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5 Comments

Mark Finkle (February 12, 2005 @ 6:41 pm)

When you say “productivity gains”, what are you comparing too? MFC? or some other C++ based Windows framework? If so, then I agree. It’s a night and day difference.

But when comparing against other tools, like Delphi or VB, the gains are much smaller. Especially when factoring in the learning curve.

Also, commercial or shrink wrap ISV’s (its what I do) are much slower to convert mature, shipping applications to new frameworks for little or no value add to their end customers.

Internal corporate IT is another story. They rewrite software much more frequently. They also build many more small, temporary solutions. I see .NET adoption happening faster in those situations.

My 2 cents.

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Jeff Atwood (February 12, 2005 @ 8:52 pm)

You are referring to a blog entry on *COMPACT FRAMEWORK* .NET. mobile devices have a smaller footprint and tighter hardware requirements. It’s probably the same reason you don’t see a lot of people writing Java apps for mobile devices.

There’s more incentive to be native on those platforms, I think, than on the desktop/laptop.

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Steve (February 12, 2005 @ 8:58 pm)

I know I was linking to a reference to the Compact Framework, but, what I said was “the same thing rings somewhat true for the full-blown .NET Framework”. I know lots of guys writing desktop Win32 apps that refuse to touch .NET.

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David Brabant (February 13, 2005 @ 6:26 am)

I have been in the (corporate) software development business for more than 15 years, and I don’t remember starting a project from scratch. Never ever. That’s one thing people at Microsoft seems to forget too often. The application on which I’m currently working started as a research project 15 years ago. It is now one of the most successful electronic patient record in Scandinavia. The team maintaining it is small: about 6/7 developers. That team has not only to maintain and support the application for more than 30 hospitals, create new functionality, and so on. Our customers DON’T CARE about the technology we use as long as they get what they are asking for. I’m a geek. I love technology for the sake of technology. That’s damn fun. But one thing I can tell you is that 99.99% of the nurses and doctors I’ve met don’t give a damn s**t about my passion for new platforms, tools and languages. We’d really like to migrate the application and use .NET (we are in the process of converting right now) because we expect gains in productivity and maintenance. But in the priority order, it comes way after everything else: support, maintenance, implementing new features without rewriting the existing 1.600.000 lines of code…

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Daniël Haveman (February 14, 2005 @ 12:12 am)

We make multimedia software. Even though .NET is pretty good at that, we’re still dealing with people running our CD’s on Win95/98 with no plugin’s no codecs and definately no .NET ; yet our software is expected to run on everything. So until Microsoft makes some magic .NET wrapper that automatically takes all dependancies from an application and embeds it in a runner which works on any Windows platform it’s going to be a long while until we adopt. I’d like to use the new stuff, but considering people are still using W98 (which is now 7 years old) it might take another 5 or so before we even consider. Sad but true…

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