{"id":299,"date":"2002-11-02T09:50:51","date_gmt":"2002-11-02T23:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=299"},"modified":"2002-11-02T09:50:51","modified_gmt":"2002-11-02T23:50:51","slug":"net-and-platforms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/2002\/11\/02\/net-and-platforms\/","title":{"rendered":".NET and Platforms"},"content":{"rendered":"

I continue to be encouraged about how .NET<\/a> is developing. Which is nice, because I’m also investing quite a bit of my personal time in learning it. For a while it looked a bit wobbly, but now that the Hailstorm nonsense is receding into the past and MS seems to have slightly reduced its determination to brand every new and existing product with a .NET name, some of the focus is shifting back to the development tools and the platform.<\/p>\n

Its looking likely that I’ll spend a quarter of my career with .NET. After years of struggling with MFC, wndprocs, COM threading models, etc. I’m glad we’ve got a platform thats so rich and powerful.<\/p>\n

Now just give me generic types and deterministic garbage collection, and I’ll be happy. I can live without multiple inheritance, but support for contracts<\/a> in the CLR would be nice.<\/p>\n

Perhaps because the number of “What exactly is<\/em> a web service” articles in the press seems to be going down, I’ve noticed more discussion of running .NET on non-Windows platforms. The Register<\/a> (US) has a fairly speculative article<\/a> about Borland getting interested in Mono<\/a> as a way to target Linux. As far as I know, a few current Borland products ship with experimental, command-line compilers that emit assemblies. They do seem serious<\/a> about the platform, though, and this makes sense. Its got to be easier to target a single API and MSIL, than maintain separate UI designers and backends for each development tool and operating system.<\/p>\n

On a similar theme, the Register<\/a> (UK) is reporting<\/a> that “PalmSource intended the (sic) make the new OS Microsoft .NET compatible, and will likely partner with others to provide a run time for the platform.” I can’t see how Microsoft would licence the compact framework to Palm, given that they’re such an obvious competitor to the Pocket PC, but it should be possible for a strongarm-based Palm to run a port of the Mono runtime<\/a>. Presumably it would be similar to the CF, but I don’t know if the Mono people have plans for this. Their focus (understandably) seems to be IA-based desktop systems running Linux. Another option would be thePortable .NET<\/a> project. As a Palm user, I have mixed feelings about this. I like my Palm because its simple and lightweight – not bogged-down lots of extra features that I don’t need. As a developer, though, having a CLR in the PalmOS would be nice. I hope Palm can hold-out against the PocketPC long enough for this to happen. I’m not hopeful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I continue to be encouraged about how .NET is developing. Which is nice, because I’m also investing quite a bit of my personal time in learning it. For a while it looked a bit wobbly, but now that the Hailstorm nonsense is receding into the past and MS seems to have slightly reduced its determination to brand every … Continue reading “.NET and Platforms”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}