A History of .NET Runtimes • Hacker News Board

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#11

Post by Someguywhatever » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #8

jasode wrote: post #7

I think the history of the internal politics at Microsoft in regards to .NET and also the external industry trends is fascinating. The common thinking is that C# & .NET was a ripoff of Sun Java because of the "write once run anywhere" threat. That's sort of true but missing some nuance. I'm not a MS insider but here's my understanding of what happened. We have to separate the C# language from the CLR runtime. In the…

Microsoft developed .NET (internal codename COOL) to get back at Sun for suing them over Java compliance. Microsoft wanted to do embrace-extend-extinguish with the Java runtime and Sun would have none of it, so Microsoft took their ball and were like "Fine! We'll develop our OWN managed runtime and it'll be more better-er than yours is! Neener neener!" And Bill certainly did program in low level assembly. The last Mi…

I think it is better-er than Java and the JVM and they have stewarded their language much better than Java, and now Java borrows heavily from C#. I think they will win in the long run if they haven't "won" already.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#12

Post by Boulth » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

teh_klev wrote: post #6

mariusmg wrote: post #5

Does anyone remember Rotor ? That thing (codeveloped with Corel) was pretty interesting. Too bad about the look but don't touch license model.

Yes...and I also had Ted Neward's book "Shared Source CLI Essentials" to go along with it: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shared-Source-Essentials-David-Stut... The problem with Rotor was that they ripped out of all the good bits and replaced with not so good things, for example they replaced the garbage collector with a naive implementation. That said I still learned quite a lot from studying and playing around with it wa…

I've also read that book, it was excellent!

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#13

Post by nicoburns » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 2:44 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #7

I think the history of the internal politics at Microsoft in regards to .NET and also the external industry trends is fascinating. The common thinking is that C# & .NET was a ripoff of Sun Java because of the "write once run anywhere" threat. That's sort of true but missing some nuance. I'm not a MS insider but here's my understanding of what happened. We have to separate the C# language from the CLR runtime. In the…

IMO .NET being closed source until recently was also a big factor in it's lack of world dominance. Why choose a proprietary language when there are several comparable opwn ones to choose from.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#14

Post by jorgeleo » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #7

I think the history of the internal politics at Microsoft in regards to .NET and also the external industry trends is fascinating. The common thinking is that C# & .NET was a ripoff of Sun Java because of the "write once run anywhere" threat. That's sort of true but missing some nuance. I'm not a MS insider but here's my understanding of what happened. We have to separate the C# language from the CLR runtime. In the…

"Two major forces outside of Microsoft's control curtailed .NET's planned world dominance: (1) the rise of Javascript in the browser which negated .NET Silverlight, and also Java applets and Flash. (2) the rise of Apple iOS and Android."

I agree with those 2 forces:

1) the raise of javascript: Now is starting to develop an answer to this in Blazor (https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor)

2) iOS and Android: both are here to stay, so Xamarin is the answer. I have been using Xamarin for iOS and all though still lack of some maturity, in its actual form is very viable.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#15

Post by thrower123 » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #7

I think the history of the internal politics at Microsoft in regards to .NET and also the external industry trends is fascinating. The common thinking is that C# & .NET was a ripoff of Sun Java because of the "write once run anywhere" threat. That's sort of true but missing some nuance. I'm not a MS insider but here's my understanding of what happened. We have to separate the C# language from the CLR runtime. In the…

My hypotheses is that C# would never have become as popular as it became if Java hadn't had the long stall between 1.6 and 7[1]. That long, long pause provided a window, and under the stewardship of the vampires at Oracle there is not the kind of direction to push things forward that C# has had.

[1] Four and a half years! Nowadays it seems like Angular and React are pushing major versions every four and a half minutes.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#16

Post by stupidcar » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #9

jasode wrote: post #7

I think the history of the internal politics at Microsoft in regards to .NET and also the external industry trends is fascinating. The common thinking is that C# & .NET was a ripoff of Sun Java because of the "write once run anywhere" threat. That's sort of true but missing some nuance. I'm not a MS insider but here's my understanding of what happened. We have to separate the C# language from the CLR runtime. In the…

The whole Longhorn/Vista debacle, with .NET components being rewritten in COM for Vista, followed up by the increasing the COM usage in Windows 7 and then bringing up WinRT as .NET replacement under Synofsky's leadership is another example of those political internal wars.

Yeah, I think this was a far bigger contributor to the failure of .NET to achieve dominance. Silverlight was only ever a slightly weird sideline intended to compete with Flash, which became DOA the moment the iPhone launched and Jobs killed Flash overnight by saying the iPhone would never support it.

Microsoft's biggest internal teams turning against .NET during Longhorn created a schism that the company has never resolved. I often wonder what might have happened if they'd had the requisite leadership to force the change through organisation-wide, and MS had spent the last 15 years with a single, rational dev story.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#17

Post by sebazzz » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #3

alexvoda wrote: post #2

Is the .Net environment in SQL Server since version 2005 considered a different runtime?

No, SQL Server just uses the normal .NET Framework to execute managed code which is also implied by the name of the feature, Common Language Runtime (CLR) Integration. Well, maybe one could also read this as integrating - in the sense of implementing - a CLR into SQL Server.

Yes, SQL Server hosts the .NET framework runtime but with added security configuration. There are also other applications hosting the framework (like IIS), and you can actually host the framework yourself (both the full and core framework). I was actually playing with the idea of hosting .NET addons in Kodi but it turns out it is too much work for a single developer as a hobby project.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#18

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #16

pjmlp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole Longhorn/Vista debacle, with .NET components being rewritten in COM for Vista, followed up by the increasing the COM usage in Windows 7 and then bringing up WinRT as .NET replacement under Synofsky's leadership is another example of those political internal wars.

Yeah, I think this was a far bigger contributor to the failure of .NET to achieve dominance. Silverlight was only ever a slightly weird sideline intended to compete with Flash, which became DOA the moment the iPhone launched and Jobs killed Flash overnight by saying the iPhone would never support it. Microsoft's biggest internal teams turning against .NET during Longhorn created a schism that the company has never re…

Yep, they were forced to sort out the mess introduced with WinRT, UAP, UWP, by making UWP .NET Standard 2.0 compliant, and now making Forms, WPF and EF 6 runnable on top of .NET Core 3.0.

However given the last Office related announcements, it appears that the reorganization did little to sort out those political issues.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#19

Post by wildmusings » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 3:07 PM UTC

Something that makes following Microsoft tech different for engineers, in my opinion, is that naming has historically been driven by marketing/sales, not engineering. There is not a 1-1 mapping between the branded/advertised functionality and the technical components responsible for it. This makes sense when your audience is purchasers at a company. They care about what features/scenarios are supported, not how they are implemented (sorting through that is, at most, the job of someone lower on the totem pole).

Engineers, on the other hand, want to know how the system works. Even when it shouldn’t matter to us, we can’t help but think in terms of the actual mechanisms driving the system’s behavior. We don’t like black boxes, because we experience daily the leakiness of all abstractions. And for an engineer targeting Windows as a platform, the technical details obviously do matter.

I think this difference is especially jarring to developers used to the nix world, where everything is much more developer-oriented. I would bet that the early success of Microsoft products against Unix is partially due to this difference in focus. Ideally, you communicate differently with both groups, but in reality you have to make trade offs. It would just create more confusion if there was one set of names/brands for end-consumers and another totally different set for developers.

(Another difference is that Windows has historically been one big project, so features do in fact span technical components, which due to being under single management, are less regimented to begin with.)

The web has definitely changed things by making operating systems less important. At least the perceived importance of marketing to developers has increased. I think Microsoft has done a good job adapting to this change lately.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#20

Post by ASalazarMX » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 3:08 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #16

pjmlp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole Longhorn/Vista debacle, with .NET components being rewritten in COM for Vista, followed up by the increasing the COM usage in Windows 7 and then bringing up WinRT as .NET replacement under Synofsky's leadership is another example of those political internal wars.

Yeah, I think this was a far bigger contributor to the failure of .NET to achieve dominance. Silverlight was only ever a slightly weird sideline intended to compete with Flash, which became DOA the moment the iPhone launched and Jobs killed Flash overnight by saying the iPhone would never support it. Microsoft's biggest internal teams turning against .NET during Longhorn created a schism that the company has never re…

> Jobs killed Flash overnight by saying the iPhone would never support it.

I think it was a forced choice. Even if Flash had been supported, most flash sites and games would not have worked well on a phone.