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- Dave Bernard
- The Intellection Group, Inc.
- http://www.IntellectionGroup.com
- DBernard@IntellectionGroup.com
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- Share some interesting tidbits and gain perspective on the past, present
and future of .NET.
- Discuss how to evaluate .NET as a potential tool for your development
toolbox.
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- Introduction
- Discussion Context
- The Evolution of .NET
- Evaluating the Move
- Conclusions
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- Who am I?
- Over 27 years as developer, manager, executive.
- Developing in FoxPro since 1990.
- Vice President, Atlanta FoxPro Users Group.
- MCSD (VFP), MCDBA (SQL 2000).
- Co-founded The Intellection Group 2 years ago.
- Develop custom extranet, EDI, PDA, TabletPC applications.
- VFP 9, COM+, SQL Server, ASP/DHTML/CSS/JS, IIS/Apache, PHP/MySQL.
- (Almost) No VFP GUI work.
- SR, TTS, NLU, RFID specialists.
- Conference speaker (FoxCon 2005, FoxCon 2006).
- Author (FoxTalk 2.0 March 2005, TechLinks April 2005).
- Reporter (UT coverage of SW Fox 2005, DevTeach 2005, SQL Pass 2005)
- Mantras:
- There are no technical problems, only business problems.
- Try not to sell to IT people; sell to business owners.
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- Most software development is still done by small organizations.
- Success requires satisfying the business case.
- On time, under budget, functional.
- It's much easier to sell to business owners than IT people.
- They are unimpressed with the complexities of my tools.
- They are impressed with results, especially in short time frames.
- To them, software is not magic, it's an important business tool.
- Your company's value is directly related to the value you generate for
your customers.
- It's not related at all to whether Microsoft supports FoxPro.
- The time when any new features in FoxPro has had a material difference
to your ability to deliver value to your customers has long since
passed.
- The installed base of applications is a much more accurate predictor of
future demand requirements than is marketing hype.
- If your product can't deliver it doesn't matter what language its in. If
it can, it really doesn't matter what language its in.
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- Traditionally, OS releases were backwards compatible.
- .NET broke this rule for the first time (VB.NET vs. VB6).
- Many developers have moved to the web and refuse to move back.
- Most .NET developers use ASP.NET, developing for Microsoft's web
server.
- Web development does not requires Windows to run the application!
- This does not bode well for the profits Microsoft enjoyed via its API
power.
- The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development
marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.
- Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista
on native code development.
- The Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime.
- Visual Studio .NET is not a managed application.
- No services are implemented using .NET in Vista Beta 1. During normal
execution, neither explorer, nor rundll32 uses .NET.
- The .NET framework is provided as part of Vista, but only so that
third-party code can run without the large download of the framework.
- Conclusion: Microsoft has lost its confidence in .NET.
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- Is there a .NET version of Help Builder?
- NO! My counter question is: Does it REALLY matter?
- Where's the ROI?
- Largest learning curve yet. OO was bad, but this is worse. And where
was the OO ROI?
- How's it supposed to reduce cost, improve my revenue? Sell more? Expand
my markets?
- Higher risk: it's the unknowns that get you.
- The time spent on a re-write is better spent on feature enhancements and
other priorities.
- From a technical perspective there’s very little that .NET would offer
this application that can’t be done in the current environment.
- Re-writing an application rarely yields any MAJOR benefits for the
users of an application.
- A re-written application is not necessarily a better application.
- An existing stable application has many advantages because it has been
real-world tested and tuned to the environment.
- Before insisting on fixing something: "Do experienced users have a
problem with this?"
- Why do you think applications like Office are not managed applications?
- There’s little to be gained from building a .NET version of Word.
- .NET leads to hype-induced strategies:
- Story about ASP .NET and Access.
- Conclusion: It's all cost and no benefit.
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- The development tools we use to solve these problem are becoming
increasingly complex at a rate out of all proportion to the problems
they are used for solving.
- Microsoft has raised an enormous barrier to entry with VS .NET,
especially for non-VS .NET developers.
- Smaller shops cannot afford long sales cycles, long learning curves on
new technologies or lots of non-billable time.
- .NET seems be aimed at enabling novice/mediocre/bad developers to be
productive in large shops.
- The complexity of .NET will lead to developer specialization.
- As we become more specialized, it takes more developers to cover a
project.
- You throw away your hard-earned habits and knowledge.
- It takes many years to become an expert of any non-trivial development
environment.
- Tool knowledge is very relevant; the deeper the tool the longer it
takes to really know it.
- .NET is immature and unproven; reminds me of the unfulfilled promises of
AI, OO, ADA, etc.
- There is clear evidence that the rate of change in the software
development paradigm (that business can absorb) is slowing.
- What's going to make .NET "obsolete"? And what will I do then?
- Don't discount the tools you already know.
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- This presentation is available at
- http://www.IntellectionGroup.com/AFUGPresentationNET.htm
- http://www.intellectiongroup.com/Presentations.asp
- DBernard@IntellectionGroup.com
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Notes
