Conclusion

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[oR]

The .NET initiative is a big step for Microsoft. By providing a new foundation for building Windows applications, the company is all but forcing developers to begin climbing a long learning curve. Yet the benefits brought by Web services, the .NET Framework, .NET My Services, and the other aspects of .NET are significant. The new development environment is much more modern, and it provides many more services. Once developers have internalized at least the core .NET technologies, their productivity should improve significantly. And with the built-in support for Web services, whole new classes of applications can be created. Ultimately, .NET is likely to be another step in the ladder toward the ultimate goal: producing the best possible software in the least amount of time.

.NET provides a better, more powerful environment for developers

The Pain of Change

During a .NET seminar I gave in Moscow, one of the participants raised his hand with a worried expression. I'm an experienced Windows DNA developer, he said. If I learn this .NET stuff, can you promise me that this is the last new technology Microsoft will ever make me learn?

I couldn't, of course. I could promise him, however, that he was in the wrong profession. Even if my worried interlocutor sticks with Microsoft for the rest of his career, it's all but certain that new technologies that he'll need to get his mind around will appear. As long as the hardware we depend on keeps getting faster, smaller, and cheaper, new software technologies will continue to exploit those advances.

Fortunately, changes as large as .NET aren't common. Bringing out new languages, a large new library, and significant revisions to other core technologies all at once is almost too much to swallow. Yet bringing out those same changes piecemeal would likely have been worse, if only because the integration among them would certainly have suffered. The bottom line is simple: If you don't like change, get out of the software business.

The price of more power is accepting change

The downside of all of this power is that it comes at the price of substantial change. Windows developers must learn many new language features (and in the case of C#, perhaps even an entirely new language), at least parts of a large new standard li brary, and various new concepts, such as Web services. Even scarier for some developers, a large chunk of their existing knowledge is no longer useful. For example, COM isn't used in the .NET Framework, except for interoperability with existing code, and so the detailed COM knowledge that many Microsoft-oriented software professionals have painfully acquired isn't needed to build Framework-based applications. With the introduction of the .NET Framework's Windows Forms, knowing how to use existing GUI technologies is much less valuable. Even data access is substantially different, with ADO replaced by ADO.NET. There's no use complaining, however. The only real choice for developers who wish to continue working in this environment is to devote the time required to come to grips with .NET. It's the future of application development on Windows.

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