The power of .NET

Not often do I have to explain to customers about Cross Platform and .NET, even when Eric Rudder spent 2 days in Israel last week he was asked about Microsoft's position regarding mono.

Personally I love the idea that someone is taking the specification and really proves that it can be done outside Microsoft. Practically I think it's a lost battle. I really can't imagine anyone that could keep up with the guys in redmond. Why is that? when I think of the reasons, I came up with 1 that has nothing to do with .NET. It's Windows itself that is the key to the power of .NET.

While reading https://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/21872 about the how portable ASP.NET is most of the article really discusses really really simple scenarios. Real world application in the enterprise level cannot live using such basic and poor support for cross platform.

For instance take the System.Transaction namespace in .NET 2.0 or the Enterprise Services as we know it today, they are a key thing for every large scale application. Juval Lowe while speaking in Teched Israel did a great session on Enterprise Services said at the beginning of his talk that if you are not using Enterprise Services you are writing a toy. Many attendees disagreed loudly, but 30 min later most of them agreed that they simply didn't know enough about it.

This brings me to a key point in my argument, showing poor sample of porting does not mean it is portable. Someone who is new to .NET could easly be misled by such articles and put all his eggs on the mono basket relying to the power of windows where it doesn't exist.

.NET is powerful because it's windows under the hood.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 09, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  September 09, 2004
  Mono is the first and still quite early.
  
  .NET ontop of apache on a linux environment gives you a really powerful framework to build web stuff it doesnt need windows under the hood, and please dont talk to me about TCO, many ISP's use linux becuase they have the expertise to manage it and recharge those services at some of the cheapest rates on the market.
  
  Yes I heard Juval's quote made by Clemens Vasters at Amsterdam, something that other people find a bit arrogant. More pragmatic people in the industry dont believe that ES are the be all and end all to applications, just choosing the right technology is important and large apps can be appropriately written outside of ES.
  
  Choosing the correct technology for the app is talked about here.
  http://www.lhotka.net/WeBlog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=a70aad9c-79fd-45cc-875f-00dfd3dc0fb6
  
  Personally I prefer windows, despite having spent many years in the unix environment. Likewise there is so much I miss about Unix working in windows, its got closer over the years but I still miss certain things.
  
  The Mono camp are quite capable of saying the great thing about mono is that it has *Nix under the hood, and believe me they are a bigger bunch of zealots than the micrsoft camp.
• Anonymous
  September 16, 2004
  The comment has been removed