On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 10:23:31AM -0400, tedd wrote: > Hi gang: > > What do you people think of the .NET framework? > > Please provide your thoughts as to cost, maintenance, benefit, and > whatever else you think important. I'll be politically incorrect and say that it's evil. Microsoft is a well-documented monopolist corporation which typically either steals or buys most of the "original" technologies it issues. (I just saw a video where a guy bemoaned all the advertising Microsoft did for Windows 7. Many, many of the "amazing" features of Window 7 have existed for years in Linux and MacOS. And as far as I know, they still don't have what Linuxers would call desktops and MacOS would call workspaces or spaces.) It's also a *corporation*, which means hitching your wagon to them is a liability. Just ask users of PageMaker, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc. PageMaker languishes in Adobe's hands now. MySQL users (and its original developer) are still waiting for the next shoe to drop from Oracle. Major Open Office developers have now forked OOo, because of whatever Oracle is doing/going to do with the programs. As an example, I recently went on an interview with my old boss, who, when I worked for him, did FoxPro development on a widely used accounting package. That accounting package was bought by a couple of corporations in the last few years, and now languishes. Further, Microsoft recently announced the "end of life" for FoxPro, the language it was written in. Goodbye to a whole industry of users and developers who based their business on a language and software owned by corporations who simply have no time for them any more. My old boss spent months searching for a comparable and comparably-priced accounting package to take up the slack in his business. To .NET specifically, the framework was originally built on Java 1.4, according to an acquaintance who knows much more about Microsoft internally than I do. After a dispute with Sun over co-development of Java, Microsoft went "not invented here" and created its own version of the platform. .Net is heavy and expensive, as detailed elsewhere. I realize there are often economic issues involved, but let me reiterate that I strongly advocate against using any language owned by a corporation (like C#). I feel the same way about storing documents in .doc format. We all know the version-to-version incompatibilities with .doc format. But Microsoft can do anything they like with it; it belongs to them. Paul -- Paul M. Foster -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
