.Net Popularity | The Coffeehouse

LCARS
Hello World!!

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!
Tongue Out

Tonatiúh
Cuali itcha a cosamalot

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?

jinath
jinath

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

TommyCarlier
I want my scalps!

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.

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

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]

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

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

Now we make most of our revenue with .NET projects Smiley

andokai

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.

sakisp
C/C++ and a cup of coffee...

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.

rhm

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.

Aayush Puri

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.

MisterDonut
The Disco Godfather

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. "

opsan
Microsoft Pragmatic Evangelist

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).

Detroit Muscle
Wii!

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.

Sampy
This will be the sixth time we have destroyed it and we have become exceedingly efficient at it

So you don't use .Net because it's not designed to be used by you?

I don't think you should use .Net considering those parameters Smiley

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

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

LCARS
Hello World!!

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.

Red5
Systems Manager Curmudgen

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.

Cider
Daze-d & Confused

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"

Karim
Trapped in a world he never made!

Cider wrote:
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"

LOL that gave me a laugh... one of the first times I saw Windows Geniune Advantage, it said it couldn't automatically find my product key, but there should be a Certificate of Authenticity somewhere stuck to the computer.

(I have a Tablet PC, Windows XP is preinstalled)

So like an idiot I'm turning my Tablet around and flipping the keyboard out and I can't find the damn COA sticker.

So then I read the fine print and it says something like, "Oh, if you have a Tablet PC, the COA might be affixed UNDER THE BATTERY."

As in, "I hope you aren't running off batteries, because you will need to hibernate, get a screwdriver, get a (real ink) pen, get a piece of paper, remove the battery, WRITE DOWN THE NUMBER, replace the battery, and start up again."

I think I just clicked the "take me to the damn download" button at that point.

This must have been fixed in subsequent versions of the ActiveX control, because I was never asked for my COA after that.

Tonatiúh
Cuali itcha a cosamalot

Cider wrote:
THE WORKING WORLD OF TOMORROW

Hello Cider:

Are you kind of an SF writer?... That is an smart script for a cool movie!... Have you thought about trying Hollywood?

Tonatiúh

JChung2006

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

It's unfair to call .NET "bloated" for not being able to run on computers with 10KB RAM. I mean even Microsoft's very first product (Altair BASIC) would have just barely fit on a computer like that.

There's certain classes of applications for which .NET is well suited. Maybe you've heard of them; they are called "desktop and Web applications."

dotnetjunkie

Funny question!!!

For us, it's not a matter of ".net catching on", it has catched on COMPLETELY!

We have adopted the platform all over the place, for many years now already.

Since beta2 of the very first version of .NET, every new development in our company was done using .NET.

Nowadays, all our critical servers and applications use .NET.

We would never have been where we are today if it weren't for .NET..., and we would certainly not be able to realize our ideas and products without it.

Tonatiúh
Cuali itcha a cosamalot

JChung2006 wrote:
[...] to run on computers with 10KB RAM. I mean even Microsoft's very first product (Altair BASIC) would have just barely fit on a computer like that. [...]

My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 (1973)... 16 KB RAM running MS Basic... There where enough spared RAM as for loading MS-DOS from floppy and yet running a medium sized interpreted Basic program.

Of course there is not any relationship between that old software and Microsoft.NET, but the same Company... I bet Detroit Muscle have missed several figures.

Tonatiúh

Believer

LOL. I love that car story. Made my day!!!

As for .NET its going well in the area it is targeted. I think it falls down when there is legacy code that needs to be interoped with.

rjdohnert
You will never know success until you know failure

We dropped Java and C++ for .NET. It may have been a mistake but so far nothings come across for us to believe that to be the case. We also use and experiment, mostly experiment, with Mono . All of our internal stuff targets .NET and MONO.