.NET is teh suX0rz!!11! (And Ars' editorial standards are on the decline)

I love Ars Technica, but I think they're slipping. While the articles they post in the legal realm are fascinating, when they get down to writing about bits, they get the most uninformed jackasses they can find. Check out this steaming pile of crap on why .NET is a failure, and count how many times you see the term "API" (take a drink every time!).

It's an opinion piece wrapped up as fact, and one of many pieces you can find that people will buy in to the credibility where none exists (just read the comments). What's more annoying is that this is presumably setting up the author's Mac zealotry, which as a Mac fan and a .NET developer I could really do without.

I'd love to see this guy's resume to see just how much experience he's had. Heck, maybe we can lump him into one of his neat little categories of developers.

I suppose just linking to the article is some sort of validation, but my real intention is to show that this is the sort of stuff in the online tech quasi-press that is of the least value, and it's starting to permeate RSS feeds. It's basically Brit/Lindz gossip. No platform is quite perfect, but you know, there are millions of us doing really sweet things with this one, and not because of some evil monopolistic power either.

Craptacular! 

21 Comments

  • Agreed 100%.

    Too bad

  • Yeah I read this morning and was like "WTF?". I've programmed in Cocoa and .NET, so I know it's bull. I'm just waiting for the series to finish before I completely unleash hell on it.

    -Drew

  • "...and count how many times you see the term "API" (take a drink every time!)."
    Bought a 12 pack on the way home and it's gone already. Now that I am feeling my oats, I decided not to join in on "their" discussion.

  • And by the way, the Ars forum app is about as reliable as Lohan on a cocaine binge.

    Further irony is that the main Ars site runs on .NET.

  • OMG! This guy is either drunk or has some loose screws.

  • I can't even discern what he was trying to do with .NET. Was he using .NET? Why all the discussion of Win32 calls to open files and such?

  • A lot of misinformed blather citing the stereotypical rants about Windows programming but I missed the part of the article that showed how much easier it is to write OS X apps. Where are the IDEs and other tools for OS X dev? Where are the OS X dev books? Where are the developer supported help/tutorial sites for OS X?

  • I'm going to take my apparently sub-par approach to programming (because I write VB.Net) and go to work tomorrow, and write apps that actually make a difference for people in my organization. I'm happy to be a "level 2" developer. I learn what I need. Besides, apparently moving to "level 3" or whatever, requires being an arrogant... nevermind.

  • Even the rants on Slashdot make more sense then this and that's damn hard!

  • Rather than throwing a hissy fit, how about debunking his claims with some real arguments?

    I have never touched a Mac and have been writing code in VBA, MFC/ATL to .NET for over 10 years now. Stop being such a fan boy and consider that what the guy is saying actually holds some water. Only way our tools are going to get better is by community involvement (like that's going on in the Java world). Such juvenile outbursts gets the industry no where.

  • "It's an opinion piece wrapped up as fact"
    No, it's an opinion piece wrapped up as an opinion piece.

    "Check out this steaming pile of crap on why .NET is a failure"
    Only insofar as .NET is a failure to provide a clean, modern development environment free of Win32's constraints and misfeatures. That we're not in the position of being able to write "any" Windows application in "native" .NET (i.e. no P/Invoke/C++/CLI to call Win32 directly) is pretty damning, IMHO. The article says that this is a missed opportunity--can anyone really dispute that?

    As a tool for letting people churn out yet more CRUD database apps, it's fabulous. ASP.NET, for all its quirks, isn't bad either.

  • Debunk what? There's no substance to respond to. It's just a big rant about different classes of developers and arbitrary subjective nonsense about the design of .NET.

    What's a missed opportunity about not being able to code "natively?" Who wants that? Game developers can still work in C++ and manipulate memory all they want, but outside of that, the need is niche as best.

    I've been fortunate enough to work with architect types in companies that do billions in business every year, not some hack without any bio or public qualifications listed on Ars. These smart people I've worked with think very highly of .NET and are betting the farm on their multi-billion dollar business on it. And you know what? They've been enormously successful.

    Who would you rather listen to?

  • "What's a missed opportunity about not being able to code "natively?" Who wants that? Game developers can still work in C++ and manipulate memory all they want, but outside of that, the need is niche as best."
    Who wants that? People who want to use MS's ribbon control? People who want to use Media Foundation? People who want to use TxNTFS? People who want to spawn UAC-elevated portions of their application? OK, yeah, it's niche. Problem is, there's a lot of niches. And not all of them are legacy. MS is creating *new* niches with each new version of Windows.

    Don't you see how that might represent a missed opportunity? MS has this platform which is, at least, technically sound (because it offers things like strong versioning memory safety), but there are all sorts of things that you might want to do on Windows that you *can't* without leaving that brave new managed world. And MS keeps on adding yet more stuff that's non-managed.

    Doesn't that disappoint you, even if only a little? It certainly disappoints me. I wanted .NET to be *the* platform to target. But it just *isn't*, and MS isn't doing the work to make it so.


  • You made my point, it's a tiny percentage of people. Again, who cares? What's particularly silly about this is that the action is moving away from the desktop anyway. I don't know what percentage of development for Windows is for desktop apps, but I can only imagine it's a small percentage. That big company gig I was talking about? Hundreds of developers, none of them doing desktop work. I can't even remember the last time I saw a job ad for desktop work.

    Windows as a desktop platform is irrelevant. Microsoft knows this all the while they try to keep milking it. The only desktop apps I use on Windows anymore is Visual Studio and SQL Management Studio. Everything else is Web based (except Adium, on OS X).

    To write off .NET because it doesn't hook into some obscure features of Windows that 99% of developers will never need is ignoring where the real action is.

  • "You made my point, it's a tiny percentage of people. Again, who cares? What's particularly silly about this is that the action is moving away from the desktop anyway."
    The hell it is. You'll take my local office suite, web browser, media player, IDE, ssh client, e-mail client, games from my cold dead hands. Even proponents of "web apps" are realizing this--you've surely noticed how Google is developing versions of its online apps that work offline?

    Even for "online" apps, oftentimes they don't come into their own without a web app. I don't use twitter.com for tweeting; I use Twitterific. Why? Because Twitterific is so much *better*. I could read my e-mail online too--but it's better in Outlook. This is a tale that is repeated over and over and over again.

    "I don't know what percentage of development for Windows is for desktop apps, but I can only imagine it's a small percentage. That big company gig I was talking about? Hundreds of developers, none of them doing desktop work. I can't even remember the last time I saw a job ad for desktop work."
    Well golly gosh wow. The desktop isn't dead, no matter how much the Web 2.0 Cloud crowd like to claim otherwise. The fact is, the desktop provides a considerably better experience, and disconnected operation is still essential in today's world. You can like it or lump it.

    "Windows as a desktop platform is irrelevant."
    Please. Until web apps can even begin to compete with desktop apps, they haven't got a chance.

    "Microsoft knows this all the while they try to keep milking it. The only desktop apps I use on Windows anymore is Visual Studio and SQL Management Studio. Everything else is Web based (except Adium, on OS X)."
    You never listen to music?

    "To write off .NET because it doesn't hook into some obscure features of Windows that 99% of developers will never need is ignoring where the real action is."
    Yeah--the desktop.

  • OK... keep telling yourself the desktop matters. The change will happen with or without you. How fast can you search for an e-mail message from a year ago in Outlook, by the way? It's instant in Gmail.

    Adobe's AIR and MS' Silverlight/WPF show exactly why desktop apps are becoming more and more irrelevant. These two platforms deploy from the Web, and can have that local storage I'm sure you're fond of, but they're intended to be connected. *That* is your better experience. Besides, short of MS Word, and I hesitate to call that a positive experience in any form, I've yet to find a "must have" desktop app outside of development work.

    Web apps *are* competing with desktop apps, and they have been for awhile. Even my non-tech savvy better half does most computing tasks in a browser.

    Yeah, music is served up by iTunes or whatever you like to use, but do you honestly think that's a long-term proposition? We're already half-way there, where in my house I listen on devices like iPods and Apple TV and an Xbox 360. I'm already listening to "radio" from the Internet. I don't need a desktop app for that.

    The revolution is already in progress my friend. I remember in 1999, working for a B2B media company, pitching a Web-based CRM system for use internally and to our customers. What did the execs say? "No one will ever use a tool like that online because you have to 'dial in' to use it." So while that company was delisted from the NYSE a few years later, Salesforce.com is still doing exactly what we pitched.

    Because people will "never" have the ability to be online all of the time.

  • "OK... keep telling yourself the desktop matters. The change will happen with or without you. How fast can you search for an e-mail message from a year ago in Outlook, by the way? It's instant in Gmail."
    Instantly. Quicker than gmail, in fact, in spite of my local inbox being a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than my gmail inbox (no network latency, quicker browsing through the messages that match the criteria). Even better, Outlook works when I'm not in the office. It'll tell me about meetings even when I'm at a client site. It'll let me write e-mails (and queue them up until it's next connected) and look at my contacts and create meetings, even when I'm offline. I can't do any of that with gmail, yet it's all pretty mundane, ordinary stuff.

    "Adobe's AIR and MS' Silverlight/WPF show exactly why desktop apps are becoming more and more irrelevant. These two platforms deploy from the Web, and can have that local storage I'm sure you're fond of, but they're intended to be connected."
    I use an AIR app much of the time (for tweeting from Windows) only... it runs locally. It is a desktop app.

    "*That* is your better experience. Besides, short of MS Word, and I hesitate to call that a positive experience in any form, I've yet to find a "must have" desktop app outside of development work."
    The entire Office suite creams any online equivalent. Even simple apps like Paint.NET have no good online equivalent. There are no good online text editors, either.

    "Web apps *are* competing with desktop apps, and they have been for awhile. Even my non-tech savvy better half does most computing tasks in a browser."
    his/her loss.

    "Yeah, music is served up by iTunes or whatever you like to use, but do you honestly think that's a long-term proposition?"
    Er, yes, actually.

    "We're already half-way there, where in my house I listen on devices like iPods and Apple TV and an Xbox 360. I'm already listening to "radio" from the Internet. I don't need a desktop app for that."
    I've not come across a single internet radio station whose online Flash-based applet is even half as good as a desktop app. And is there *any* software that'll let me store all my myriad media files online and play them back in real-time on my computer? Anything even on the horizon?

    "Because people will "never" have the ability to be online all of the time."
    And indeed they don't, which is precisely why big players like Google are pushing offline-capable "web" apps, and precisely why Adobe is pushing AIR. Because "the Cloud" just isn't that available. My desktop is always connected (unless my ISP has broken something, which occasionally happens), but my laptops are regularly disconnected. Client-side computing is plainly essential.


  • You must use a different Outlook than I do. How often are you not connected, and what happens when your hard drive fails? I can and do all of the same things with Google Apps, by the way, including schedule meetings.

    Your AIR app is a small client app you downloaded, right? You don't Twitter to your desktop.

    I'm not a majority, but I'm connected at all times. That's the reality we're moving toward. Skate to where the puck is going to be...

  • "You must use a different Outlook than I do."
    2007.

    "How often are you not connected,"
    A few hours a day.

    "and what happens when your hard drive fails?"
    Restore from backup.

    "I can and do all of the same things with Google Apps, by the way, including schedule meetings."
    Only by running them on the desktop. You can't do that with web apps.

    "Your AIR app is a small client app you downloaded, right?"
    Sure.

    "You don't Twitter to your desktop."
    But I do Twitter with a desktop app.

    "I'm not a majority, but I'm connected at all times. That's the reality we're moving toward. Skate to where the puck is going to be..."
    It isn't the reality we're moving towards, at all. I mean, I live and work within a major metropolitan area, and yet when I'm not at my desk (or in Starbucks, heh) I'm typically devoid of Internet access. The train I commute to work on each day? Disconnected. That's not abnormal. In fact, it's the very opposite of abnormal. The world is nowhere near as well-connected as you seem to think.

  • What are you talking about? I don't use Google Apps on my desktop. The whole point is or them to be browser based.

    You only choose to see today. The future is connected at all times. I don't see how you could possibly see any other future.

  • "What are you talking about? I don't use Google Apps on my desktop. The whole point is or them to be browser based."
    Why do you think Google is developing Google Gears? I'll give you a hint: it's because Google wants to provide a way of using web apps offline.

    "You only choose to see today. The future is connected at all times. I don't see how you could possibly see any other future."
    Given that many parts of the world do not even have reliable access to electricity, a "connected at all times" future is decades off, if it'll ever happen. I don't see why think otherwise.

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