What about .NET?

The point that you've raised about Microsoft is quit right until now.I think now it is coming to the right direction as the .NET Framework is accepted as a standard and any third party ventor can implement its own specification on that standard. Secondly the whole Framework is completely free. No charges are involved to practice with .NET. Regarding Developer tools, it is also your choice to choose either Visual Studio.NET or any third party tool like an open source project "SharpDevelop" that is freely available to download from http://www.icsharpcode.net As well as Microsoft's own initiative to provide Free tools like "Web Matrix Project" (http://www.asp.net) for developing web services and ASP.NET applications. I think as more vendors will study that intersting platform and its flexablity regarding development, deployment and ease of use, more they would provide their own (may be free) developer solutions. At last, i think Microsoft has done a great effort to make that platform worth to look at and it really is.

Where as there are free tools availible I agree that theese are useless whilst there are no .NET guides, people will not be interested untill they see what they can do. And they wont see what they can do until they are interested. It is a vicious circle, The combining of languages to a common frame work is however a great Idea. and one which should have been done a while ago. Perhaps in ten years, when .NET version 20 is out some really good and really secure applications will be built, Information will not be restricted. Microsoft products will be easily obtained the internet will run at one million megabits per second. perhaps.

.NET is a lot more better development tool than MS has released before. Its completely oriented towards and simplifies lot of web based development issues

The .NET framework (20MB) is remarkably easy to download. If you're running Win2k or better, just go to "http://WindowsUpdate.Microsoft.com". If you've never been there before, you'll probably find a ton of other stuff that you'll want to downloadalso.

As far as the development tools, you can use anything from Notepad on up to Visual Studio. Command Line compilers come with the .NET Framework SDK (131MB) at "http://msdn.microsoft.com/nhp/Default.asp?contentid=28000451" so an IDE makes thing easier, but isn't necessary.

that builder.com would post an article that is so poorly researched and biased. .NET is easy to download, resources for it exist ALL over the Internet (try using Google or ANY search engine for crying out loud), and NUMEROUS people are crowing about what they're doing with .NET in the same places.

I have nothing against people who prefer Unix/Linux and Java. Like the Mac, Java was there with the goods first. However, this virulent anybody-but-Microsoft stupidity followed by a blind eye towards the necessary steps to leverage an initial lead into a permanent one simply amazes me. .NET only exists because of Sun's (and others) abuse of Microsoft and lack of thinking about what their actions might cause. "Not being able to find .NET information" is similar rampant stupidity. Just because you have your head in the sand and claim that nothing can be found doesn't mean that most people won't go looking and find it - - and in the future measure the worth of your words accordingly.

This is the text of an e-mail received on this article. I thought it would add to this discussion.

"I would have to venture a guess to say you haven't looked into .NET very deeply. Not only is there a WIDE range of developer tools out there, Microsoft even makes a free one, yes I said a Free MS tool. It's called WebMatrix, and it's used to build ASP.NET Solutions. MS has also released several dozen free tools, including universal data access layers, database connectors to Oracle, and SQL Server managers built on ASP.NET. MS has an extremely active developer forum at www.asp.net/forums (75,000 members strong), where I am a moderator, posting under the name "interscape". DotNet is being implemented all over the place, and many people are waiting for the new .NET Speech platform to come out early next year, which will allow Web applications to process speech recognition over the internet.

While people have very negative feelings towards Microsoft, mostly propagated by the media and other companies who are just plain jealous that they cannot ever be that successful, MS has an awesome developer community, and they pay tons of people to do nothing more than assist developers. To anyone that still wants to program in PHP, I say this: If you want to be a script kiddie, then go ahead. .NET brings compiled execution to the web, and makes programming easier with over 4,500 pre-written classes in the .NET Framework. There are currently at least 2 open source projects to port the .NET Framework to Linux and OSX.

In today?s world, you cannot talk Web Services without knowing about .NET. I would highly recommend that you take an hour and start seriously looking around. You'll begin to find that most of what was said in the most recent article was false."

Mark W. Kaelin
Review Editor Builder.com

This is the text of another e-mail comment.

"At our shop we are beginning to use .Net on a number of things, including Webservices. As with the rest of .Net, I have found that the biggest impediment to getting it working is finding out all of theinformation. For instance, there is plenty of information on creating a .Net Webservice, and even information on accessing it from a VB client. If you are trying to learn however how to access it from a standard ASP page, good luck. It can be done, and we have done it using the SOAP 2.0 tool kit, but it took a while to ferret out all of the information. In the end it was pretty simple, but getting there #?*&%$#. Oh by the way, while you can create . Net components that are able to access your web service from VB, there is a documented bug that prevents the same components from calling a .Net webservice from a standard ASP page."

Mark W. Kaelin
Review Editor Builder.com

Technically I agree with Brian Schaffner or many things. I love the open source movement and the potential of web services. However I do have to disagree on couple of things.

1. Why does Brian need Microsoft to contact him to try out the .NET framework? It's been free since the beta and the first release. Downloading the .NET framework is as easy as downloading the JDK. After downloading the .NET framework, Brian might want to check out the free IDE called "Web Matrix" at www.asp.net

2. Many of us developers who are truly "non-biased" on development platforms do understand that Sun's Java technology is just as proprietary as the .NET framework. Please don't make it sound like Java and Open source is from the same mold.
I do know of one company that have just adopted .NET development as a standard development environement. But I can't speak for them, you'll need to contact their IT department to see how they like it.

Sincerely

-Jae Cha

I am currently developing .NET web applications with my home computer as a test server using all free downloads from MS:
- .NET framework (of course)
- Web Matrix Project
- SQL Server Desktop Edition

I can also use DreamweaverMX to create ASP.NET applications.

I have bought a few .NET related books, but I really don't need them since there are so many tutorial and articles online.

As a student at Indian University - IUPUI, I am amazed at how much Microsoft is offering to universities at Microsoft's own expense. They have come a long way from just a few years ago.

Regarding this PHP vs. ASP.NET thing:

Why do we compare them? Why can't the PHP language be a .NET compatible language? I love PHP syntax. I also love the .NET framework and CLR.

Another e-mail contributor to the discussion:

"Are you talking about VisualStudio.NET or the .NET framework. All you need
to build .NET applications is a file editor (NOTEPAD) and the .NET framework
installed. Then you can compile C# or VB.NET files from the command line
using the utilities provided by the .NET framework. The .NET framwork is
essentially like java. Java has a compiler JAVAC that you download and you
have to have its interpreter just like you do with .NET.

I findthat many of the officials who give the yes or no to go with a
particular application or programming environment (.NET for example) are
very against anything Microsoft and do not even properly look at the product
before bashing it like it was a $.50 hooker in TimeSquare.

just my opinion ... clarrification would be good if you meant the framework
of the IDE."

Mark W. Kaelin
Review Editor Builder.com

Thanks to all of the readers for their insightful comments. Clearly, there are some .NET downloads readily available from Microsoft.

How did I miss those? Well - I went to microsoft.com/net and looked for downloads. I saw a .NET Server (which I incorrectly assumed was a required component) and tried to download it. Apparently .NET Server has relatively little to do with .NET Framework (yet another misnomer). .NET Server (as you probably already know) is a new Windows OS, while the .NET Framework includes the .NET development tools.

-brian schaffner-

Well, I believe we?ve established that there is, indeed, plenty of information about .NET available, not only from Microsoft but also from third parties.

I?m curious about how the Builder.com community feels about whether .NET will be widely and generally accepted by developers. Several discussion participants have mentioned some perceived benefits to using .NET when compared to other Web Services technologies. Would anyone care to elaborate?

Brian writes, and I read. I finish the article, and I am disgusted. I read Brian no more.

It's absurd that Builder.com would permit such a uneducated, biased and ignorant writer to even write an article about .NET (although I doubt his true ignorance) when no research was done.

In the "real" world, before articles are written, citations are provided at least for documentation purposes (this standard journalism practice, especially at NY Times).

I will read Brian's crap no longer.

Brian,

You obviously didn't look very deeply into the world of .NET. There IS a free tool out there, and it's called Web Matrix. Guess what? Microsoft built it as an alternative to Visual Studio.NET. It sounds to me like you are more of an anti-Microsoft person than an independent evaluator of technology. Your article really turned me off to reading anything else you have to say about web services. If I wanted biased information I'd go to aol.com.

Just what I've come to expect from Builder.com. Poorly written, unreasearched, bias drivel from consultants that don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Let me qualify my statements by saying that I am a consultant and I am both Java andMicrosoft-cetified. I have developed enterprise-level applications with both technologies.

Since a consultant's bill rate is inversely proportional to his intelligence, I'd venture that Brian could bill about $400/hr. And accusing Microsoft of having no documentation is insane. Microsoft documents their products well beyond anything else out there. If you can't find something on MSDN, you can't read. I would also say that it's easier for a newbie to get the .NET framework downloaded than figuring out what he's supposed to download from Sun to get Java/J2EE working.

Now that I've vented, I will say that I find companies rapidly adopting .NET technology. The last two companies I have worked for (both Fortune 500) have already deployed enterprise-level software using .NET.

Java had better make some serious improvements in usability in short order, or we'll all be saying "Remember when..."

I read books and took courses in .NET. soon after it went Gold. Most of the books either used notepad for the editor or couldn't get past drag-and-drop and settings properties in the IDE. They were either bare-bones nuts-and-bolts, or geared for hobby programmers that didn't care if the resulting code was inefficient crap. I didn't realize what the problem was, so I actually thought I wasn't going to be able to learn this platform. The classes at Cal State Fullerton were a complete waste of time. They had no concept of how to teach it, so we wasted a lot of time on UML and oop theory.

QuickStart and most other MS Supplied .Net tutorials also are either for hobby programmers, or those who know how to look past the superficial cut-and-paste explanation. But if you are that knowledgeable, you don't need the tutorials. I think they were a big mistake, they almost soured me on .Net overall.

My recommendation - if you're at a beginner level, search Amazon and carefully look at the reader reviews. Ignore anything that doesn't get raves by most readers. Also Safari is good because you can reverse sort on copyright date and then use Amazon for the ratings.

Go ahead and get Applied .NET Framework Programming by Richter and Programming Visual Basei.Net by Balena. Start reading them. If you understand them fully, use them. If not, keep on educating yourself and referring back to them until they become working references.

Learn both C# and VB.Net. It's not that difficult to do and it gives you the ability to use and adapt code written in either language. With cross-language support, you cripple yourself by knowing only one language.

.NET is the most wonderful platform I've ever worked on. I could never build a coherent library of routines because of the variations between straight Win32, MFC, ATL, static-linking to MFC, etc. etc. Now I approach every programming problem with an eye to creating generic code to solve it because it's so easy to incorporate that solution in a class library and potentially use it in every program you write in the future.