Antony wrote:Because it is not complicated, unlike C or Java, to get started.
true, but it's quite expensive - visual studio express and borland turbos are free and if you really must use basic to learn programming you can do so for nothing, and like i said, the interface in vs and the borland products are much more productive and have had those 'new' features for several years in some cases.
Don_HH2K wrote:The language itself may be a mess, but if you're targeting the .NET Framework it all compiles down to the exact same thing whether you're programming in VB, C/C++/C#, J#, and so on. Though if you want to be cross-operating-system about it, the .NET Framework itself is a mess.
.net is a bit of an anomaly really. i get the feeling that microsoft aren't really behind it 100%, even though when compared to mfc it's a million times better.
i checked some of the new applications which come with vista (purble place, the sidebar, windows photo gallery, windows calender and windows mail) and none of them are written in a .net language. i can understand why office hasn't been ported over, but it seems odd that entirely new applications bundled with the new os, with the new version of the .net framework don't actually showcase the framework.
the framework itself suffers from a couple of flaws, firstly, it's incomplete. massively incomplete. to do system level stuff you need to perform unmanaged win32 calls, which, utterly negates any benefit of using the framework (such as being platform agnostic)
also, and more crucially, i believe the main reason why microsoft haven't adopted it in any real sense is that it is much easier to reverse engineer and although it can be obfuscated the actual logic and algorithms used can be seen in source form.
the cross-platform element of the framework is also interesting in so far is that is a community effort which is on some pretty dodgy legal ground.
the pc industry is in a flux at the moment. the limits of 32bit architecture are being reached and software vendors are going to need to start porting their apps to 64bit very soon, .net is a great way to ensure that no matter what processor architecture you have, the application will just work. if .net for desktop applications doesn't catch on then i feel it probably never will in any serious way.
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