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Absolutely, .NET is ready for the masses.
I wanted to respond to some of the posts below, but there are so many that I take issue with that I figured a new thread is the proper place for my comments.
The deciding factor is not any of the following:- Are users are willing to download a 23 MB installer?
- Are they are willing to update their existing .NET runtime with a newer one?
- What percent of developers are using .NET to build applications?
- What percent of .NET applications are web based vs. windows based?
- Is obfuscation sufficient to protect your intellectual property?
These are all interesting and important questions to consider before developing your next killer app in .NET or betting your career on .NET. But they don’t have any real bearing on whether .NET is ready for the masses in general.
These are some of the factors that I think should be taken into account.
Are applications built with .NET:- As rich in features and user experience as applications built with other APIs?
- Sufficiently high performance compared to other APIs?
- As easy to develop as with other comparable APIs?
- Able to run on current hardware and software?
- As secure as other applications built with comparable APIs?
- As reliable as other applications built with comparable APIs?
Let me elaborate on these points.
Point 1: This is the most important question when it comes to end users, i.e. the masses. Does you mother care about what percentage of enterprise developers are using .NET? Is she still holding out until that percentage tops 40%? I doubt it.
Point 2: This isn’t far from the top of end users wishes. They want an application which is not sluggish. I’ll grant you that .NET apps can start slow on older computers or on first run, but once they are going, they are sufficiently fast if well written.
Point 3: Any company selling applications has to make money or perish. Since a large component of their cost is developers’ time to build the application, the longer it takes to build the application the more it will cost the end user. That is, I’m contending that retail price is proportional to development cost. And thus, more productive APIs such as .NET should result in less expensive applications.
Point 4: .NET will run on the current hardware and operating systems of most [Windows] users. Granted they may have to download the .NET framework, but how did they get the application in the first place?
Point 5: There is no contest here as compared to say Win32. Can you say buffer overrun? Not in .NET.
Point 6: See point 5.
Michael Kennedy
Partner, Software Engineer
United Binary, LLC
Index of my code project articles [^]
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These are all interesting and important questions to consider before developing your next killer app in .NET or betting your career on .NET. But they don’t have any real bearing on whether .NET is ready for the masses in general.
Care to explain yourself here?
An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
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Navin wrote:
Care to explain yourself here?
Sure:
I wrote:
The deciding factor is not any of the following:- Are users are willing to download a 23 MB installer?
- Are they are willing to update their existing .NET runtime with a newer one?
- What percent of developers are using .NET to build applications?
- What percent of .NET applications are web based vs. windows based?
- Is obfuscation sufficient to protect your intellectual property?
Point 3: When considering whether apps built with the .NET framework are ready for end-user use, I don't see how what other developers are doing is relevant to this discussion. It is important if you want a job programming .NET. It is important if you want to sell tools to developers developing in .NET. But it is not important to your mother what percentage of developers are programming in .NET. The question to them is only whether the particular app they are considering does the job.
Point 4: This has even less bearing for the user than does point 3. They don't see the code for the web apps and they don't execute it. It doesn't apply here.
Point 5: The end user does not care about how well your code is obfuscated. They want features, security, reliability, etc. Developers care, you care, but end users don't. Granted there may be a few punks trying to steal your software, but they are the minority by far.
Point 1: This is the biggest obstacle for users to use programs written in .NET, but it is minor. One of my favorite programs is NewsGator and happens to be written in .NET. They have the best download solution for dealing with non-technical end users that I have seen. Take a look at this page:
http://www.newsgator.com/downloads.aspx[^]
When I visit there, I get:
You appear to have the Microsoft .NET Framework installed. We recommend you use the following download links: ...
Their website determines which version (if any) of the .NET framework you have installed and recommends the course of action. To me, this sufficiently solves the missing or out of date framework issues. Beyond this, it's only a matter of time until everyone has the .NET framework. And that time is <= Longhorn's adoption date.
Point 2: See Point 1.
Regards,
Michael
Michael Kennedy
Partner, Software Engineer
United Binary, LLC
Index of my code project articles [^]
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I'll give you 3 and 5.
4 is impoortant precicely for the reasons you say. It doesn't matter to a user if a Web app was written with .NET or not, becuase it won't affect them. A user will be affected, though, if a desktop was written with .NET.
For points 1 and 2, the URL you sent I actually consider a pretty bad way of handling it. For one, it doesn't work in Mozilla. Mozilla is slowly gaining traction... so discounting it completely is a bad idea. And it appears that the download with .NET is too small - which probably means it's not a full download, it's probably one of those installers that has to download a bunch of stuff while it installs... so telling the user it's only 2 meg is a bit deceiving. And it remains to be seen whether it will correctly do version checking and identify whether or not the *right* version of the .NET framework is installed.
There will be a day when these aren't issues... I am guessing around 2008, when Longhorn and .NET version 2.0 are out and widespread.
An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
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Regarding point 4, all code can be disassembled -- be it native code or IL, and therefore potentially cracked or algorithms stolen. Despite all MS's efforts to make people register Windows XP, there exist cracked versions of that. Despite all the efforts of the gaming community, cracks come out within a matter of days for the most popular (and most well "protected") games. There is no perfect way to protect software for PCs. (If there is a perfect way, let me know... I could use it  )
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While I agree with most of your points,
Michael Kennedy wrote:
NET will run on the current hardware and operating systems of most [Windows] users.
About 80% of the my company's users are using Windows 95 on a Pentium 1 75Mhz with 32Mb of memory. Just thought you'd like to know.
"if you vote me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine" - Michael P. Butler.
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According to Microsoft your workstations don't exist anymore. Just thought you'd like to know.
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Yeah, but that still doesn't convinces them to upgrade. 
"if you vote me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine" - Michael P. Butler.
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If Microsoft simply released a new version of Explorer that also installed .NET as part of its installation, it would be everywhere and we could start targeting it. Plus, you would have a ready-to-go alterative to MSJava in the IE browsers.
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Or, and I know this would probably require a massive changes in the architecture of the .NET framework itself, MS employed the use of a linker with .NET.... so it would not matter if the framework was on the client machine... all would need to be there would be the CLR which is an extremely small component in the whole scheme of things.
Regards,
Brian Dela 
http://www.briandela.com IE 6 required.
http://www.briandela.com/pictures Now with a pictures section 
http://www.briandela.com/rss/newsrss.xml RSS Feed
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USers who won't (or can't) download a 25 megabyte .NET redistributable won't download a 50-meg IE update that includes the .NET redistributable.
And, as others have said, even if everyone gets .NET right now, that won't solve anything, as .NET version 2.0 which has a whole lot of featurs not found in .NET 1.x, will be out soon enough (next year?)
An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
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Over 50% of all voters are saying 'Yes', yet there is hardly any positive comment bellow so far.
Do we have another case of the vocal minority here?
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Er... as of the time I'm writing this, I see 36% as saying "Yes".
An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
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Yes, I forgot to include the other 'positive' option. It should have been 'Yes/Almost'.
Combined 'Yes/Almost' votes do exceed 50%.
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Ah, but "almost" only counts in horse shoes and hand -grenades.
An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
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'Almost' counts a lot when it's pushed by the biggest software company in the world.
Given that .NET is being developed further, it's safe to state that this 'almost' means 'yes'.
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Hi, All:
I just went to Monster.com, and did simple job key words seach over development languages against a set of major USA states like CA, TX and NY. Here are my findings (approximate):
DotNet including C#, VB.NET and ASP.NET -- 25%
C++ over all of OSs -- 30%
Java -- 35%
Others -- 10 or less%
I would like to urge you to do the same thing and judge if dotNet is already accepted by mass.
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Well, in being fair, it would be best to isolate that to Windows platform since they were the only ones that had .NET until recently so there is probably not many openings on other platforms other than Windows.
Because a person is able to write C++ code, does not mean they are platform independant. A C++ developer would most likely not land a job on a platform they have not had experience on.
Rocky <><
www.HintsAndTips.com
www.MyQuickPoll.com - 2004 Election poll is #33
www.GotTheAnswerToSpam.com
"We plan for the future, we learn from the past, we live life in the present!"
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Hi, Rocky:
My point is that dotNet is not well accepted yet overall like Java. It needs more time (2 or more years) but dotNet percentage does increase in comparison to one year ago. At this time, dotNet is well used with IIS for web applications, but I'd like to wait until dotNet version 2 is formally released. I don't think that dotNet is matured at this moment.
Charlie Ye
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Consider what the masses do with their computers: read and send e-mails, use the browser, listen to music and type a letter occasionally. Besides that the masses don't do much with the computer besides heating the air. So why would the masses need .NET when WinXP and Office 2003 is already more firepower then they need?
IMHO the corporate users and developers are the only ones who need .NET. The developers need it because it's much cheaper to develop using the .NET framework and the corporate users need it, because the developers won't bother to write a large scale app that needs to be integrated with LAN or WAN in C++ when they have .NET at their disposal. And why should they bother since .NET cuts 30 or more percent of development time...
Besides that, if microsoft doesn't make Longhorn backwards compatible with Win32, the masses won't leap to .NET until the year 3000.
This is just my opinion though...
A student knows little about a lot.
A professor knows a lot about little.
I know everything about nothing.
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.NET will be included into longhorn.
1) it will be compatable.
2) I remember hearing similar comments about people thinking others wouldnt switch to 95 from 3.1.1 go figure.
/bb|[^b]{2}/
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Some businesses still use WFW 3.11 and DOS because they don't have a need to jump into a 95/98/NT/2K/XP environment since all the tasks they do are already fast enough using their DOS and WFW software. So who's going to say that those people are going to jump into .NET? I worked at GE for a while and they still are using 95 due to compatability issues with 98, NT, 2K and XP and the many versions of IE that make it a pain since no one in the office knows how to upgrade and you'd be insane to try and upgrade all the systems at their plants since companies can't write browser and OS independant software and .NET's not about to achieve that. Java's about the only thing that comes close.
People still use win32 software more than you can imagine because it still works on XP for the most part. Believe me, I'm about to switch over to Linux because windows just gives too many frustrations. At least with linux the APIs don't change so drastically and coding is easier because they actually make coding ledgible and simple.
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Kiehlster wrote:
At least with linux the APIs don't change so drastically and coding is easier because they actually make coding ledgible and simple.
You must be kidding. Either that, or you never actually tried to program for Linux.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
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I have... whats so difficult about it? pick a better project, one with some direction. I know this is a microsoft-centric site, but linux is great!
/bb|[^b]{2}/
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And what have you used for GUI? Plain old X? GTK 1.x?, GTK 2? Qt? (e)FLTK? Fox? Motif?
And how do you distribute your apps? Source packed in tar.gz? rpm? deb?
And for which distribution have you tested your apps? There are hundreds of them, and each one releases a new version every couple of months.
Linux may be "great" for web servers, but developing consumer apps for it - no thanks.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
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