Joel Kolstad wrote:

"Mike Monett" wrote in message
...
Whenever I'm looking for applications, I disregard any application written
in .NET, and continue looking for code written by professionals.

I'm willing to bet you a dollar that -- at least if you're running Windows XP
or Vista -- you're using plenty of .Net programs without even knowing it.

You can argue that the overhead of .Net -- and similar technologies such as
Java or (to a much lesser extent) Python -- are not worth their (sometimes
quite significant) overhead, but there are some objectives advantages to what
.Net is attempting to do. Not that that implies Microsoft has necessarily
done a particularly good job (I wouldn't really know, having only ever written
"toy" programs in .Net), but hey -- at least they're trying to advance
technology while they take over the universe! :-)

One of the authors in the LTspice forum generated a MOSFET model program
using .NET. He recently changed it to a stand-alone exe. This shows .NET is
not needed, and how easy it is to get rid of it.

Note that producing a stand-alone .exe doesn't imply that .Net is gone -- it
could have just been bundled up in the executable.

.Net certainly isn't "needed," but neither is Windows Vista or XP, or
Microsoft Outlook or Word or any other program out there. How easy or hard it
is to get rid of .Net is largely a function of the size, complexity, and scope
of the program that's written -- "hello world" is trivially ported to any
language/framework you want, after all.

Its better said that "hello world" is more easily ported to .NET and as
the programs get larger and demand more services (think databases,
specialized networking, etc.) the odds increase that .NET will _not_
have support for it.

Any 'write once, run anywhere' apps have to target the lowest common
denominator API set. With something like Java, which has a JRE for a
wide range of platforms, it was worthwhile for developers to add the
hooks for underlying services. For .NET, developers just asked "What's
the point?" .NET originally ws planned to support only Windows (ignoring
the Mono project). Its a 'write once, run in one place' runtime. So all
the developers asked themselves, "If I've already got my stuff running
on Windows (native .EXE), what does all that additional pain and
suffering buy me?".


--
Paul Hovnanian
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The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
-- Tom Waits