Microsoft and the enterprise market, is it reality?

Since Microsoft published .Net they start to push .Net as solution for enterprise market. .Net introduces much more mature developing system combining with much more mature servers and operating system. Microsoft adopts several programming concept such as OO, ORM, Attributes. Microsoft also Improve IIS and operating systems and they are keeping improving their operating systems and development tools by developing Longhorn and Whidbey. But it looks to me that all that effort not really addresses the enterprise needs. Before I mention the word Java I just want to mention that I'm not java guy at all. My daily occupation as enterprise guy simply forces me to interact with Java and Java solution on a daily basis. My interaction with Java not as a language or development tool but as a set of infrastructures and frameworks for enterprise development make my daily life as Microsoft guy very but very hard. As opposed to the rich opportunities that Java solutions supplies to enterprises I just have IIS, BizTalk, COM+ and other servers that I cant even compare to other solutions such as application servers (JBOSS), clustering, in memory databases (Giga spaces) and other useful open source project that already port to .NET such as Nunit, Nant and as I heard recently Nspring.

 

The main reason for the .Net gap is that Java has been in the enterprise field for a long time and that time needed to learn from real life experience what frameworks, infrastructures and other project are really need for enterprise development. It looks to me that Microsoft isn’t aiming to target the enterprise market specifically. They are target a wider range of markets and pay the taxes in the enterprise field. I really don’t know and until now don’t find why. The only consumption that I have is that none of the leading PM or product manager come with strong background of enterprise developing. But it's just my assumption and I really don’t know all the right people in Microsoft to come to such conclusion.

 

What I know for sure that most of the enterprise solution that the java community has to offer are open source projects developed by programmers who see the need and develop solutions. I just think that those solutions can be adopted for .NET usage after adaptation to .NET that should take advantage of .NET abilities. If the current java solution will be converting to .NET they could help .NET to penetrate more easily into the enterprise market. I talk with some MS workers about that subject but they don’t appear to my enthusiastic to import those java projects into .NET world. Apparently that work is left to us, the .Net community …

3 Comments

  • "I talk with some MS workers about that subject but they don’t appear to my enthusiastic to import those java projects into .NET world. Apparently that work is left to us, the .Net community …"



    and I think thats right and here's why:



    on one hand folks ask MS to be the source of everything..... and when they are another bunch of folks start saying MS is too big and is hurting competition a "Monoply" and all that.



    so for MS it's good to have lots of other developers building stuff ... for leagal reasons and others...



    and for us ... if we have more and more shared / open soruce .net code we can learn from and improve on then we are much less limited by any microsoft problems...



    examples: Mono

    if you write an Open Source web server package that runs on mono then you can deploy it to windows or to linux so if some problems show up in windows that ms does not fix you can keep running on another os.

    if MS fails as a company and we have work such as Mono and others we can keep .net alive after MS if we wish to.



    so it's better for us and MS to have the code coming from different places .....

  • > What I know for sure that most of the enterprise solution that the java community has to offer are open source projects developed by programmers who see the need and develop solutions.



    > I talk with some MS workers about that subject but they don’t appear to my enthusiastic to import those java projects into .NET world. Apparently that work is left to us, the .Net community …



    You said it yourself that most Java solutions are community oriented and supported, yet you want MS to add these packages out of the box. Would it be nice? of course. but I don't think MS have the free resources considering how their products are being delayed.

  • I agree with most of your comments. Currently with MS they offer applications like MSMQ, COM+ and so on...and they are stringly tied to an OS. To ask an enterprise to upgrade systems to a newer OS just so we can utilise these features wont happen. I strongly belive OS exists to provide hardware abstraction and then application layer and run time provide the next tier of abstraction. In that respect Linux market has it worked out where by you have the OS and on top you can assemble any combination to suite the needs. Having said that they still have a long way to go before getting out of the box stability.



    With regards to App servers personally I would like to build objects that I can specify in the config file to execute locally or remotely and do db percistance without doing a lot of coding. Mind you a lot of it can be done with XML config files and reflection but it comes at the cost of performance. Surelly there must be an easier way..as some one once said "Abstractions cost CPU cycles" what is a cycle or two if you have a few Gig of them to throw around.



    It would be good if we can start an open source project for an app server on .NET. The first step would be to work out what exactly it should do. If you do set one up count me in...



    BTW I have no response from MS on my post in Channel 9

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