Martin Spedding's Blog

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Are developers really interested in .Net and what is the solution ?

Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with a couple of friends who work for a .Net consultancy where they also give .Net training. I was curious to know what reaction they where seeing to .Net. The answer I got I would very interesting and gave me cause for thought.

They said initially people are not interested in .Net but when they see it then they like what they see. However, the problem is generally the people who are interested enough to learn about .Net are the elder members of the development community. The younger people, who after all are the future, are much more interested in PHP and Java.

Also people still confuse .Net with Windows 2003 Server which makes me wonder why on earth Sun thinks it is worth spending a lot of money on developing the Java brand. It seems the brand awareness of Java is already very strong really what they should be investing in is improvements to Java. Expanding the brand often dillutes the message, .Net is a great example. It would also seem that .Net needs to be hip  and start showing the doubters that in a difficult job market that learning .Net language results in a job and career advancement. Also it would seem to me, and I might sound a little like a hereti, that Microsoft should invest time and money to get Mono finished. Once Mono is there than the cross platform story is much stronger and people can write ASP.NET applications that run on Linux and on an Apache story. I am sure that the Windows Server and client people would say that will remove on our selling points and cause us problems. However, by the time Mono supports .Net Framework 1 or 1.1 then v 2 should be close. Without seeing v2 I am assuming that it will be a major advance on 1.1, which means Windows keeps it's advantage.

I want to write .Net applications that I run on a Linux box, as the customer has been seduced by the myth/reality of cross platform applications.

What do you all think ? Is the observation correct ? How do we make .Net hip and of interest to the next generation of programmers ?

Posted: Jun 22 2003, 03:29 PM by MartinSp | with 12 comment(s)

Comments

Frans Bouma said:

I think the observation of your friends is not correct. Consider the millions of developers who are writing software targetting MS-related platforms and technologies. Consider these developers being told that they have to migrate to .NET because .NET is the successor of the technology/platform they're targetting now. What's the result? Millions of developers considering a transition to that new platform, or they have already made that transition. 'new' developers who think the future is PHP are not developers but amateurs who will not be able to produce solid software until they understand what it takes to create solid software, and one of them is type safety. (needless to say, I also think ASP is not the technology of the future, asp.net is)

Java is the platform of choice for a lot of developers who want to write business oriented software. (that is, not gui's, but the logic behind those). Those developers are however never been interested in MS-related platforms or technologies.
# June 22, 2003 3:46 AM

Dave said:

I think these observations are missing a key angle: product lifecycles.

Where was Java back in 1997? In terms of chronological age, this is what you need to compare .NET against. Java was a very young and unadopted solution platform back then.

New developers - particularly since the dotcom bubble burst 3 years ago - will generally go where the money is. Older developers are many times already well established in their careers.

I attended Developmentor's Conference.NET back in August 2001. The keynote speech was given by an MS rep. One point he made was that .NET adoption would be very low for 2-3 years and would definitely be lagging behind Java - all due to natural product lifecycles.

The interesting point was what happens after that. Java, being a mature product based on 20th century technology, would start to see an inevitable slide. On the other hand, .NET, with it's _native_ codebase of XML/SOAP, complete rewrites of the System object and languages and extremely scalable design.... would start to take off in geometric growth. Again, just part of a natural lifecycle.

I see this as about 1 year off. Win2003, ASP.NET 2.0, even Mono will be out there. Yukon and Longhorn soon to be. More importantly, capital spending is expected to really begin bouncing back. Pent up over the last few years and all that.

Put it all together and there will be much more money to be made with .NET. That's when you'll see new developers coming in - in droves.
# June 22, 2003 5:28 AM

Martin Spedding said:

Thanks for the well thought out comments. By the way people I had been speaking to are european based and so maybe we are at an earlier point in the lifecycle in Europe. At present I am seeing customers starting to move their clients to XP, albeit slowly. The servers are slowly moving from NT to W2K. However, a lot of them are interested in server consolidation and at the moment a lot of them think that means reducing the number of server licences they have to purchase from Microsoft. They try to consolidate in the application server and web server area. This means that those servers are likely to be linux boxes. Microsoft clients and Unix servers. Unless you are masocist you don't really want to do client applications but if the application and web servers are linux boxes where is the great push for .Net going to come from. It is unlikely they will be running Mono but highly likely it will be Java.
# June 22, 2003 6:46 AM

Dave said:

Two other things came to mind when I read your last comments Martin.

(1) MS really - and I mean REALLY - screwed up big time 18 months back when they altered their licensing policies. I'm not talking about 'Acivation' a la XP, I'm talking about corporate licensing. I believe they are still taking hits for this in various corners.

(2) One very unique feature of .NET WinForm deployment is 'automatic updating' (not to be confused with No Touch Deployment). Sooner or later this will be the only way to design/deploy WinForm apps IMHO. Picture a PeopleSoft HR implementation that needs no tax updates or client PeopleTools upgrades - these will all be done automatically over the web. But....

The problem today is this 24M one time download of the .NET Framework. I've seen varying statistics that range from 6% to 30% of the Windows PC having the Framework installed.

My app designs today generally strip out all non-UI from the front end - which I feel make my ASP.NET apps suffer some. But now I can easily port things to WinForms and deploy true RIA apps that take advantage of those clients that can run them.
# June 22, 2003 7:39 AM

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# June 22, 2003 9:29 AM

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# June 22, 2003 9:29 AM

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Julia Lerman Blog
# June 22, 2003 9:29 AM

Dave Burke said:

I agree with points made by all of the commenters, particularly Frans who said that developers who think PHP and Java are cool are "amateurs." I authored a rather sophisticated PHP/mySQL data-driven site in 1995/96 and thought I had the best technology available. Then I went to Cold Fusion with a SQL Server 6.5 backend (the backend was sweet, the front-end sucked), then to ASP and SQL, with COM/COM+, MSQL and transactions, which is about the time I started to "get it" and see the complete development solution I had at my disposal and never thought about PHP or Java again. I already discovered the true best technology available, so moving to .NET was a no-brainer.
# June 22, 2003 11:53 AM

Phil said:

It is true that there are two camps that developers are going to. either .NET or Java. It is my opinion, though that going forward, the distinction between Java or .NET developer will blur as the number of systems that are required to perform a business process increase. Companies are currently using systems that are starting to mature that were written in Java and at the same time they may have a legacy C++ service, and an ASP/COM+/SQLServer system. In this case, the company is looking for developers that have expertise in Java, ASP, COM, SQL Server, C++, etc. So I think that the two camps will start to blend together (I believe most of the new hires out of college that join microsoft know Java and know some linux development, too in addition to C++). I have a post on my blog that talks to this.
# June 22, 2003 4:24 PM

Alex Hoffman said:

Unlike some of the other comments here, I think your observations are pretty spot on. I find that those already exposed to .NET are enthusiastic, but for many it's a question of why look at it in the first place. That question I think, is very much due to a lack of brand awareness and product positioning by Microsoft. In the wider community, most people can tell you what Java is, but few people can tell you what .NET is - let alone tell you why you should be using it.
# July 10, 2003 2:01 PM

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# August 5, 2003 12:03 PM

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# August 5, 2003 12:14 PM
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