Sure Microsoft.com makes the list. The developers of the site are lazy. All they care about is that it 'works' with IE and Firefox and a few other browsers. They do NOT care one bit about W3C compliance. Do you think they put the site through the validator? I DOUBT it. Otherwise, they'd fix the 176 errors .

And then there are web developers for big companies that do the same thing. Amazon.com: 1580 errors, eBay: 226 errors and a big one for a lot of us on Slashdot I am sure (US based people), Newegg.com: 566 errors. What is so hard about validating to the standards in place? If you do it from the start, you have no problems. But developers of these sites clearly do NOT care as long as the site 'loads'.

Do not forget so many of these sites rely upon Microsoft's ASP.NET, ASP and/or IIS.

Are you guys surprised by this news? Of COURSE they are going to put IE 8 into XP and Vista now that it is nearing completion what with RC's out now. I do not really care as I slipstream it anyway (with nLite), but otherwise I ignore it and use Firefox or Opera.

using namespace std;

eh? :P

arguable but I will agree that in C vs C++ I choose C

Very true. Both C and C++ standards are not perfect on all platforms. Mostly we can expect them to work exactly the way we want on x86 and PPC and that's about it. ARM, MIPS, etc; on those we just hope it works.

Agreed. And you have to remember that WinForms (the Windows-look-alike GUI part of .NET) is still not fully supported. To me it looks like there is little effort being spent on this. Why? Because there is Gtk# because [sarcasm]THAT will solve all our problems[/sarcasm].

Maybe the .NET or Mono framework should never be used for front-ends to CLI programs on any platform, but there are many on Windows. At the moment, any Windows user might assume that a .NET app will 'just work' on Mono not knowing that it is just front-end to a Windows app.

The Mono team has no plans to support launching any type of binaries other than Mono and .NET ones. They will not work with the Wine team, which is clearly shown by how crappy .NET AND Mono run on Wine.

I am on the side that finds Mono a waste of effort based upon the way it has gone.

My point exactly. And another thing, as expressed in your last point, time is expensive! What is more important? Getting software out the door faster that sucks? Or getting your designs ready (on time, on schedule) with a native app that will not rely upon the (buggy) Java VM or .NET.

So it is a money issue. That is the saddest part. We are going to have lesser performing applications all because software companies want to pay less to developers.

I would rather pay $100 more for a sleek native program vs a Java one.

I used Mono pretty recently and was completely disappointed by lack of features in comparison to .NET. I thought it was supposed to be the open source equivalent, yet it is versions behind and lacking so many features.

At the same time, Wine needs .NET too. Mono has no plans of having Wine or SOMETHING run native apps (Windows exes) that a C#-based front-end to a CLI app might use. This is my other problem with .NET. It is seriously locked to Windows because Windows gets all the features, and gets to run the native apps too.

Okay, so you can code less with C# and possibly Java. So what! Your code is still going to run slower than C code. I know about Paint.NET; seems to be just an example application supporting the usage of .NET, nothing more.

I'll agree with you that C++ sucks. OpenMP is looking good though. Right now I use pthreads-w32 for Windows and POSIX threads elsewhere (Linux, BSD, OS X).

It is true that programming for platforms is sort of an issue with a bunch of #idefs but I find #ifdefs to be a lot better than starting from scratch.

With something like Qt (speaking of the GUI toolkit and ONLY that), you will have very few #ifdefs in my opinion because MOST of the code is completely cross-platform.

Agreed. The Qt API is RIDICULOUSLY easy to use, especially in comparison to Win32 API and even GTK+ and wxWidgets.

Death to Mono!

Agree. de Icaza is a Microsoft-paid Microsoft technology-supporting money man.

But you go work for Microsoft today as a 'Linux enthusiast' and you will be lying to death tomorrow with all that money you got.

Where do you want to go today?

s/using Java or Qt/using Java over Qt/g

Lucky for Windows users, Windows will always search the current directory first for DLLs that an app needs. So just include them. QtCore4.dll and a few others. Many apps ship their own version of Microsoft's DLLs just to make sure the app will call the correct version without worrying about a newer version being in system32 or the wrong version being called from WinSxS.

No, there is no case for using Java or Qt now. Qt looks sleek on every OS and is SO incredibly easy to program. It is native and is very fast.