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]
.NET == .Yawn... If it had come 10+ years ago it might have been interesting, but now it is just ho-hum IMHO. And if I do have to learn it, it's a couple weeks (if that) of ramp up, not some hugely revolutionary thing to grasp. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)!
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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.
Reinout Hillmann wrote: I definitely think the VS.NET IDE is a LOT better than the old IDE i hate the new IDE. -c
Image tools: ThumbNailer, Bobber, TIFFAssembler
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Nishant S wrote: But now when the whole world seems to be looming with .NET do you guys feel afraid? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? :wtf: "Shock and Awe" :omg: Don't :beer: and drive.
:laugh: MS is trying to scare us into submission? :-D -- Tune your mind, reach inside, peel away Touch, Taste, Feel, Saturation
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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.
Reinout Hillmann wrote: 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. In VC6, these are used to Record and Playback the Quick Macro. What do they do in VS.NET? Regards, Alvaro
When birds fly in the right formation, they need only exert half the effort. Even in nature, teamwork results in collective laziness. -- despair.com
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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. We may have the source to MFC but you can't really fix anything to it. And even if you did dig in and "fix" it, could you build a DLL that worked? There are no build scripts for it, and I suspect if you did get a DLL built it would be illegal to re-distribute right? Too bad, cause then MFC could have gotten fixed instead of remaing such a mess. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)!
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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
First of all Mike, very well written post! But I've just gone through all the replies I've got and am puzzled by two points. (1) Everyone seems to think that taking up .NET means having to abandon your old MFC/ATL stuff. (2) Most people also equate .NET coding with C# and/or VB.NET If you are thinking of (2) well then for almost all purposes you are essentially giving up on your unmanaged native stuff. But if you use MC++/IJW/CCW etc... then you won't have to abandon your existing applications and libraries. I should know what I am talking about here because right now I am co-authoring a book with Tom Archer and the whole purpose of the book is to demonstrate how it's possible to embrace .NET without abandoning your existing MFC/ATL/SDK stuff. MS aren't total fools. MC++ is there for a reason and the reason is simple. It's C++ for one thing (whatever people like CG say) and for another it lets you mix unmanaged code with managed code. Anyway from the rating my post got I can assume that the vast majority of people here see .NET in a bad light. I wonder where MS marketed this thing wrong! Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
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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 do a lot of work where efficiency and performance counts so I believe .NET is no threat to me. However, if they got rid of the virtual machine and had templates I would be interested in writing code for C#. 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? That you will soon become - er - obsolete? :wtf: "Shock and Awe" :omg: Don't :beer: and drive.
Kant wrote: "Shock and Awe" :laugh::laugh::laugh:
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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
Your points about exe size are rather interesting. Yes, the 20 MB download is large, but that's only a one-time* thing. However, the applications written for the .NET framework are vastly smaller than they would be if they were written in plain C++/Win32. Here, we have several C# apps (UIs, services) that weigh in at less an 90K. Many of them are less than 40K. This is a distinct advantage if you are concerned about the size of your exes. * Yes, I know that one-time isn't exactly true, what with the updates MS will release. "Yeah, and I invented the spellchecker" - fellow inventor Dan Quayle on hearing that Al Gore invented the Internet.
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I cant see any real time server application being written in .net Sometimes C++ doesnt seem fast enough so .net would be a no hoper.
Hell I thought it was funny .....
Our company has deployed what most people would call a real time server application. It was written in C# and performs fantastically. In fact, it's noticeably faster than the C++ service that preceded it (that being due to the fact that we didn't have large amounts of time to spend on performance improvements that came free with the .NET framework). "Yeah, and I invented the spellchecker" - fellow inventor Dan Quayle on hearing that Al Gore invented the Internet.
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First of all Mike, very well written post! But I've just gone through all the replies I've got and am puzzled by two points. (1) Everyone seems to think that taking up .NET means having to abandon your old MFC/ATL stuff. (2) Most people also equate .NET coding with C# and/or VB.NET If you are thinking of (2) well then for almost all purposes you are essentially giving up on your unmanaged native stuff. But if you use MC++/IJW/CCW etc... then you won't have to abandon your existing applications and libraries. I should know what I am talking about here because right now I am co-authoring a book with Tom Archer and the whole purpose of the book is to demonstrate how it's possible to embrace .NET without abandoning your existing MFC/ATL/SDK stuff. MS aren't total fools. MC++ is there for a reason and the reason is simple. It's C++ for one thing (whatever people like CG say) and for another it lets you mix unmanaged code with managed code. Anyway from the rating my post got I can assume that the vast majority of people here see .NET in a bad light. I wonder where MS marketed this thing wrong! 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: I can assume that the vast majority of people here see .NET in a bad light Well, I am not in that group..:):):):) What I am seeing here is, in enterprise application development, people are divided into 2 groups(mostly). One with UNIX/J2EE etc and other one is Windows/COM/COM+/.NET. Both these groups use C++ for where real performance is needed. Otherwise they either use Java(J2EE etc) or COM/.NET(VB, VB.NET, C#). So .NET will be a major platform in the application development...But demand of C++ will not be less. Remember Java hype in the late 90s..according to those people everything will be in Java...But where is it now...???. Madhu.
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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.
Reinout Hillmann wrote: CTRL-SHIFT-R & CTRL-SHIFT-P I've been using them for years in VC6. I hope they don't do something different in 7. I'll add that they only reason I ever left version 5 and moved to 6 was because a third party library I use forced it upon me. Our database software was updated, and so our client software was updated. The new .lib file, for the client DLL's had been put together with version 6 and the version 5 linker didn't recognize it. Had it not been for that, I'd likely still be on version 5. Chris Meech "what makes CP different is the people and sense of community, things people will only discover if they join up and join in." Christian Graus Nov 14, 2002. "AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! Those leaks are driving me crazy! How does one finds a memory leak in a garbage collected environment ??! Daniel Turini Nov. 2, 2002.
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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]
Our core product (machine translation engine) will *always* be developed in standard, portable C++. It would be a huge risk to rely on a proprietary framework for this, not to mention that we 1) Need all the power of C++ including MI and templates 2) Found almost nothing in .NET framework that would make us even consider switching to .NET. Having said that, for "application layer" (different linguistic tools that work with this translation engine) we are adopting .NET. For web applications we already swiched to ASP.NET (in some cases, ATL Server), and even for desktop applications we plan to gradually dump MFC :cool: and replace it with .NET Windows Forms :~ . Not that I am particulary fond of Windows Forms either, but anything is better than MFC.
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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]
Native code is GOOD, managed code is BAD. Am I wrong?
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.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. We may have the source to MFC but you can't really fix anything to it. And even if you did dig in and "fix" it, could you build a DLL that worked? There are no build scripts for it, and I suspect if you did get a DLL built it would be illegal to re-distribute right? Too bad, cause then MFC could have gotten fixed instead of remaing such a mess. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)!
Jim Crafton wrote: We may have the source to MFC but you can't really fix anything to it You don't need to rebuild the MFC dlls. Seeing the source code provides hints for workarounds on one hand, and on the other hand MFC classes can be inherited/overridden to "fix" a given behavior. The trouble with .NET is that : - a significant portion of classes are marked as sealed/internal/private, thus cannot be inherited. - ildasm provides IL code which is low-level, not a user-friendly view of the code (you can buy a third party decompiler though). - again, MS can upgrade the .NET run-time at any moment and doing so force developers to either follow or to give up (trying to) doing business. Jim Crafton wrote: and I suspect if you did get a DLL built it would be illegal to re-distribute right? MS would argue against something having to do with their business, for instance the redistribution of Internet Explorer. I can't figure out what they could argue about a generic framework which is in fact only a wrapper on top of WIN32. That's not my point in my comparison with .NET
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Reinout Hillmann wrote: I definitely think the VS.NET IDE is a LOT better than the old IDE i hate the new IDE. -c
Image tools: ThumbNailer, Bobber, TIFFAssembler
New IDE is a dream of LISP programmers (parenthesis I mean), isn't it?
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Reinout Hillmann wrote: blazingly fast on a dual 2.4GHz Okay .. you just wanted to brag didnt you ... admit it , come on admit it Reinout Hillmann wrote: CTRL-SHIFT-R & CTRL-SHIFT-P For those of us without the new IDE, what do these do that they are so useful ?
I was going to leave that as an exercise but understandably you don't have the new IDE :) CTRL-SHIFT-R starts and stop recording keystrokes CTRL-SHIFT-P plays them back. This is really useful if you need to do the same key strokes over and over and over again. How many times have you copied and pasted a large number of lines only to have to change one (or two) things in the code block on every line. With the ability to record macros this is a LOT faster.
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Reinout Hillmann wrote: 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. In VC6, these are used to Record and Playback the Quick Macro. What do they do in VS.NET? Regards, Alvaro
When birds fly in the right formation, they need only exert half the effort. Even in nature, teamwork results in collective laziness. -- despair.com
ACK!!! OH hell.. I didn't know they were in VC6 too.. :( :( There goes my whole reasoning. That makes me a sad panda indeed. All this time and I didn't know it existed. I need to go spread the news
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Nishant S wrote: I can assume that the vast majority of people here see .NET in a bad light Well, I am not in that group..:):):):) What I am seeing here is, in enterprise application development, people are divided into 2 groups(mostly). One with UNIX/J2EE etc and other one is Windows/COM/COM+/.NET. Both these groups use C++ for where real performance is needed. Otherwise they either use Java(J2EE etc) or COM/.NET(VB, VB.NET, C#). So .NET will be a major platform in the application development...But demand of C++ will not be less. Remember Java hype in the late 90s..according to those people everything will be in Java...But where is it now...???. Madhu.
Madhu Cheriyedath wrote: Well, I am not in that group Cool :-) Nish p.s. You are the single guy who replied positively :-)
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]