.NET Reality Check - a matter of 'Pragmatic R&D'
My recent posting (with the convoluted long sentence - thanks Frans :-), needs an update. Michael Earls has some very substantiated arguments about .NET at the present and its future. His posting(s) does express a concern about what's needed today.. I do concur that MS has done a superb job with the Longhorn technology and the weblogs that are devoted to it in disseminating the information. Too much information in such cases, are never enough. 'Longhorn', today is a matter of 'Pragmatic R&D' and I hope to indulge in it (am expecting a new Dell box in my lab soon). 'Pragmatic R&D' is not a production environment but a viewport of what's coming but it may (will) change when it gets here. Having spent a considerable portion of my career in research labs, I know that it's a gamble as well, as the bottom-line is always there to remind us. When advising/suggesting to clients about the future of an operating platform, I would also like to state what's needed in human terms - training issues are the foremost. Quite a few of my clients run their systems for decades - talk about ROI! A Windows Healthcare laptop application, of which I was the project tech lead, was built about 12 years ago and it's still running! Granted that it has undergone numerous iterations (and a change in compilers from BC++ to VC++). So, it pays to do some 'Pragmatic R&D' upfront - laptops and Win3.x have come a long way!
The other important issue to consider is how are the new technologies being covered by the media. Client managers do read columnists and some columnists do a better job of it than others - some code (that's pragmatic also) but some only show screen dumps of alpha copies and render their myopic *opinions. It's the latter that you have to watch out for, but, then again, they keep me in business.
*Longhorn will be $350, and we'll just pay tribute once again while IBM wonders how Microsoft gets away with it.