Some thoughts on Richard Grimes article on .NET

I personally find the article by Richard Grimes on the state of .NET technologies very informative. It is comical to note some of the rants against him in the post and in the comments at https://weblogs.asp.net/danielfe/archive/2005/02/22/378343.aspx

Some of it are plain hilarious like:

And really, let’s face it, every programming language has a problem. Yes, .Net isn’t the best, compared to the others, but it is pretty good, as in easy application development. Still, it’s coming up.
For me, I hate Java, and that’s my opinion. Unfortunately, it has a lot of technical advantage compared to .Net, so I MUST use it. I dreadful fate.

Some comments on his encrypting the email, and so he not a believable guy! It however never occured to him when he was writing those incredible articles and book on .NET technologies.

I really pity these guys.

Anyway instead of just responding viciously to anyone who has anything bad to say about .NET/VB (MS group of products), why not take the suggestions positively and try to improve?

My experiences with MS products have been:
1. They are easy upfront
2. When you want to develop solid enterprise products with them they are a royal pain to develop, to maintain
3. You are continuously on a forced upgrade path
4. Developing never becomes simpler over time
5. Horrible support! Their main concern is to ensure they get the money without even being able to answer whether the question is at all answerable by them!

In contrast my experiences with Java (from late 1995) have been:
1. Very simple to develop
2. Very simple to reuse, to develop large scale products and maintain
3. Easy to debug
4. Easy to distribute to wide spectrum of users including those on Mac and Linux

I have tried both sides (starting from Basic, VB, C#, .NET, and now sticking with Java technologies) and I prefer Java technologies any day.

At the core as a programmer I look for what makes my life easier, makes better products easily and maintainably. I am not saying it is not possible with MS technologies. It is definitely possible either way to develop. So examples of software in managed code is meaningless. The point is that it is comparatively much much harder. And you can only know it when you have been at both camps.