The Pain of Change During a .NET seminar I gave in Moscow a few years ago, one of the participants raised his hand with a concerned 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 Microsoft technology I'll ever have to learn?" I couldn't, of course. What I could promise him was that he was in the wrong profession. Even if my worried questioner sticks with the Microsoft platform for the rest of his career, it's all but certain that new technologies will appear that he'll need to understand. As long as the hardware we depend on keeps getting better, and as long as creative people work in this field, new software technologies will continue to appear. 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, as Microsoft did with .NET, was 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. To make progress, vendors are sometimes forced to make their customers swallow a large amount of change all at once. The .NET environment is now a standard part of the software world. Still, don't think it's the last word in software technologyit's not. If you don't like change, get out of the software business. |
