Web 2.0, Meet .Net 3.0 177
An anonymous reader writes to mention an eWeek article about Microsoft's move to rename WinFX to .Net Framework 3.0. Microsoft has also announced the availability of the beta version of the MSDN Wiki, the company's first step toward allowing customers to contribute to Microsoft's developer documentation. From the article: "It is purely a branding change, company officials said. The gist of the issue is that Microsoft has two successful developer brands in WinFX and .Net, and the company has seen 320,000 downloads of WinFX -- and 700 signed GoLive licenses -- since the December Community Technology Preview, and more than 35 million downloads of the .Net Framework since the November launch. "
Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:2, Interesting)
If you get a chance to pass along my comment (below) to someone in Microsoft's marketing department I would appreciate it.
I have largely avoided Microsoft products over the past 20 years because I couldn't easily figure out what is what. It seems like every six months or so Microsoft renames their technologies in an effort to make them sound new. The actual result (in my case anyway) has been to think "Crap! I just got through learning FOO and now they're dropping it for BAR! I'm going to forget about Microsoft as it is clearly a technological treadmill and the people involved have no long term vision of where they are going!".
The fact that BAR is just FOO with a new name and a few tweaks doesn't change things. Now I can't tell when I am reading a three month old article about FOO if *any* of it still applies. It is all incredibly *DAMN* frustrating!
What I want are products with major, minor, and patch version numbers. The product name should never EVER change. Patch number changes should be fixes and only break existing code that depended in some way on the bug. Minor number changes should be enhancements with zero breakage of existing code. Major number changes can break existing code but should try not to.
Thank you for reading and I hope someone in marketing will get the message. I like what I have seen of the latest crop of Microsoft development tools but I am too spooked by Microsoft marketing to believe investing my time in learning the ins and outs won't ultimately be wasted.
Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:1, Interesting)
So, what are the implications for Mono and portability? Does incorporation of entirely proprietary WinFX essentially make alternate, cross-platform implementations of
I'll put it this way: if it does, I'm alot less interested.
Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course with us we were running a web server with the 1.1 framework on a 32bit server when we ran into performance issues because we were more than 1000 times the traffic we regularly get. Fortunately this was an Opteron box so we popped on 64bit Windows and the 2.0 framework since 1.1 isn't available. Everything worked without having to make a single change to any of our code.
That is not to say their aren't some funky things that won't transfer over but you speak out of just plain ignorance or prefer to focus on minor details that affect but a few people. With that said I've never had a Windows update break anyOf course this is all moot considering updates in any corporate setting don't occur automatically but after happen after approval and testing so you'll know if it'll break your app assuming you have a proper testing environment which I definitely know a few don't. Of course I don't know any development houses which don't since staging on a production server is well, you know, not wise ;)
Don't mean to be harsh but realistic here. You're gripes are completely inaccurate so if you really want to gripe go ahead and find valid gripes. I'm not sure what they would be with the framework but I'm sure there are some out there.Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:3, Interesting)
That used to piss me off, but now I just remind myself that the more complex the API is the better. Allow me to explain my reasoning:
Take the old Win32 API for example. It is very ugly and badly designed, I'm sure not many would disagree with that. Try making a reasonably bug free user interface with it, obeying general guidlines from offical software like iexplore & explorer. Toolbars, menu, maybe a list that looks like explorer's file list too.
You'll find that it takes even a seasoned programmer months to fiddle around with the bugs, incompatibilies, undocumented functionality *even when using the built in controls*! (toolbar, menu and listview controls). They are both badly designed and made, just like the API itself.
So why is this good? Because many rival companys or programmers will likely give up after a few weeks/months of wasting time with such a frustrating thing. Sure, many will and do continue to struggle through it, but think of the competition for me if it was a well laid out API that was perfectly understandable and worked as expected.
It relates to the problem of programmers becoming commoditized by easy newer and higher level languages such as vb, access. From the small glimpse I have seen of
I realise there is more to programming than technical knowledge of an API. A non-programmer who knows an API well will still have bad general design ideas, for example. I don't disagree with that at all. But whenever trying to decide what a good new project would be, I would recommend that programmers look for software that is just too hard, or too boring to write. That is where the money is imo.
.NET is a top level domain name... (Score:1, Interesting)