Re: Penetration of ASP.NET - Developers continue to use VB6 & ASP

From: Roland Hall (nobody_at_nowhere)
Date: 06/17/04 

Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 21:48:40 -0500

I remember in 1991 when VB came out and how many said you couldn't really do
anything with it and how it had a short life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic#Criticisms_of_Visual_Basic

It's de ja vu all over again! (O:= 

-- 
Roland Hall
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"dotnetforfood" <dotnetforfood@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:64e12d46.0406161543.5cd762d@posting.google.com...
: Joel Spolsky's new article "How Microsoft Lost the API War" at
: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
: describes how .NET has failed, how classic VB6 and ASP continue to be
: preferred by developers, and how Microsoft has lost control of the
: preferred API.
:
: You really should read the article. Here are some excerpts:
:
: <Joel Spolsky>
: "And yet, people aren't really using .NET much.
: Oh sure, some of them are..."
:
: "instead of .NET unifying and simplifying, we have a big 6-way mess,
: with everybody trying to figure out which development strategy to use
: and whether they can afford to port their existing applications to
: .NET.
:
: "No matter how consistent Microsoft is in their marketing message
: ('just use .NET-trust us!'), most of their customers are still using
: C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, and classic ASP, not to mention all the
: other development tools from other companies. And the ones that are
: using .NET are using ASP.NET to develop web applications, which run on
: a Windows server but don't require Windows clients, which is a key
: point I'll talk about more when I talk about the web."
:
: "if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's
: 'official' latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment,
: WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to
: support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely
: stillborn. Hope you haven't invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a
: slide from Microsoft labelled 'How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and
: Avalon?' and asks, 'Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and
: Avalon?' A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer."
:
: "So you've got the Windows API, you've got VB, and now you've got
: .NET, in several language flavors, and don't get too attached to any
: of that, because we're making Avalon, you see, which will only run on
: the newest Microsoft operating system, which nobody will have for a
: loooong time. And personally I still haven't had time to learn .NET
: very deeply, and we haven't ported Fog Creek's two applications from
: classic ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET because there's no return on
: investment for us. None. It's just Fire and Motion as far as I'm
: concerned..."
:
: "the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web
: browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most
: people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted
: to develop almost every significant new application as a web
: application.
:
: Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web
: applications don't require Windows.
:
: It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course
: they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the
: brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in
: their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared;
: they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's
: no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it
: already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich
: client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: 'Microsoft is betting
: the company on the rich client.'"
:
: "Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since
: moved to the web and refuse to move back. Most .NET developers are
: ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft's web server...None of
: this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its
: API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application
: development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.
: </Joel Spolsky>
:
: The only sentence in the article that I disagree with is:
: JS> "ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web
: JS> development for ten years and it's really just a
: JS> generation ahead of everything out there."
:
: Whereas in my eyes ASP.NET is not a "generation ahead", but merely a
: Microsoft rewrite of some well-known Perl modules available years ago
: that:
: - use templates to generate dynamic web pages and
: - encrypt form data.
:
: dotnetforfood
:
: classic ASP rulez!!!

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