of the download size (telling modem users that they need to do a 20 MB download is not a good way to win customers), or the developers just don't know the .NET classes yet. From what I've seen, .NET's big strengths are in how it makes code operate transparently a) between languages and b) over the network.** That's all well and good, but I have no interest in those areas. *shrug* I just don't. If there was a job opening for an app that was not using C++ and all network-based and whatnot, I wouldn't go for it in the first place, .NET or no .NET. As for GUIs, you have to learn a whole new class library and do all sorts of conversions just to call APIs. If you're coming from VB where it's all forms-based and all you know how to do is click-drag-drop onto forms, and let the wizard write the handlers for you, then cool. Not for me though. For all the talk about VB being RAD and whatnot, I still have no trouble mocking up GUIs quickly in good ol' C++. In fact, I'm doing it right now at work. Why should I the time to learn the .NET GUI classes? (That's not rhetorical, if you can explain why I should, go right ahead.) IMO, the big strike against GUIs is that when major additions are made to the Windows API, you can't just grab the PSDK and use the new headers. You have to either go through the headers, look for new APIs and structs, and translate them by hand into .NET types, or hope that someone else will do it for you. I can just grab the PSDK
Michael Dunn wrote: *we really need an acronym for that MS tend to call it DOTNETFX do they not....so how about. .NETFX ? Maybe we should send it off to ISO and get it made a standard :rolleyes: From the rest of your post. THe one thing that really put me off developing for .NET was the framework. I reasised that whatever app I made, I would have to release it on CD to get people to bother getting it. I've seen sites around offering their "50kb super app", and as a footnote say that you need the .NETFX to run it. Suddenly the file size leaps about 20mb and users say....I don't really need this app do I. As soon as MS release it as part of windows itself, as in .NET Server, people won't mind it. IMHO, they should have kept WinXP back until they could ship it with the .NETFX.
"If you just say porn then you get all manner of chaff and low grade stuff."
- Paul Watson, Lounge 25 Mar 03
"But a fresh install - it's like having clean sheets"
- C. Maunder Lounge 3 Mar '03
Jonathan 'nonny' Newman Homepage [www.nonny.com] [^]
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Nishant S wrote: But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET The sun shown dark and red through the haze that morning, as though a pool of blood in the sky drying at the edges. Over the horizon it came, growing larger by the moment, hard, alien, terrifying. In their beds, the peaceful townsfolk tossed and turned feverishly, fearing the dawn fast approaching. As through the streets the crier ran, shouting and screaming until his voice was left a rasping whisper, but still the screech could be heard:
".NET! .NET! Run for your lives, .NET looms!"
ok, ok... time for sleep... ---
But, oh god / Under the weight of life / Things seem / Brighter on the other side - David Matthews, Big Eyed Fish
Shog9 wrote: ok, ok... time for sleep... Shhh....shhh....there there, the Next Big Thing will soon arrive to eat up the evil .NET and all its namespaces.
"If you just say porn then you get all manner of chaff and low grade stuff."
- Paul Watson, Lounge 25 Mar 03
"But a fresh install - it's like having clean sheets"
- C. Maunder Lounge 3 Mar '03
Jonathan 'nonny' Newman Homepage [www.nonny.com] [^]
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Nope, I agree with Mr Dunn, specialized or desktop GUI apps don't qualify for .NET. When developing Data centric applications, .NET and C# make life a whole lot easier. I think in the long run it's Microsoft goal to eradicate Win32/Win64 API programming (except at Microsoft or course ;), otherwise they would never have the edge over the competitors). I'm easy, I'll certainly do .NET programming but I'll insist on using C# as the preferred language.
Norm Almond wrote: I think in the long run it's Microsoft goal to eradicate Win32/Win64 API programming Yep! They are changing the API while the system is running. And I think I like that new API. But then - most of the work will (for many years to come) be made with 'normal' programming. Wherever you have to be fast, small or interoperable .NET is right out. And the Web-programming market is shrinking, not growing. Money is made by firms who make real value, and not just some virtual hullabaloo. There is a real mass extinction of startups for quite some time now.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
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There are several of you who shun .NET like it was the devil herself. Mike Dunn and Colino come to mind. Initially it might have been okay. But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
One big advantage of .NET is that it brought conclusion to the VB6 product line. By this, I mean *finally* we don't have to worry about another VB6 sp coming along... And all the third party controls out there either work or they don't. VB6 has become 'stable'. For shareware / small utility development Delphi, C++ / C++ Builder, and VB6 (for certain things) are the best route. Basically, for anything that requires small footprint, and good performance (e.g. graphics engines) - and most importantly, anything that has to be distributed online. Most of the world are still on 56k dial-up - It's difficult enough to persuade them to download the VB runtimes, let alone having to download the 20Mb .NET framework. Why oh why wasn't this included in XP??? :(( However, I've been doing a lot of development work recently in ASP.NET / VB.NET and *love* it! - For a server-side web based dev environment it really is the easiest and most powerful I've worked with. ;) John.
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Nishant S wrote: But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? A lot so-called news sites are doing a lot of MS PR because MS pays well, so may be it's just about us thinking that everything is about .NET. Which is wrong. In fact, MS is using .NET as a sexy title to make sure enterprises upgrade their hardware and software every year, even without a cause. They are basically doing business, but this does a lot harm to other small software companies. The other thing is about the control on APIs. MFC/ATL/WTL/STL/... are out-of-control since we have the source code. But .NET is on the MS side, and every time they decide to make breaking changes, you have to cope with it. The trouble is MS only supports the latest release (let me guess how little time it takes before MS decides that VS.NET 2002 is now unsupported), while us small software companies are expected to support both versions.
.S.Rod. wrote: The other thing is about the control on APIs. MFC/ATL/WTL/STL/... are out-of-control since we have the source code. But .NET is on the MS side, and every time they decide to make breaking changes, you have to cope with it. The trouble is MS only supports the latest release (let me guess how little time it takes before MS decides that VS.NET 2002 is now unsupported), while us small software companies are expected to support both versions. .S.Rod you've hit the nail on the head!
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Michael Dunn wrote: *we really need an acronym for that MS tend to call it DOTNETFX do they not....so how about. .NETFX ? Maybe we should send it off to ISO and get it made a standard :rolleyes: From the rest of your post. THe one thing that really put me off developing for .NET was the framework. I reasised that whatever app I made, I would have to release it on CD to get people to bother getting it. I've seen sites around offering their "50kb super app", and as a footnote say that you need the .NETFX to run it. Suddenly the file size leaps about 20mb and users say....I don't really need this app do I. As soon as MS release it as part of windows itself, as in .NET Server, people won't mind it. IMHO, they should have kept WinXP back until they could ship it with the .NETFX.
"If you just say porn then you get all manner of chaff and low grade stuff."
- Paul Watson, Lounge 25 Mar 03
"But a fresh install - it's like having clean sheets"
- C. Maunder Lounge 3 Mar '03
Jonathan 'nonny' Newman Homepage [www.nonny.com] [^]
Jonny Newman wrote: , they should have kept WinXP back until they could ship it with the .NETFX. That's already the case : Windows XP SP1 CD. You have to order the CD though.
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Au contraire! (your French lesson for the day :)) I don't view .NET as evil or any incarnation thereof. It's simply a case of it not being the right tool for the work I do. I'm gonna say what I always do - just because VC 7 comes out with all the whiz-bang whammy-dyne .NET features, it doesn't mean VC 6 suddenly stops working and I can no longer code in it. For work[^] download size is a huge concern, and right now we're converting our UI from MFC to WTL (yes, at my suggestion) to get our EXE size down. .NET is right out since our users will probably not have the .NET Framework yet and it is unacceptable to make them download it. Now the VS.NET IDE, that's evil. ;) Nishant S wrote: do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Again, why should I? There will always be a need for small apps where requiring the .NET Framework* is unacceptable, either because of the download size (telling modem users that they need to do a 20 MB download is not a good way to win customers), or the developers just don't know the .NET classes yet. From what I've seen, .NET's big strengths are in how it makes code operate transparently a) between languages and b) over the network.** That's all well and good, but I have no interest in those areas. *shrug* I just don't. If there was a job opening for an app that was not using C++ and all network-based and whatnot, I wouldn't go for it in the first place, .NET or no .NET. As for GUIs, you have to learn a whole new class library and do all sorts of conversions just to call APIs. If you're coming from VB where it's all forms-based and all you know how to do is click-drag-drop onto forms, and let the wizard write the handlers for you, then cool. Not for me though. For all the talk about VB being RAD and whatnot, I still have no trouble mocking up GUIs quickly in good ol' C++. In fact, I'm doing it right now at work. Why should I the time to learn the .NET GUI classes? (That's not rhetorical, if you can explain why I should, go right ahead.) IMO, the big strike against GUIs is that when major additions are made to the Windows API, you can't just grab the PSDK and use the new headers. You have to either go through the headers, look for new APIs and structs, and translate them by hand into .NET types, or hope that someone else will do it for you. I can just grab the PSDK
Michael Dunn wrote: IMO, the big strike against GUIs is that when major additions are made to the Windows API, you can't just grab the PSDK and use the new headers. You have to either go through the headers, look for new APIs and structs, and translate them by hand into .NET types, or hope that someone else will do it for you. I can just grab the PSDK at any time, and I'm good to go. Don't forget that you can always use C++.NET to wrap up any new API calls. I did it a while ago with the EmailValidator control I wrote (here on CP), I needed to query some DNS servers and so rather find some .NET code that would do it directly I just used the DNS functions in the Win API. I produced some code that put together a collection of Mx records after navigating through the query results. In the end it wasn't too bad. It's damn lucky because there was no way I was going to sit down and convert the structs and calls to use in PInvoke! -- Paul "Put the key of despair into the lock of apathy. Turn the knob of mediocrity slowly and open the gates of despondency - welcome to a day in the average office." - David Brent, from "The Office" MS Messenger: paul@oobaloo.co.uk Sonork: 100.22446
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Jonny Newman wrote: , they should have kept WinXP back until they could ship it with the .NETFX. That's already the case : Windows XP SP1 CD. You have to order the CD though.
.S.Rod. wrote: You have to order the CD though. Need I say more? I rest my case. What Joe Average user is going to bother with the SP? They buy the OS expecting it to be finished.
"If you just say porn then you get all manner of chaff and low grade stuff."
- Paul Watson, Lounge 25 Mar 03
"But a fresh install - it's like having clean sheets"
- C. Maunder Lounge 3 Mar '03
Jonathan 'nonny' Newman Homepage [www.nonny.com] [^]
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Nishant S wrote: do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete There are still COBOL programmers around. Chris thinks we should all be using FORTRAN. ;) For me it is like this; For web development ASP.NET is an absolute no brainer. It has tangible benefits that even business men can understand. For the rest of the IT industry the benefits are nowhere near as tangible as that.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaMacbeth muttered: I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er Shog9: Paul "The human happy pill" Watson
Totally agree, finally you don't have to set about creating some COM server everytime you want to do anything more than query a database and show the results. I've finished coding my final year project for University (now just time to write the mammoth documentation package that follows), a .NET powered XML Web Service (includes dynamic billing, authentication and other such funky things). It's never been too much of a hassle, there's been times when things just plain haven't worked (and when documentation I've been using has been incomplete to say the least) but that's when the VS.NET debugger has proved its worth. Its fantastic to be able to develop web apps in such an all encompassing environment, when it comes to the UI design then you've got to consider Dreamweaver, but for the behind-the-scenes grunt work, VS.NET and .NET make it relatively simple. -- Paul "Put the key of despair into the lock of apathy. Turn the knob of mediocrity slowly and open the gates of despondency - welcome to a day in the average office." - David Brent, from "The Office" MS Messenger: paul@oobaloo.co.uk Sonork: 100.22446
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There are several of you who shun .NET like it was the devil herself. Mike Dunn and Colino come to mind. Initially it might have been okay. But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nishant S wrote: But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? I will have to agree with Mike and others. It simple does not really offer anything major over what I have for what I am supporting. Which is mostly server side integration with much of the effort towards web services and XML publishing on SUN boxes. Now when I return to my former life and on the client machines if calling those web services is noticable better than the tools I alread have developed it may be different. ""
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Au contraire! (your French lesson for the day :)) I don't view .NET as evil or any incarnation thereof. It's simply a case of it not being the right tool for the work I do. I'm gonna say what I always do - just because VC 7 comes out with all the whiz-bang whammy-dyne .NET features, it doesn't mean VC 6 suddenly stops working and I can no longer code in it. For work[^] download size is a huge concern, and right now we're converting our UI from MFC to WTL (yes, at my suggestion) to get our EXE size down. .NET is right out since our users will probably not have the .NET Framework yet and it is unacceptable to make them download it. Now the VS.NET IDE, that's evil. ;) Nishant S wrote: do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Again, why should I? There will always be a need for small apps where requiring the .NET Framework* is unacceptable, either because of the download size (telling modem users that they need to do a 20 MB download is not a good way to win customers), or the developers just don't know the .NET classes yet. From what I've seen, .NET's big strengths are in how it makes code operate transparently a) between languages and b) over the network.** That's all well and good, but I have no interest in those areas. *shrug* I just don't. If there was a job opening for an app that was not using C++ and all network-based and whatnot, I wouldn't go for it in the first place, .NET or no .NET. As for GUIs, you have to learn a whole new class library and do all sorts of conversions just to call APIs. If you're coming from VB where it's all forms-based and all you know how to do is click-drag-drop onto forms, and let the wizard write the handlers for you, then cool. Not for me though. For all the talk about VB being RAD and whatnot, I still have no trouble mocking up GUIs quickly in good ol' C++. In fact, I'm doing it right now at work. Why should I the time to learn the .NET GUI classes? (That's not rhetorical, if you can explain why I should, go right ahead.) IMO, the big strike against GUIs is that when major additions are made to the Windows API, you can't just grab the PSDK and use the new headers. You have to either go through the headers, look for new APIs and structs, and translate them by hand into .NET types, or hope that someone else will do it for you. I can just grab the PSDK
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Michael Dunn wrote: Now the VS.NET IDE, that's evil. :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: I don't want to start a big war here but I definitely think the VS.NET IDE is a LOT better than the old IDE (somewhat slower on low-spec machines but blazingly fast on a dual 2.4GHz :P ). There are a LOT of reasons I feel it's better but the main reason being: CTRL-SHIFT-R & CTRL-SHIFT-P If you haven't used this then you're really missing out on one of the most useful features of the new IDE. It saves me TONS of time.
It's blazingly fast on an Athlon 1700 too. Just crank up the memory and you're set :-) What's the difference between a C++ programmer and God? God knows he's not a C++ programmer : anon
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There are several of you who shun .NET like it was the devil herself. Mike Dunn and Colino come to mind. Initially it might have been okay. But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
I have been coding in .Net for about a year. First of all I must say I miss C++. I do find .Net to be a lot better for creating web based applications. Things do fit a lot better. ASP .Net is a huge change from the crap they had before. Have no clue about VB .Net and I hope this trend continues. C# is fun to use, but does not compare to C++ (Just my opnion). What sort of bothers me is the .Net Framework and the fact that it needs to be installed on any machine that will use apps built in .Net. This is OK for web based apps. But why would I ever build a windows app using .Net. That would be like doing it in VB and shipping 20MB of DLLs.