Install was...interesting; despite repaving my machine, I found that if I set up MS Office, VS6.0SP5 and Win2kSP1, then .NET Beta 2 just wouldn't install on my configuration. If I leave off Win2kSP1 and go from vanilla to SP2, then it installs just dandily. Most of the API changes were warned about in advance, and improve clarity (although not all). The performance, in speed terms, is greatly enhanced - particularly in the IDE - although its memory footprint remains pretty constant from Beta 1. The runtime appears to be very stable, and the frameworks are of astonishingly high quality, considering the volume there. It will take a couple of releases to really shake out the problems, I'm sure. There are still a few interesting theoretical questions left in the runtime (the semi-sorta-kinda-reality or otherwise of the reference type, for instance ), and other changes to support old-style VB apps are, IMHO, retrograde from a 'future of the platform' POV - anything that muddies the waters is bad at this stage, as it is just something that cruft will attach to in years to come. The IDE, on the other hand... Leaps and bounds better than Beta 1, but still a couple of shake-outs short of RTM quality, IMHO. However, that probably means 1 shakeout before RTM, and then a point release later..? Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

Hmmm. I tend to find quite the opposite! OK, if you let the compiler inline everything it could, the exe size will get larger, and it _might_ get faster (but not by much in the average case). When you take into account the time taken to load code segments, you'll often find that optimizing for size ends up generating code that executes faster... :) Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

I used to be a subscriber to the C/C++ User's journal, but they seem to have really gone off the boil in recent years. :(( JOOP and C++ Report were my faves (from the same publishers), but they both went out of business (admittedly, they were realtively esoteric [which means that they used to publish articles about things which might not have occurred to me ;) before, and not another half baked 'I've got a better Windows wrapper than MFC/WTL, and it is nearly sort of kind of cross platform but not quite feature complete, and not quite working']...but you could actually learn from them). I let my subscription to CUJ lapse last month; however, this is a time of flux for that stable, and they may pick up again. I hope so, because I don't know of a decent developer's magazine that's left. MSDN Magazine & WSJ are useful for keeping up with MS if you insist on having things in print. Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

I guess it really depends on how you define 'elegant'. My personal definition of elegance is that the product has ascertained, and implemented a solution to the problems of a particular customer need. The customer should be able to interact with the solution in a way that is (or becomes) completely natural, with a minimum of development effort expended. The solution should be easy to refactor and extend in the future, as a result of clarity of design, no matter how crufty or complex some parts of that implementation may be. What about others? Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

I was thinking just the same. I usually have a build of Mozilla no more than a couple of days old on my machine, but I hardly ever use it. IE's integration into the OS makes it so much simpler to use 99% of the time. Mozilla is constantly regressing, and is still so full of memory leaks that it is impossible to use on a day-to-day basis (I pity the poor developers eating their own dogfood). The main problem appears to have occurred at the beginning of the project - features were added and added in a remarkably uncontrolled manner. Checkins abounded without proper automated testing for years, and now they are trying to overcome the massive resource leaks, mysterious bugs and undefined functionality that bedevil the program. Interestingly, IE is now on what appears to be an iterative cycle of improvement. Smaller, faster, more stable, more standards compliant. We see new versions every few months, each better than the last - not perfect by any means, but better. Is that NS competition? No - I would say not. I believe that MS needs its browser to be superb, as it is such an important part of its platform now. Therefore, they focus on getting it better. Everybody wins (except AOL). ;) Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

That said, the Feb PSDK turned up in my MSDN sub this morning, so I was wasting the internet's bandwidth. :) Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

For some reason, the ftp site is dropping out on several of the files, regardless of which of several machines I'm using. The i386.exe, the i386.msi and several of the .cab files (large and small). Is anyone else seeing a similar problem, or is it a local difficulty (I'm in the UK, and behind a local firewall. PASV mode doesn't help.) Matthew :confused: Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

COM is, however the ONLY route for interoperability between the managed (.NET) world and the unmanaged (unmanaged C++, VB6, Delphi etc. etc.) domain. About a year ago, we started designing more or less everything using COM simply to make it cheaper for us to take the .NET transition (notwithstanding the other benefits we have gained as a result). We are now in a position where we can ship a working system today. Tomorrow, we will have replaced some components with .NET ones, created brand new .NET features, fixed existing problems in the unmanaged code, and added new unmanaged features, and still be in a position to test and ship the end result as a seamless whole, with only a tiny amount of _necessary_ reworking (this is not to say that we haven't treated this as an opportunity to rethink and refactor!). .NET's component model is what COM would have been, had it been designed for the job COM ended up doing, and not an evolution of the old OLE technologies. It is indeed cool. :) Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

I would also recommend Generic Programming and the STL, by Matthew H. Austern. AW Professional Computing Series, ISBN 0-201-30956-4. Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

Whilst 'features for features sake' is a big problem with the SW industry at large, and perhaps MS in particular, I would disagree with you about MS 'charging off in a different direction' with COM/.NET. COM interoperability is a key feature of .NET - without it, we would not be basing _our_ future development on the platform. .NET then builds on the philosophy and infrastructure that COM provided, fixing most of its (many!) deficiencies, and then - as a huge, huge bonus - providing a rich set of component libraries that act as enabling technologies for the kind of applications companies are developing today. Previously, I have not been enamoured of the 'web development' model, as espoused by Microsoft, Sun etc. in various forms. It has not offered the flexibility, user experience, or indeed sound technology basis that more 'traditional' programming models have evolved over the years. .NET marries most of the advantages of 'traditional', platform dependent technologies, whilst extending them to embrace the more-or-less heterogenous network environment into which most applications are now deployed. I still think that the focus on broadband, WAN/Internet connectivity is at the 'hype' level, but all of these technologies are applicable in the genuinely high-bandwidth intranet environment we see in most offices, and many homes today. .NET is making my life easier, and yet there is still a critical place for the ATL programmer in our organization, because sometimes hand-tuned code is still essential. Admittedly, the assembler programmer is somewhat out in the cold (we tend to use Intel's C++ performance libraries for processor-intensive coding, and they do much better than my rusty, out-of-date assembler skills), but picking the right technology for the right job is a vital part of software archticture and the development process. Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd

Unnecessary working-set bloat is certainly the biggest problem with most applications these days. I can barely get my machines to 80% processor usage, even during compiles etc., but find that I have to shut down the development environment every couple of days, because it is now mysteriously hogging 300Mb of RAM. In our own applications, the effective use of minimal resources is essential. Particularly in the UK, healthcare purchasers are extremely cost-concious, and getting the best use out of the cheapest hardware is an essential part of our design process. For myself, I would want to see equal emphasis on Productivity, Reliability and Efficiency from our tool vendors, and sensible choice of implementation technology and process from developers to balance these in their own work. As an aside, the .NET programme seems to be getting this balance almost perfectly, but I would love to see a slim, efficient next generation native C++ library from Walter Sullivan's group to complement it. Matthew Adams Development Manager Digital Healthcare Ltd