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Web 2.0, Meet .Net 3.0 177

Posted by Zonk from the higher-number-means-better-code dept.
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. "
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Web 2.0, Meet .Net 3.0 More

Web 2.0, Meet .Net 3.0

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  • Icredible (Score:5, Funny)

    by reydelamirienda ( 892327 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @02:18PM (#15509879)
    Wow, how innovative! I wish the PHP documentation had user contributions too...

    • Vista? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by kripkenstein ( 913150 )
      TFA says, "Microsoft is continuing to roll out--slowly but surely--new branding that will be part of its overall Windows Vista campaign". So, supposedly, this is part of the marketing strategy for Vista.

      I guess when your product isn't good enough, you need other ways to get it sold.

      • Re:Vista? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by I'm Don Giovanni ( 598558 )
        I guess when your product isn't good enough, you need other ways to get it sold.

        Or Microsoft could just give away their product for free, like other vendors who make products that aren't "good enough" to sell to the public.
    • The PHP docs have an unedited "comment" system which is completely different from a Wiki. I wish the PHP docs were a Wiki so that wrong information could be cleanly removed and whatever debate about it could go on a "discussion" page.

  • Web 3.0 (Score:5, Funny)

    by PhreakinPenguin ( 454482 ) * on Saturday June 10, 2006 @02:18PM (#15509881) Homepage Journal
    I'd like to propose that the first standard of Web 3.0 be to stop coining stupid phrases for every day things. Web 2.0, Dot Com's, etc.

  • Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    .NET 1.3 to .NET 2.0 was practically an entire different platform, and I can't get any of my .NET 1.3 software to compile and run right under .NET 2.0.

    And now .NET 3.0 is literally an entirely different platform family from .NET 2.0?? Kind of like how JavaScript has nothing to do with Java?

    Given that they're the most powerful platform vendor in the world, with the ability to force adoption of virtually any programming environment, language or library that they choose, Microsoft sure does seem to act despera

    • Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rakslice ( 90330 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @02:55PM (#15510012) Homepage Journal
      Yeah...

      From the article: "Microsoft has decided to avoid any confusion in the naming scheme for its core developer technology [...]"

      Before my brain shuts down in order to protect itself and I start drooling on myself, I should say that it's one thing for tech journalists to be clueless and incoherent; it's another entirely for them to report something that's exactly the opposite of what's happening just because it's in the corporate press release.

    • Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:5, Informative)

      by AaronBrethorst ( 860210 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @02:56PM (#15510015) Homepage

      I think you mean version 1.1 of the .NET Framework, not 1.3. Also, we published a very detailed list of breaking changes from 1.1 to 2.0 on MSDN [microsoft.com]. We never take a breaking change lightly, every single one of these would have been reviewed with a great deal of scrutiny to ensure that we really were doing the right thing under the circumstances.

      With regard to .NET 3.0 (no longer WinFX 3.0), it's the next version of the .NET Framework. As a result, it includes new features, like WPF (Avalon), WCF (Indigo), and a ton of other cool, new things. This is merely a marketing change, no more.

      • Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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

      • Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing. (Score:5, Informative)

        by russryan ( 981552 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @04:20PM (#15510281)
        The rebranded WinFX (now .NET Framework 3.0) contains the RTM release of .NET Framework 2.0 (the runtime) as well as WPF (Avalon), WWF, and WCF (Indigo). It represents a superset of the 2.0 runtime. Yes, I work there too.
    • 'Entirely different platform'? I thought WinFX was based on what MS started with .NET. Renaming it to .NET sounds alot more sensible than 'WinFX', which just sounds corny and gimmicky. Atleast when people hear '.NET' they think of the Internet and everything it's done.

      Interesting to note that the WinFX Wikipedia article is now redirecting to '.NET Framework 3.0'
    • Maybe he was talking about upgrading from Java 1.3 to .NET 2.0, I can see how that would cause many problems...
    • And now .NET 3.0 is literally an entirely different platform family from .NET 2.0?? Kind of like how JavaScript has nothing to do with Java?

      I love how the well informed respond...

      Actually, .NET 3.0 is .NET 2.0 with all the new Vista stuff strapped on it, like WinFX, etc. .NET 3.0 STILL USES THE 2.0 CLR. (Get where I am going here?) It is .NET 2.0 with new features that also run under the same .NET 2.0 CLR...

      This time they didn't change the .NET 2.0 platform, they just added new stuff to it, and new features
    • Not true at all... why is this modded insightful? WinFX (ahem, .NET 3.0) IS .NET 2.0, with some extra APIs added as well: Windows Presentation Foundation, which uses XAML (an XML dialect) to do form layout, some new SOAP IPC stuff, and some other things.

      So the only reason .NET 3.0 isn't a good name is that it IS backwards compatible (which you shouldn't expect given the major number increase). For shame, Microsoft?
  • I mean see how much better Netscape 8 is compared to Firefox 1.5.

    And seriously, it does make sense to align it with their .NET brand since after killing the "cool code names" (Avalon, Indigo) and turning then into indecypherable abbreviations (WPF, WCF, WTF and so on), people got confused, and slap WinFX on top of all that.

    Of course .NET also is not a great way to describe it since it's an OS programming framework, not just network related, but what the hell..

  • Active WinFX 3.11 for Workgroups. (Score:4, Funny)

    by MULTICS_$MAN ( 692936 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @02:46PM (#15509974)
    With dynamic OLE licensing 6.23.0 That's my vote.

  • Not News (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    WinFX was a technology code word for the new .Net based replacement to the Win32 API. It's ALWAYS been .Net from the get go. Move along ... nothing to see here
    • It's not a replacement. It's also news that it would be called .NET Framework 3.0, as the framework already contains different components (like the "actual" framework, including the VM and other APIs) and there have also been other plans already presented for what most of us assumed would be .NET 3.0 (LINQ and all, probably tied to VS.NET "Orcas").

  • Cool Aid (Score:1, Insightful)

    by truthsearch ( 249536 )
    I went to the main "WinFX" page and followed the first link [msdn.com] about the rename. Right there in black and white I see all I need to know:

    ".NET Framework has becomes the most successful developer platform in the world."

    I'm going to put down my cup of coffee, pick up the cool-aid and jump right on it! Just another Microsoft developer blogger trying to market for them. And they wonder why only current customers listen.

    On a related note, I thought WinFX was originally just the replacement for WinForms, the orig

  • S.O.P. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scottsk ( 781208 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @02:58PM (#15510024) Homepage
    "purely a branding change" -- Standard operating procedure for MS -- they rename their stuff like clockwork. Trace the history of DDE, OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, .Net etc etc etc (same basic stuff) or their alphabet soup of database access methods which all boil down to that incredible confusing ODBC control panel doodad. (And you have to install the drivers on EVERY DESKTOP, too, or at least you used to...) If MS is not renaming their techologies, they're reorganizing the company.
    • Thankfully, the odbc control pannel isn't so bad anymore. You do, however, have to configure the odbc stuff for either:
      1) Every User on the machine that's going to use it if the database lives in their account
      or
      2) The machine that the database runs on if you want it to run on the machine and not in the user's account (say a server or an app on a box that several users may use)

      Oh, and if your program is in java and you want to connect to an Access database with the JDBC-ODBC bridge, there's another quirk.
    • Minor correction, DDE and OLE1 were closely related. OLE2 was the first use of what was then called COM. .NET maintains a fairly good compatibility layer to COM, but so it also does to C/Pascal style of DLL (or even static) linking, but fact is of course that the COM part was what the VB fans cared about.

      I detest this change (WinFX => .NET 3.0), as the CLR, the actual VM of the environment, hasn't changed. On the other hand, it's still fairly consistent compared to Java version numbers... I guess :-)

    • Re:S.O.P. (Score:2, Funny)

      by labreuer ( 950633 )

      If you're a Linux developer you don't change the name, you just create a new distribution!

      *ducks*

    • For once I like the renaming, especially if MS do internally consider this to be an update to the .NET Framework. Then it's just confusing to call it something as obscure as "WinFX" (many believed FX was for "effects" too, which it wasn't). The only unfortunate thing I can see about this rename is that they picked a bad brand in the first place.

  • More confusing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HalAtWork ( 926717 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @03:08PM (#15510059)
    As if people weren't confused enough as to what .NET was anyway... At first Microsoft had named their future version of their OS "Windows.NET", they have .NET My Services web services, there's a .NET conference, a ".NET Enterprise Server", a .net TLD.

    Not only this, but .NET was supposed to be a common language runtime environment, and now it's encompassing APIs that are not specific to the environment but specific to a certain version of Windows.

    Now they're bringing this same confusion to WinFX? WinFX used to be the three pillars to the new Windows API to be included in Vista, encompassing Avalon (presentation layer), Indigo (communications layer), and WinFS (metadata database for the filesystem). Then some of these pillars were dropped, and now apparently according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] there are four pillars. I'm not sure if these will still be available [about.com] for Windows XP, and where Windows 2000 stands. Not only that, but will Mono have to re-implement major parts of Windows just to be .NET 3.0 compliant?

    Anyway, all this makes me wonder, what is MS trying to accomplish with this moving-target definition of WinFX and .NET? They should just hold all announcements until they ship a product, IMHO.

    • what is MS trying to accomplish with this moving-target definition of WinFX and .NET? They should just hold all announcements until they ship a product, IMHO.

      MS is the spoiled child that always needs all the attention. MS will always tell customers that the next "great" version is coming. However, once that time comes, the date always slips. When was the last time MS released one of its core products on time with all promised features? MS only makes these "announcements" because they want to keep th

    • Re:More confusing (Score:2, Informative)

      by AJanuary ( 746139 )
      "Not only this, but .NET was supposed to be a common language runtime environment, and now it's encompassing APIs that are not specific to the environment but specific to a certain version of Windows."
      I've not seen any official word that .NET is supposed to be fully cross platform. Whats more is that it will actually be limitedly cross-platform. They are developing a small subset of the .NET Framework and WinFX to be deployed on other OS's such as linux and OSX (primarily for use with the web but as I under
    • I work as a consultant and my boss and the sales persons here have asked many times "what .net is" over the last years. Especially when everything was ".Net" it was really hard to explain. Windows.Net, Passport.Net and so on. Sometimes it feels like MS deliberately want people to have a very FUD'ish and fuzzy picture of their stuff. I remember a discussion when Java was pretty new and a fellow consultant argued that ActiveX would do much the same. He is far from dumb, and that makes the point how fuzzy MS m
    • I'm not sure if these will still be available [about.com] for Windows XP, and where Windows 2000 stands.

      WCF and WPF will be backported, yes. I doubt to 2000, but definitely to XP and Server 2003.
      (actually, they already have been and is downloadable if you wish to check them out)
  • ...I wonder why they hadn't renamed it to "nude pics", or even "fr33 p0rn 4U". Downloads would have reached a bizzillion in far less than week.

    On a more serious note, I wonder if this is just the old renowned way to force something down users' throat: just one more occasion to make users agree on a if-we-blow-your-computer-you-can't-sue-us, will-send-your-private-infos-to-third-parties, your-old-programs-won't-work-after-this EULA.

    Since a lot of spam I received through the ages tries to have you to download
  • People are enough confused as it is so the chance of anyone getting a grip about what dotnet really is supposed to be is slim to none.

    Ajax is where i place my bet because it works. Ajax is being implemented by multiple sources and have shown to perform well. For the untrained eye dotnet seems like all hype and no show. A slew of marketing hype with nothing tangible in it.

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