.NET Class Notes

first day of the seminar

2/19/02; 10:35:13 am by ddb

Seems it's mostly a matter of definitions right now -- classes become blueprints, projects become assemblies, much talk about how there are many different languages that support .net right now.

The issue of multi-language support is a tricky one. You can support the syntax of a language, but a language is more than it's syntax. I could port UserTalk to some other platform, but without the verbs provided by the environment, there would be an entirely different flavor.

I know that Python was one of the first non-Microsoft languages that supports .net, but I wonder about the feel of python.net. You would be using a completely different set of classes, and that's the part that makes the difference when learning a language. You can pick up the syntax in 5 minutes, but it takes a while to learn the support classes.

Another way to look at it is that once you've learned .net, you only have to master the syntax of any language that supports .net, rather than some foreign class library.

I think I'll try that thought on for a while.

2/19/02; 1:01:22 pm by ddb

Okay, it feels like a good idea as long as I try to ignore the fact that it's a technical argument with a strong marketing undertone.

If it was altruistic, it would be fine. If the CLR had the open contributions of more than one company, it would make sense.

But it's Microsoft, and you can't ignore the fact that adopting .net allows Microsoft to control what you can and can't do with the platform. At least it controls what you can and can't do easily.

2/19/02; 1:36:52 pm by ddb

The real problem is that the instructors have a VB focus, and none of us are VB programmers. try/catch is not new for us, and everything being objects is not a new way of thinking.

So now they're talking about C#, and they are pretty much just describing a Microsoft-flavored Java. But we knew that already.

2/19/02; 2:10:38 pm by ddb

quote for the day: 'Designing for failure-reduced fragility'

2/19/02; 3:45:45 pm by ddb

There's a lot of really cool forms processing stuff, as well as some decent database connectivity objects.

I wish I'd had some of the web forms tools that .net has.

VS.net also makes cutting and pasting snippets of code pretty auotmatic -- you can select a bit of code, drag it to a palette, and then drag that code from the palette to wherever you wish to propagate your bugs. Looked upon cynically, they've made it very easy to propagte bugs and/or anacronistic code thorughout your project.

I'm wondering if I should come up with a snippets tool for the Python IDE.

The day is actually going fairly quickly, surprisingly enough.

2/19/02; 4:05:47 pm by ddb

A statistic that keeps getting mentioned is that there are over 65,000 classes (blueprints) in the base system. I wonder how that compares to the J2EE specification plus the base JDK. People complain about API bloat in Java -- in fact it seems that every week brings a new acronym or capability, with a certification course to go along with it. On first blush, it seems that Microsoft is just avoiding the gradual rollout of all the API's and just doing it all at once.

Instead of working to become bloated, let's bloat right off the bat. ";->"

Of course, having an extensive class library is a good thing.

2/19/02; 4:10:04 pm by ddb

It would have been nice if they had tailored the class to the audience a little bit -- it's very VB focused, and as far as I know, there is only 1 B programmer in the audience. The rest of us are Smalltalk and Java programmers, and have no need for the OO primer that they are spending a large amount of time with.

"It's all OO now!"is the refrain.

Side note -- I really like outliners. Some people seem to prefer word processors, some take notes in Excel. I know people that pretty much LIVE in Excel. For some reason, outliners just work for me.

second (and final) of the seminar

2/20/02; 8:32:15 am by ddb

I wish I'd saved a list of SOAP implementations from the web. I would be more prepard to ask about SOAP interop if I had.

They've added keywords to many labnguages to bind UI events to handler code. I'm not sure that then 'handles' stuff is just for UI events, it would be interested if it was generalized like JavaBeans events have been. So far, when they describe objects, they use the 'properties, methods and events' descriptiong that Java uses to defin a Bean, so it may be a more general event handling system. Still no view as o how these events are generated, but that doesn't mean that it desn't exist.

Still, there is a lot of time spent explaining the OO aspects of the new VB to an audience of mostly OO programmers.

2/20/02; 10:05:39 am by ddb

Okay, so I asked them about compatibility with other SOAP toolkits, and the answer is that they are only testing against their own stuff. As usual, making things work together is a task for another company. Microsoft is only concerned with compatibility with Microsoft.