.Net Popularity

For all you developers out in the real world, do you think that .Net is catching on? What is the attitude towards .Net? How many companies are actually adopting (or planning to) the platform?

Where do you think .Net will be in 5 - 10 years?

Discuss!

LCARS wrote:

[...] How many companies are actually adopting (or planning to) the platform? [...]

At least the R&D department of my own (Well, I share our mini-mini company with my son) is adopting .NET... Although the other existent department (Direction) is against it... You know, even in the same family there are Microsoft and Torvald's fans... But we survive, endure it and learn a lot from one each other.

Tonatiúh

EDIT: Count that for one? Or counts it for a half?

Evan in sri lanka lot of software companies now goes for .NET.  now its like 60%  .Net in Sri Lanka

I think its use is increasing. The company I work for has been using it (almost exclusively) for more than 2 years. And every time we go to a .NET-related event, there's always a big crowd. When talking to peers at those events, I notice that about a year ago, a lot of companies were just considering .NET, but now a lot of them have actually started using it.

The company that I work for is trying to stay away from .NET basically because we can't take the chance that someone has a pirated version of Windows and can't download the framework [C]

Our company was an exclusively Java shop up to two years ago.

Now we make most of our revenue with .NET projects

Cybermagellan wrote:

The company that I work for is trying to stay away from .NET basically because we can't take the chance that someone has a pirated version of Windows and can't download the framework

You know you can install a redistributable onto pirated machines without any problems? You can bundle it with your application install if necessary.

Here in Greece, .NET is not going well enough. Most goverment and corporate solutions are coded in Win32 (clients accessing SQL servers).
Small business, vertical market  and utility applications are Win32 unmanaged projects and almost nobody wants to import them in .NET because of performance loss posibility.

In education, universities, colleges and tech institutes, C/C++ is the official programming language, with a few of them teaching Java, VB and other less common languages.
.NET is only used for web development although only a few developers switched from ASP to ASP.NET yet.

I work for a small research and development company, coding industrial automation, machinery and communications projects. Unfortunately .NET is not the best platform for this kind of demanding applications, unmanaged C++ is still the preferable language.

However, I continue learning .NET, and C#, which BTW is a language I like a lot, coding small projects for personal use.

Never underestimate the power of people not wanting to learn anything new. See for example the vocal mob trying desperately to cling onto their VB6 skills.

2 of my friends joined a financial consulting company in their IT department. They had graduated this year itself and had very little prior experience in programming and software development.
As their company deals with both J2EE and .Net, in a couple they were introduced to both of these platforms. When I asked them which one did you find better any why. Both of them had the same answer -- Let anyone rant to any degree about Microsoft but no one can beat them in terms of developing platforms and tools that increase productivity of developers. Giving the example of ASP.NET vs JSP they pointed out to the fact that how ASP.NET makes it so easy for the developer who needs to write the business logic to simply focus on the stuff he needs to implement rather than playing around with HTML.

rhm wrote:

Never underestimate the power of people not wanting to learn anything new. See for example the vocal mob trying desperately to cling onto their VB6 skills.

Sadly,
I think this is the precise reason VB.NET even exists, as a bone to throw at the VB6 developers.. "Sorry, you have to learn OOP, but, don't worry. Here's a verbose, visually cluttered language to use, just like what you're used to. "

It's funny (to me, anyway; but I've an odd sense of humor) that this discussion came up when it did.  The timing is perfect. 

In background, I'm working with a partner on a little .NET migration from other technologies and was in search of customer evidence.

After the research and what I found (wow, what I found), I just had to post "It’s About the Business - .NET Momentum" on my blog, pointing out the seventy adoption/case studies that have occurred in the current edition (there are three previous editions, each chock full of case studies).

The URL points to the online versions of the books; if you want hardcopy, contact me (described in the article).

Reasons we don't use .Net :

1. It's too bloated.
       The computers our software runs on only have 10 kilobytes of ram.

2. It's too unstable.
       The computers we program for have to go 10+ years without being rebooted. That is not possible with a .Net solution.

3. The hardware it runs on is too expensive.
       Our company sells millions of computers per year. The extra money we would spend on more powerfull hardware to run .Net would be multiplied by millions. Accountants hate that.

4. .Net requires patching.
       Users of our software have to take our computers back to the dealership to have software patches applied. That costs lots of money.
      

We'll stick with assembly and C.

Yeah, I don't quote think that .NET was designed for automotive computers in mind

Detroit Muscle wrote:

Reasons we don't use .Net :
2. It's too unstable.
       The computers we program for have to go 10+ years without being rebooted. That is not possible with a .Net solution.

Maybe I missed something and this will be a dumb question but are you saying that it is not possible to leave a computer on for 10 years with .Net installed? If so, why not?

Everyone I know who have written .Net programs (v 1.1) have had no problems with stability.

Our company adopted .NET as the primary development platform when it was in BETA 1 over four years ago. Aside from some minor bugs in the VS IDE, it has been a good experience.

Harlequin wrote:

Yeah, I don't quote think that .NET was designed for automotive computers in mind

Heh.


THE WORKING WORLD OF TOMORROW

7:15am  Get up

7:30am  Get in car to drive to work

7:31am  Turn key, and popup on dashboard says "Initializing Car Driving System .Net Library 1.1.57435.5345345.33333."

8:45am  Popup says "Initializing Car Driving System Complete".  Clicking popup brings up another popup "Car Driving System Update 1.1.57435.5345345.33334 downloading...please wait"

9:20am  Popup says "Download complete.  This update requires a Car Genuine Advantage key.  Please input the serial number of your car.  It is a 32 digit number that can be found on the underside of your car.  Car Genuine Advantage is here to give you a better experience of your car"

11:45am  Get into work.  Need to write a memo.  Load up web browser and go to www.googlesunopenoffice.com.  Popup displays "Loading OpenOffice over the web...  Please wait."

3:00pm  Popup says "OpenOffice loading complete"

3:01pm  Starts to write memo

3:03pm  Midtype a popup appears "Buy a Ford!  Ads provided by Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle"

3:05pm  Midtype a popup appears "Buy a Sandwich from MacDonalds...MacDonalds:  We're Loving It".  Advert plays Justin Timberlake singing.  As everyone in office is using same word processor, office is treated to 500 cubicles filled with Justin Timberlake singing "we're loving it".

4:00pm  After 25 adverts, memo is complete.  It is telling office that you are off to Taiwan to meet suppliers.

4:05pm  Need to find where meeting place for suppliers.  Load Google Maps.  Type in "Taiwan" in search.  Google maps returns Taiwanese restaurants in Kansas.  Shake head.  Loads up Scoble's blog for some entertainment.  Link is redirected from weblogs.com to scoblizer.com to robertscoble.com to rscoble.com to robertscoblizer.com to philipseymourhoffmanlookalike.com to eventual new home for his blog at wordpress.com.  Scoble is excited.  He says "WOW!  I've just come back from the Virtual Earth team.  They have some exciting developments.  One really cool feature is that whatever you search for, it always returns somewhere in Kansas.  And we're not stealing features from Google!"

4:15pm  Back to Google Maps, you try every concoction of Taiwan you can think of.  You eventually type Taiwan into normal Google search.  It returns "Did you mean...  People's Republic of China's certainly not independant in any way and if you say otherwise Kai-Fu will have a word with yis Island?"

5:00pm  You get back in car to go home.  Turn key, and popup says "Car Driving System Update 1.1.57435.5345345.33335 downloading...please wait"