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A History of .NET Runtimes

mattwarren.org

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Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#31

Post by [deleted] »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #20
stupidcar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#32

Post by stupidcar »

jasode wrote: post #29
stupidcar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Microsoft's biggest internal teams turning against .NET during Longhorn created a schism that the company has never resolved. From the fragments of leaks I read about the internal strife, the .NET code had huge performance problems and the C++ team was frustrated that "DevDiv" couldn't solve them. ("DevDiv" is Developer Division that owned NET Framework.) Therefore, they ripped a lot of "managed code" out and redid…

Yeah, that's my understanding as well. But what I wonder is what would have happened if someone at the top had brought the C++ and .NET teams in and made some Jobsian declaration like "this isn't negotiable, the company is switching to .NET. All of your jobs depend on finding a way to make it work." Were those performance problems really insoluble, if all the engineering ability of the company were brought to bear on them? I get the impression that a lot of the C++ old hands were never pleased with .NET to begin with, and were all too happy to chuck it.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#33

Post by nailer »

As someone outside the .net world, is there a wasm version? Can I run a .net language in a web browser and have access to the DOM, or render the UI for a .net app as DOM objects on a web page? That would be super useful.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#34

Post by sureshv »

Few more missed include (Device CLR's were in C, Desktop/Server in C++):

(1) CLR for Sony/Ericsson phone OS and (2) Variant running on linux (in 2001/2002).

I worked on the Compact Framework team back in the day so there's a few more things to point out related to the internal politics of Microsoft at the time.

The devices strategy was a mess even back then due to Alchin/Valentine/Ballmers love of Windows desktop 'everywhere'. Windows and Office dominated the company so things like .Net were always going to be secondary to that.

The origins of the CLR can be found in the purchase of Colusa in 1996 which had the Omni VM for running C++ in a sandbox. The original C# language was called cool and came from that project.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#35

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

nailer wrote: post #33

As someone outside the .net world, is there a wasm version? Can I run a .net language in a web browser and have access to the DOM, or render the UI for a .net app as DOM objects on a web page? That would be super useful.

Yes, the WASM version is here: https://blazor.net/ It's an early preview

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#36

Post by codenesium »

nailer wrote: post #33

As someone outside the .net world, is there a wasm version? Can I run a .net language in a web browser and have access to the DOM, or render the UI for a .net app as DOM objects on a web page? That would be super useful.

Blazor is coming. It's not GA yet.

https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#37

Post by WorldMaker »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
stupidcar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To further tangent: I don't think the last Office related announcement says anything about UWP that people think it does.

From my understanding, the Office apps that were killed were supposedly forked from the web apps and actually ran as UWP HTML/JS.

Meanwhile, Office has also announced plans to move forward with more UWP XAML Islands to integrate more Fluent Design in the UX starting soon after the Windows October release, and part of why the Office 2019 LTS was shipped where it was and arguably why Office 365 pushed to align to only support latest Windows releases so they could move forward on Fluent Design dogfooding.

They did sunset the non-UWP OneNote with this LTS release, and the UWP XAML app is supposed to be the only Windows version of OneNote moving forward.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#38

Post by WorldMaker »

bunderbunder wrote: post #27
gambler wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>.NET is still very popular but it definitely did not fulfill the more ambitious dreams that Bill Gates had for it. There is still time. It just recently got open-sourced, got a compiler written in itself and got a run-time unbundled form all the legacy crap. Those things held C#/.NET back. I feel this is a good time to adopt it for people who want to have reasonable performance, static typing and a mix of OOP/functi…

Part of me, though, worries that the ship has sailed. For a while .NET was probably completely fine from Microsoft's perspective, because the platform was (AFAICT) dominant in their target market of enterprise apps. Then big data became a thing, and basically the entire core ecosystem was written in Java. I think it's becoming a bit of a wedge issue - Java has everything that .NET has, but .NET does not have its own…

You can do "big data" entirely in .NET.

You can use Hadoop "Streaming" with .NET easily enough and still take advantage of the "Hadoop ecosystem".

Orleans is not exactly Hadoop, but it's close enough that conversions between are relatively straight-forward, and Orleans is useful for a number of other work distribution patterns beyond map/reduce.

Beyond that, the map/reduce pattern is one of the easiest abstractions to reimplement yourself from scratch if you get the itch. I believe Hadoop is relatively over-rated from that standpoint, and arguably IMO another case of Java developers over-ceremonializing what should be a simple, lovely abstraction/design pattern into a weird spaghetti mess of configuration and ritual.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#39

Post by iainmerrick »

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…

It does seem like all these .NET projects are reactions to rival technologies. C# is a Java clone, C# generics are an (arguably improved) Java generics clone, .NET Micro is J2ME, Silverlight is Flash, etc.

What are some examples of where C# / .NET paved the way and others followed? Maybe popularizing async/await?

I’m definitely not claiming MS as a whole is always a follower. It seems like Direct3D led the way for the whole industry, for example.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#40

Post by WorldMaker »

stupidcar wrote: post #32
jasode wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Microsoft's biggest internal teams turning against .NET during Longhorn created a schism that the company has never resolved. From the fragments of leaks I read about the internal strife, the .NET code had huge performance problems and the C++ team was frustrated that "DevDiv" couldn't solve them. ("DevDiv" is Developer Division that owned NET Framework.) Therefore, they ripped a lot of "managed code" out and redid…

Yeah, that's my understanding as well. But what I wonder is what would have happened if someone at the top had brought the C++ and .NET teams in and made some Jobsian declaration like "this isn't negotiable, the company is switching to .NET. All of your jobs depend on finding a way to make it work." Were those performance problems really insoluble, if all the engineering ability of the company were brought to bear on…

Right, it certainly sounded from the outside that a lot of the Longhorn performance issues were various sorts of sandbagging by one side or the other. There's an interesting leadership question there too if some of the worst sandbagging was intentional or just ADHD-style distractions due to a lack of a singular, focused vision for the product. (The biggest example being letting so much of the WinFS team get sucked into the never-ending "semantic web" rabbit hole of trying to "schematize the world"; it's hard to focus on performance when you are busy trying to catalog all the different ways that people store data.)
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