Microsoft To Open Source .NET and Take It Cross-Platform
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An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today announced plans to open source .NET, the company's software framework that primarily runs on Windows, and release it on GitHub. Furthermore, Microsoft also unveiled plans to take .NET cross-platform by targeting both Mac OS X and Linux. In the next release, Microsoft plans to open source the entire .NET server stack, from ASP.NET 5 down to the Common Language Runtime and Base Class Libraries. The company will let developers build .NET cloud applications on multiple platforms; it is promising future support of the .NET Core server runtime and framework for Mac and Linux. Microsoft is also making Visual Studio free for small teams.
Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:4, Funny)
Too little too late, Billy Bob Gates
Re: Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Funny)
They're taking it Mono a Mono.
With nasty patent clauses, no doubt.
Re: Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Informative)
They're taking it Mono a Mono. With nasty patent clauses, no doubt.
:) Microsoft's patent clauses are spelled out here https://github.com/dotnet/core... [github.com]
I guess these are the key paragraphs:
Microsoft Corporation and its affiliates (“Microsoft”) promise not to assert any .NET Patents against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, or distributing Covered Code, as part of either a .NET Runtime or as part of any application designed to run on a .NET Runtime.
If you file, maintain, or voluntarily participate in any claim in a lawsuit alleging direct or contributory patent infringement by any Covered Code, or inducement of patent infringement by any Covered Code, then your rights under this promise will automatically terminate.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, but I am on Microsoft's VB/C# language team
Re: Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds reasonable. I don't think they are legally bound to keep that promise, but that they spell it out like that is a good thing. An interesting question that comes to mind is if the promise also covers modified code, it looks like the definition of covered code only covers code published by Microsoft. But still, better than nothing.
Re: Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think they are legally bound to keep that promise
They are: Promissory estoppel [thefreedictionary.com]. It is like a one-sided contract - i.e. one that you do not have to sign for it to be legally binding for Microsoft.
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Easy peasy, M$ can just manufacture an off balance sheet company and sell the patents to them and that company can then sue the crap out of you. So the M$ promises are empty unless the patents are specified, otherwise the future 'owner' can argue which patents are or are not covered, seeing that shite like rounded corners can killed a product under corrupt US Patent law, the risk still seems grossly excessive.
Re: Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Informative)
The early Sherlock Holmes Novels, and the Character of Sherlock Holmes entered Public Domain in the past year
It does happen, we just don't notice most of the time. I noticed this time because the Arthur Conan Doyle Family filed a big lawsuit to try to keep it under copyright and lost.
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Billy Bob Gates
It's good to know Slashdot's irrational hatred is still firmly entrenched in the '90s.
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Another development stack and application ecosystem is nice, and if it's licensed under a proper open source license, then I'm all for it. I can't say I'd be in any rush to develop in it, and that may be the real problem here, that Microsoft is about seven or eight years too late.
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:4, Insightful)
Digia doesn't have the money to keep Qt up where it was. Cocoa is 100% entirely Apple. GTK never really worked all that well outside Linux. Java applications are well out of favor and Oracle isn't throwing much money at it. .NET is the most widely used widget set in the world, it faces no meaningful competition. Why wouldn't it be the cross platform standard almost instantly?
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:4)
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They're opensourcing the entire server stack... which happens to contain nearly the entirety of the client-side stack. You'll miss Windows.Forms and WPF, sure, but Windows.Forms already has opensource implementations courtesy of Mono (which I would imagine should run on Microsoft's implementation of .NET), and WPF never really took off, leaving Windows.Forms still more popular. The reason that Mono never implemented WPF was apparently due to lack of interest and resources... Well, Microsoft may have just re
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Insightful)
I've spent years using both Java and C# professionally. C# wins hands down. For many years before Sun's demise the languages would leapfrog one another in functionality, but Java stopped keeping up a couple years before Sun went down. Java 8 is about where C# was 5 years ago now. It's night and day.
The real question for MS is: what about phones? MS has partnered to get mobile cross-platform C# working with Mono, but it's not free if you want VS integration. Being able to write and test on the PC and then run on any phone or tablet (well, at least modern ones) is a big deal.
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Scala ? C#
Kotlin ? C#
Groovy ? C#
Clojure ? C#
NuGet ? Maven
NuGet ? Gradle
NuGet ? Leiningen
( NuGet > SBT because _ > SBT )
It's safe to say C# trumps Java. But even with
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To me the strength of Java has always been the tool stack and libraries around it.
Most languages usually have something available with regards to dependency management, continuous integration, static analysis, code quality, unit testing/test coverage, etc. Java just seems to have multiple well supported and very polished versions of all that.
And one thing Java seems to have as an exclusive is a consistent coding convention. Yes people sometimes deviate from it, but the vast majority of Java code you'll see
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Billy Bob Gates
It's good to know Slashdot's irrational hatred is still firmly entrenched in the '90s.
Hah, it never ends.
Because it's all on BOOOOSH!!!!
LMAO...There was only Bush 1.0 in 1990-1992. And he did absolutely nothing with regard to computing and policy.
If only the Microsoft hatred here at /. was irrational. Most of us that dislike Microsoft do so because we got tired of dealing with the constantly moving goal posts for competency, the ridiculous lock-ins to proprietary software stacks, and the even more ridiculous costs of everything they made. So, if by fact based dislike for an entire segment of the technology sector, then yes, that would be ir
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't think I'm defending Microsoft here because I am old enough to remember Microsoft at its worst and still have the deep seated hatred of Gates and Balmer era MS. Hell, anti-trust BS aside I still hate them for what they did to my MechWarrior franchise alone! However, under the new leadership that seems to be taking the company towards an era of Glasnost and Perestroika, the hatred is given pause as I wait for the next dick move that may never come. At the very least, Microsoft has moved into a position that is no more or less "evil" than Google (yes, do no evil no longer applies here) or Apple. Given this, I wonder how many people here truly rationally hate MS anymore as opposed to hatred through nostalgia (like me) or hatred through "it's the way we do things around here" syndrome. As a developer that uses MS products and support in his profession, and develops Linux, Android, and Arduino apps as a hobby, I still prefer the current open source way of doing things over the MS way... but as far as the hatred? It cannot be said yet that Microsoft is the same company it was in the Balmer days. They at least *look* like they're moving towards a path that looks similar to the one Sun Microsystems was beating through.
Microsoft is not less evil,more companies are Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
They are still as evil as they used to be. They missed the boat with search/internet services and mobile- so they have a weeker position now. And now we have other evil companies like Apple and Google, and other evil organizations like NSA and GCHQ that affect the internet and computing world. But given emergence of new evils and reduction of power of Microsoft does not make them less evil.
--Coder
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I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil.
Re:Microsoft is not less evil,more companies are E (Score:4, Insightful)
I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil.
Because more often than not it's true? Market power corrupts, monopoly power corrupts absolutely. Or maybe you should say it's more of a latent behavior in profit-maximizing companies, they simply lack the means to be a market bully until they're successful. Or you're seeing a company in the early phases of an "entice, entrap, exploit" strategy where they act nice and friendly until they got you locked in good and bleed you dry. You might call it good turned evil, they'll call it return on investment and a success. And a tool is a tool, Google used Mozilla to break the IE monopoly and it might have been good for open source and web standards but they were a pawn in a corporate play. And pawns get sacrificed when the goal is in sight, they're not your friends for life.
Of course there are companies that really do stick to making good products and services that the customers like and are happy and willing to pay for, but most sooner or later turn to the dark side. Particularly if they see a downturn in business and is facing cut bonuses and lost jobs, very few businesses go nobly down the drain. And almost anything can be excused with "it's a free market and we're only charging what the market is willing to bear", or at least that's what you say out loud even if you know they had absolutely no real choice in the matter. Particularly in business to business there's absolutely no hesitation or shame in grabbing as much of the other company's money as you can.
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Wait a second: GP listed reasons why Microsoft was and still is a sociopathic entity, and your one and only counterargument is "I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil"? Looks like you arrived to the end of your brain, and it was a very short journey indeed.
Re: Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:2)
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It's good to know Slashdot's irrational hatred is still firmly entrenched in the '90s.
Irrational? In what way?
Presumably because Bill Gates is no longer the CEO, so saying "yah boo sucks to Bill Gates" is about as meaningful as saying "Microsoft limits filenames to a ridiculous 8.3 format"
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I go around saying "Microsoft limits filenames to a ridiculous 8.sqrt(3) format."
Does that make my hatred irrational?
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:4, Insightful)
But further, Microsoft still stifles innovation by wielding its patent portfolio offensively against other companies. Microsoft has more profits than Google, and Google - which is plenty evil in some other ways - only uses its patents defensively. Microsoft has also waged FUD campaigns against competitors as recently as earlier this year (Scroogled).
You can put a tuxedo on a gangster, but he's still just a crook.
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Maybe not too little, but yes, it's too late. They should have embraced and estinguished the other platforms when they had a virtual monopoly on both the desktop and the server. In the late 90s it was common to write Java web applications and make them run on Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0. Enterprises were comfortable with Windows and were wary of Linux (unproven technology). It took over in the 2000s.
About being it too little: are they going to port Visual Studio to OS X and Linux?
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They are integrating major parts of the development process into other, existing editors rather than porting VS (which would be a huuuuuuuge job) - for example, serious effort is being put into adding debugging and intellisense into SubLime Edit for .Net stuff.
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Balmer once called Linux a cancer that was eating the world's software. Sounds like M$ now has a terminal case. That's what it sounds like, but I'm sure they are lying.
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Insightful)
AFAIK both Bill Gates and Steve Balmer don't control Microsoft anymore.
This is a new Microsoft with a new CEO, so we should at least give them the benefit of the doubt.
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Insightful)
No kidding. An open sourced .NET should get praise rather than grumpy old complaining. Some spend years complaining and then when a company takes a step in the right direction they deride it. Sure it is a decade overdue, but they did it.
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They didn't open source all of .NET. The only open sourced the bits that are critical for .NET being viable for cloud computing, which is an utterly self-serving decision that smacks of desperation.
If Microsoft really wants to raise eyebrows, they should open source the ENTIRE stack, including all the APIs necessary to write desktop applications.
So far all they've been doing is playing a game of "Gee, maybe if we open up this one particular little tidbit, that'd be enough for people to bite and give our st
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:5, Informative)
You are twisting his words. Ballmer was not talking about Linux, but about the GPL and it's 'viral' nature.
And to their defense, MS has released more open-source software and libraries in the past. Also they actually contribute to the Linux kernel.
There's plenty left to dislike MS for without twisting the truth.
Cite for "Linux is a Cancer" (Score:5, Informative)
You are twisting his words. Ballmer was not talking about Linux, but about the GPL and it's 'viral' nature.
No. You are totally incorrect. Here's the quote, from it source [archive.org] in the Chicago Sun-Times (via the internet archive):
Q: Do you view Linux and the open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft?
A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force us to be innovative. It will force us to justify the prices and value that we deliver. And that's only healthy. The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
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You're stuck in the past.
Bill is too busy saving lives to care about what you think of him. MS is still making money hand over fist and doing an impressive job adjusting to the changing landscape it finds itself on. They are clearly not going the way of Sun any time soon.
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This is not about the desktop space alone, but rather an architectural one spanning all tiers of server to mobile (and Linux has massive share on those particular endpoints).
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Once software is open source, the open source version can never be closed again. If Microsoft made .Net 4.5 open source and closed the source again in .Net 5, 4.5 would still be completely open because open source licenses would permit existing licensees to redistribute the software under their own license terms. That's assuming they use a real open source license, of course, but if they try to manufacture a revokable open source license then the EFF's lawyers will know, it will be another story on Slashdot
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, they're just quaking their boots for the 3% Apple market and 0.8% Linux share.
Actually, yes, they are. The Mac OS X market is growing on the desktop and the Linux server market has been kicking ass for some time now. Microsoft is losing developers for Windows and they have recently gone through some pretty massive layoffs in the last five years, more than 23,000 employees. They are losing ground in the console wars with the Xbox One, and are struggling to keep their Nokia purchase from tanking. Add to that the abysmal Windows 8 reception and the Surface fiasco that is just starting to show some rays of hope for that device and you have a tech company on a significant downward slide. Also note how most of the older employees are cashing out and going on to other projects. Signs that the ship is going down!
If they're not collectively quaking in their boots, they ought to be!
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And somehow, just somehow, they're making one hell of lot more money that all the ACs multiplied together. Something like half of Apple's profits but about the same as Boeing's - so they have a goal to reach (can't let anyone get bigger than you are, it's just not right). But that ship ain't sinking for a bit yet.
Hold on to your Personal Floatation Device and maybe buy some stock.
Re:Desparate Microsoft pulls a "Sun Microsystems" (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, they're just quaking their boots for the 3% Apple market and 0.8% Linux share.
The point is right there in the second paragraph of the article: "The company will let developers build .NET cloud applications on multiple platforms; it is promising future support of the .NET Core server runtime and framework for Mac and Linux"
The cloud market is dominated by Linux and linux-like systems, no one is doing Windows in the cloud except Microsoft Azure and that hasn't been going very well for them (hard to make money selling yourself OS licenses). So, get the stack into the cloud and maybe just maybe companies doing hybrid cloud deployments or are otherwise cloud-averse due to the lack of Windows presence can now get their feet wet. If they stick with .net, they will no doubt be still buying Windows licenses and MSDN subscriptions for a while. Without this bridge, companies just make the jump completely away from Microsoft.
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Are tablets and smartphones considered computers?
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My statement has nothing to do with how widely something is used, rather the motive for ploy of finally jumping on open source bandwagon.
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promised this 12 years ago (Score:2)
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That wouldn't have fooled me even then.
Sounds like what Sun did (Score:5, Informative)
This is actually a pretty smart idea, but it sounds like what Sun did with Java and parts of Solaris. .NET was designed to be a Windows-only application platform, requiring Windows clients for fat applications and at least Windows servers for web applications. Now Microsoft is seeing Windows become less relevant, but they do want people to be using their software stack regardless of platform.
Same thing with Visual Studio being made free...kind of like XCode being free for MacOS, and the open source IDEs being free. It's a bold move because now the .NET ecosystem needs to stand on its own, and I guarantee they're going to try to tie this in with Azure somehow (like making you run the free VS in Azure VMs you pay for or something...)
One scary thing from my side of the house (systems engineering/integration) is the number of new security flaws and the sheer volume of patches that are going to be released once .NET gets more scrutiny. A good thing, yes, but patching .NET is already a pain in the butt.
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Yes, I'm not looking forward to my apt-get dist-upgrade taking twenty minutes for five patches.
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Aptitude dude!
Not for upgrades.. I don't have 48 hours to let it resolve conflicts and dependencies apt-get can resolve in 48 milliseconds. Especially not when it does a worse job.
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No it isn't worthless. Most small shops could probably get by with using it exclusively.
Re:Sounds like what Sun did (Score:5, Informative)
"Visual Studio still costs over four thousand dollars"
WTF are you talking about? That's not even close to true. VS Pro is about $500-600.
The 4k you're talking about is if you buy the entire MSDN suite of MS tools (which will have VS in it), but that includes everything under the sun pretty much made by MS, that's 4k, sure, but you're grossly misinforming, or just trolling, when you say VS costs 4k.
Re:Sounds like what Sun did (Score:5, Informative)
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Any Microsoft alternative to Photoshop? (Score:2)
I wish MS the best but the best thing they could is keep the gimp hidden behind the gloryhole
Good luck with that. GIMP is already far more capable than Microsoft Paint, and Microsoft's other image editor [microsoft.com] is overspecialized toward editing photographs, such as red eye correction, color correction, cropping, and rotation. It's not for actually painting. Does Microsoft have anything to compete with Paint Shop Pro, let alone Photoshop? If not, I'll only have to keep using GIMP 2.8.x on my Windows 8.1 box at work.
What license? (Score:2)
I've got only one question: What license will they use?
Re:What license? (Score:5, Informative)
The MIT license. Are you certain that was your only question?
Re:What license? (Score:4, Informative)
While the .NET Core is under the MIT license, Roslyn appears to be under the Apache 2.0 license.
I can see the reasoning behind the different choices - I'm just saying is all.
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License: .NET open source projects typically use either the MIT or Apache 2 licenses for code. Some projects license documentation and other forms of content under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. See specific projects to understand the license used.
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Ah yes, the BOALI license.
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I like how that rolls off the tongue. And it's fitting. BOA as in the constrictor and LI as in it's a lie... It works!
Perfect Linux Application for .NET (Score:5, Funny)
I really hope systemd is rewritten using .NET!
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I agree. It's time all the underlings stop fighting their destiny!!
Post-Ballmer Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
About fucking time (Score:2)
saywhatnow? (Score:3, Funny)
bit fuckin' early for April Fools isn't it?
Die, mono, die! (Score:5, Interesting)
Current Slashquote is ironic (Score:3)
Open, but will it run? (Score:3)
Re:Open, but will it run? (Score:5, Interesting)
In concept making the .NET framework open source sounds cool. But, does making it open source mean that I can make a change to the framework, recompile it, distribute the binary framework along with my dependent application, and expect that someone else can just install my version of the framework and be good?
Yes exactly that. Imagine you wanted to change System.Xml.dll. You'd do that, and distribute your modified version of the binary alongside your app. (You won't be installing the binary framework system-wide; you'll only be distributing your updates to it locally).
disclaimer: I'm on the VB/C# language team.
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disclaimer: I'm on the VB/C# language team.
Question: PowerShell is implemented using .NET. Will we see PowerShell on Linux?
Year of the Linux desktop!!! (Score:3)
"Server Stack"? (Score:3)
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At this time WPF isn't being ported. They are giving Xamarin a lot of press at the event, that's the current approach to mobile UI development at this time (I've been using Xamarin for over a year at this point for Android development).
They talked to this a while ago while taking Twitter questions, during the Halftime Show (go down and there's a jump link), it's about 15 minutes long.
Here's the link.
http://www.visualstudio.com/co... [visualstudio.com]
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The current Linux integration is around backend components, with UI being HTML 5 or some web approach. It's a lot easier to embrace the web approach than attempt to write native rich client ports (I'm a huge proponent of rich clients for internal applications).
And the integration is for the applications, not the development environment (Visual Studio is still Windows only).
Real cross-platform is HARD (Score:5, Informative)
To make it cross-platform for real is hard. Lots of programmers don't try to avoid platform-specific and write code such as:
...instead of:
Another mistake is using explicitly hardcoded paths that only exist in Windows. And another challenge would be case-sensitivity of the filesystem on Linux; this can break programs that were developed and tested on Windows only.
The framework must provide for platform-independent ways to do things so that it is easier/shorter to do it the right way than using a naive but non-portable approach. Or programmers not really thinking things through will simply keep writing non-portable code anyway. The example above illustrates that; it is way more conventient to combine pathnames with such a non-portable string concatenation than it is with the right approach.
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There are all sorts of Windows-centric issues that I can see being a problem. The reliance on environment variables pointing to home directories, system directories and program data directories could be an issue. I suspect that there will be a considerable amount of .NET software that will never run on any other platform than Windows, even if the byte code executes.
Mind you, I've seen Java programs that committed similar sins, so it isn't completely a .NET problem, it's just that, as you say, the .NET ecosy
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The example above illustrates that; it is way more conventient to combine pathnames with such a non-portable string concatenation than it is with the right approach.
To me the correct, portable code looks easier to read and write. You don't have to check if directoryname already has a trailing seperator, for example. The Path APIs will also handle .. (and ~/ on linux).
In practice there are only a handful of things you need to know to write portable cod
Developers (Score:3)
Good for them. .NET will probably work better than just shouting "developers, developers, developers!!!"
Open sourcing
A Great Step Forward... (Score:3)
Of course, I saw all the expected arguments, and a lot of "but, Microsoft is the exact same company from 20 years ago, so this must be wrong, evil, etc." Well, companies change. Skepticism is good, but evaluating things as they are is good too.
The .Net ecosystem is a good environment to program in. They have great languages and frameworks. The Python Tools in VS are actually quite nice (they work fine with CPython). It is disappointing that the IronLanguages project has died off, but maybe this will spark some new interest.
And one of the main drawbacks to the platform in terms of target platforms is starting to be addressed in a real way.
It's a pragmatic decision. Microsoft has already benefited from open source projects (ASP .Net MVC, Entity Framework), and this is just an expansion of this. The hardest part will be getting resources to get people to really bang on it on other platforms.
I bet that internally at Microsoft, lots of people are happy about this, as they really do think they did great work and this gives them greater visibility.
I'm organizing a "Gently-Used Coat" drive for hell (Score:3)
Awesome (Score:3)
This is very good news. ASP.NET is a great web development platform, far superior to the atrocious hack that is PHP. The only reason so far why PHP has predominated is licensing costs: until now, you needed a Windows Server to do ASP.NET properly (or else resort to unsupported hacks like Mono), whereas PHP is free. Now that the playing field is about to become more level, hopefully it will be the beginning of the end for PHP.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:5, Funny)
Oh no, two versions of an open source technology. Thank god Linux still only has that one distribution.
Really, though, I can see no downsides to this change.
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Yeah, and Microsoft won't release it either. Or does the "server stack" include WinForms?
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Maybe they can port WPF to OpenGL.
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Mono is impressive, but doesn't have the development resources to really compete with the CLR or JVM for a lot of workloads. The garbage collector in particular is not as good. That's one reason you see languages that want to build on top of an open-source VM, like Clojure or Scala, targeting the JVM rather than Mono.
Illegal to distribute a WIP JVM implementation (Score:2)
That's one reason you see languages that want to build on top of an open-source VM, like Clojure or Scala, targeting the JVM rather than Mono.
One major practical problem with using the JVM is that Oracle has power to use the courts to enforce a strict cathedral model [wikipedia.org]. Because the license of Oracle's Java Language Specification forbids distributing implementations of subsets of the Java platform, any reimplementation of the JVM has to be kept private until it's complete enough to pass all tests.
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Mono is actually very incomplete, and I'm not talking about the major components that people usually bring up like WinForms - its missing a lot of the lesser used method overloads in various places, so if your code uses one then you are SOL. You are encouraged to treat it as a bug and submit a report, but its still an issue when you have deadlines approaching.
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.NET seems to be common for game modding/editing programs, actually.
I can play Borderlands 2 on Linux natively, but I have to use a VM to run the Gibbed save editor which is a .NET 4.0 program.
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What about it? The next gen one has already been much talked about (Roslyn) and you can already get access to it.
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Can you explain? what part of the .net collections would be lacking? .net and java, it's usually that the past 10 years .net has evolved and java sometimes catches up a tiny bit. .net even an array is also still a collection, they have collections for just about anything you need, and with LINQ you've got an incredibly powerful way of manipulating/creating/accessing collections.
If you see comparisons between
I always thought that java collections were weaker since in
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Do you seriously believe .NET ever really had a chance of crushing Java? By the time .NET really came online, Java was already heavily embedded in the enterprise. This guarantees that Java will be a development platform of significant entrenchment for years, probably decades to come.
People seem to believe that because Java has retreated to some degree from the desktop that it is a failed platform. But its penetration in many enterprise and financial organizations is huge, and I can't imagine that changing a
Re:Brutal Load Times (Score:5, Interesting)
.NET applications still need read about 1GB of libraries from the disk (only portions are kept in memory). This is why .NET applications are so brutally slow to load. Will this improve?
.NET Native speeds up startup times considerably. The way it works is it compiles your .NET app into native code, does whole-program optimization, and "shakes out" all the bits of the framework that aren't actually even needed by your code. (.NET Native is still under development, and currently available in preview form for store apps)
disclaimer: I'm on the .NET team (in particular on the VB/C# language team)
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I thought .NET cached its JIT images. Is this mistaken? If not, what's really new in .NET Native?
JIT has to be done very quickly. Therefore it's purely local (method-by-method) rather than cross-method. Also even within a method it only has time to do simple easy optimizations. NGEN is a way to do JIT ahead of time. But it still only uses the same JIT algorithm, i.e. doesn't do heavy-duty optimization.
Also, .NET Native does build-time generation of interop and serialization code. .NET Native uses the VisualC++ compiler backend, benefitting from its long history of optimizations. All this adds up to mas