4 ms·

The .NET Framework is big. Really, really big.

17 points by iamelgringo 19y ago

henning 19y ago
The books are big, too. Scott Hanselman's latest ASP.NET book is 1700 pages.
hernan7 19y ago
In fairness, the standard Java library, the Unix /usr/bin and Common Lisp are not for the faint of heart either.
- lst 19y ago
  As you mention Common Lisp: The implementation I'm using is really small (and contains every single symbol of the CL specs). And: as I'm doing real-world apps in CL, I'm often very happy with some (little) more complexity to gain the required performance needed. Really, there is no real waste in Common Lisp, although this seems not to be a very popular opinion nowadays...
  - harshavr 19y ago
    which implementation is this?
    - lst 19y ago
      ECL. From a pure Lisp perspective, it's maybe not the really very best choice, but from an OS viewpoint, it's simply the most convenient for my tasks (Apple, Windows, Linux, free, really fast inline C FFI). Compressed its size can be as small as 1(!) MB on some OS.
  - pchristensen 19y ago
    After spending 5 years in nothing but .Net, the CL libraries seem rather sleek and streamlined to me! I was always a little confused when people complained about the bloat in CL.
- lastone 19y ago
  .Net is alot better. Its the industry standard.
giardini 19y ago
Microsoft wants to keep developers very busy learning _their_ terminology and development tools so that there is no time to learn any other: e.g., W3C terminology, Apache, PHP or cherry.py. What better way than to rename everything that already exists in W3C and add even more new terminology from the Microsoft's tools. Learning to use Microsoft's tools with any degree of skill means that you simply won't have time or memory to learn much else. Most developers won't have sufficient time to learn even learn Microsoft's tools! The result: a brain full of cryptic terminology that no one understands except another unfortunate who made the same mistake. And when Microsoft releases the "next generation", everything you know will instantly be labelled as obsolete, inefficient and bug-ridden by Microsoft. Not exactly a "career path." Any developer considering studying .NET (or any other technology) should ask himself: In the long run what is the most profitable action that I can do next? I venture that the answer is rarely "learn .NET". Even if the boss just ordered you to learn .NET, the answer to the above question is more likely "Send out my resume."
- maximilian 19y ago
  But its not that bad. You just use it and when you run into a problem you look it up. Thats what API docs are for. The same holds for java. Most programmers aren't going to be using the whole library, just a little of it. And autocomplete in visual studio does a lot of that thinking for you. You'll use a hundred different methods without thinking about it quicker than you'll know. I threw together a program that read and wrote from the serial port and did a bunch of stuff in like 1 day. Between googling for examples and a tiny bit of help from a friend who programs c# it was very straightforward.
- brentr 19y ago
  This is the exact reason why I don't use C# anymore.
- nkohari 19y ago
  Nothing personal, but this is the biggest load of crap I've read for awhile. It's just complete and total FUD. Personal preferences aside, .NET is no different than any Java, Ruby/Rails, or any other programming stack. Programmers typically gravitate towards one stack or the other based on experience. Microsoft doesn't have any sort of "evil plan" to fill your mind with .NET. As for choosing a career path, while .NET isn't the trendiest stack, there are definitely plenty of jobs to be had, just like with Java. It's true that if you're interested in working for a startup, you might want to learn Python or Ruby, but if you're interested in job security (which is what you're talking about), you better stick with the "enterprisey" stacks like .NET or Java. I'm a .NET developer, but I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft. Still, I can't stand it when people claim that everything Microsoft does is some sort of evil plan. No one is claiming that 37signals is trying to take over the world because they promote the use of Rails.
azsromej 19y ago
I wonder successive releases make the Mono team cringe. Then again, despite not supporting every new type from every namespace, you can write really rich applications in Mono. There's always a core set of types that tend to dominate your application.
simplegeek 19y ago
I wonder why on earth someone at Microsoft don't work on taking stuff away from .NET platform. If someone at the company is already doing it I would really love to know after-effects but it seems otherwise. On a side note, Microsoft also seems to be disconnected from their Gold partners & this is horrible. I know a Gold Partner. They were rolling out their own MVC framework & by the time they finished developing it Microsoft announced their MVC framework :)
- johns 19y ago
  Silverlight 2 contains a subset of the entire framework so we'll see how popular that is as Silverlight grows.

17 points by iamelgringo 19y ago

henning 19y ago

The books are big, too. Scott Hanselman's latest ASP.NET book is 1700 pages.

hernan7 19y ago

In fairness, the standard Java library, the Unix /usr/bin and Common Lisp are not for the faint of heart either.

lst 19y ago
As you mention Common Lisp: The implementation I'm using is really small (and contains every single symbol of the CL specs). And: as I'm doing real-world apps in CL, I'm often very happy with some (little) more complexity to gain the required performance needed. Really, there is no real waste in Common Lisp, although this seems not to be a very popular opinion nowadays...
- harshavr 19y ago
  which implementation is this?
  - lst 19y ago
    ECL. From a pure Lisp perspective, it's maybe not the really very best choice, but from an OS viewpoint, it's simply the most convenient for my tasks (Apple, Windows, Linux, free, really fast inline C FFI). Compressed its size can be as small as 1(!) MB on some OS.
- pchristensen 19y ago
  After spending 5 years in nothing but .Net, the CL libraries seem rather sleek and streamlined to me! I was always a little confused when people complained about the bloat in CL.
lastone 19y ago
.Net is alot better. Its the industry standard.

giardini 19y ago

Microsoft wants to keep developers very busy learning _their_ terminology and development tools so that there is no time to learn any other: e.g., W3C terminology, Apache, PHP or cherry.py. What better way than to rename everything that already exists in W3C and add even more new terminology from the Microsoft's tools. Learning to use Microsoft's tools with any degree of skill means that you simply won't have time or memory to learn much else. Most developers won't have sufficient time to learn even learn Microsoft's tools! The result: a brain full of cryptic terminology that no one understands except another unfortunate who made the same mistake. And when Microsoft releases the "next generation", everything you know will instantly be labelled as obsolete, inefficient and bug-ridden by Microsoft. Not exactly a "career path." Any developer considering studying .NET (or any other technology) should ask himself: In the long run what is the most profitable action that I can do next? I venture that the answer is rarely "learn .NET". Even if the boss just ordered you to learn .NET, the answer to the above question is more likely "Send out my resume."

maximilian 19y ago
But its not that bad. You just use it and when you run into a problem you look it up. Thats what API docs are for. The same holds for java. Most programmers aren't going to be using the whole library, just a little of it. And autocomplete in visual studio does a lot of that thinking for you. You'll use a hundred different methods without thinking about it quicker than you'll know. I threw together a program that read and wrote from the serial port and did a bunch of stuff in like 1 day. Between googling for examples and a tiny bit of help from a friend who programs c# it was very straightforward.
brentr 19y ago
This is the exact reason why I don't use C# anymore.
nkohari 19y ago
Nothing personal, but this is the biggest load of crap I've read for awhile. It's just complete and total FUD. Personal preferences aside, .NET is no different than any Java, Ruby/Rails, or any other programming stack. Programmers typically gravitate towards one stack or the other based on experience. Microsoft doesn't have any sort of "evil plan" to fill your mind with .NET. As for choosing a career path, while .NET isn't the trendiest stack, there are definitely plenty of jobs to be had, just like with Java. It's true that if you're interested in working for a startup, you might want to learn Python or Ruby, but if you're interested in job security (which is what you're talking about), you better stick with the "enterprisey" stacks like .NET or Java. I'm a .NET developer, but I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft. Still, I can't stand it when people claim that everything Microsoft does is some sort of evil plan. No one is claiming that 37signals is trying to take over the world because they promote the use of Rails.

azsromej 19y ago

I wonder successive releases make the Mono team cringe. Then again, despite not supporting every new type from every namespace, you can write really rich applications in Mono. There's always a core set of types that tend to dominate your application.

simplegeek 19y ago

I wonder why on earth someone at Microsoft don't work on taking stuff away from .NET platform. If someone at the company is already doing it I would really love to know after-effects but it seems otherwise. On a side note, Microsoft also seems to be disconnected from their Gold partners & this is horrible. I know a Gold Partner. They were rolling out their own MVC framework & by the time they finished developing it Microsoft announced their MVC framework :)

johns 19y ago
Silverlight 2 contains a subset of the entire framework so we'll see how popular that is as Silverlight grows.