Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Dot Net has arrived (finally) I attended the local MS .Net Developer Group's meeting this evening. There was a rejuvenated interest in Microsoft's new technologies (there were no meetings over the summer, perhaps). On the surface, there is an inclination towards Visual Basic.Net as a primary development language albeit C# is the lingua franca of the .Net framework. The CLR layer should make the language choice irrelevent but C# has its place in building components with more type-safety and its extensions to object-oriented abstractions. It would be interesting to see the preferences of the Groove developer community - perhaps a developer survey is due. Microsoft plans to pour $3bn into MS Office suite over the next three years. With features like Web Services, collaboration and application integration. Groove's tighter integration with the MS Office suite is sure to pay dividends. On the topic of .Net - Microsoft and H-P have announced a major alliance. In which Microsoft will train 8,000 H-P personnel in selling and deploying .Net. I think, .Net will garner more revenues for H-P than the Compaq's assets. Remember Compaq's acquisition of DEC ? I believe in Schumpeter's Creative Destruction theory so I'll let the market decide for itself. H-P has some brilliant engineers - Tapadiya's book on .Net Programming is a gold-mine for the .Net developer. Thank you for Building a better Groove on .Net (Ray Ozzie's interview with eWeek). 9:39:05 PM