.NET Question

Language for it?

[madcat]

So, when .net is available and it becomes widespread- does that mean that browsers will no longer be useful on that particular system? If so, what languages are people learning to prepare for the shift?

That may sound thick but I'm clueless at the momemt;)

Thanks

[Lisa]

How would a browser become no longer useful? What feature are you talking about? I don't think the only web world will change because of one programming platform.

[andreasfriedrich]

Browsers display HTML documents, some display XML documents as well. .NET is a lot of things but not something that will compete with browsers to display HTML/XML documents on the userīs desktop.

Andreas

[duckhunter]

I'm using it pretty actively and can say it's better than they said it was (if that's possible). Finally, inheritance for VB.

.NET actually increases the reliability on http communication and browsing by exposing the native http protocol methods to managed code.

What you may have been reading about could be in relation to underlying services now available in .NET like XML services. You can write a downloadable EXE (Trusted through the browser) that opens windows forms and controls like a runtime application that is making calls to the webserver in the background using http and/or SOAP.

[madcat]

You said it better than I could duckhunter- Will this impact certain programming languages used today for Web development? Or just add a new environment like mentioned above-

Or is it too early to tell / or rubbish?

Thanks nonetheless - That gives me a great starting point to understand what's happening.

M

[duckhunter]

A little early to tell if the SOAP thing is going to be accepted which could add some data hookins to existing languages. However, I believe this is MSFT catching up to some of the competition. Most scripting languages could walk circles around the old version but I think the crew in Redmond have come out with something that is worth having.

For the Microsoft programmer there are indeed many, many changes like C++ and C# code behind for ASP pages. This opens up the webform world to the C programmers that only had java to choose from before. Now a webpage can call a C# function in the webpage. Inheritance for VB programmers, need I say more? This will take some getting use to for some people and will probably create some poorly written code over the next 12 months ;)

XML is certainly gaining momentum as a commonly accepeted format for transmitting data. It's nice to work with but slow. XML is string manipulation and that's slow. However, using this across the net is perfect. It stores recordset type data very well and doesn't care what the platform is so it's probably here to stay in some form for a while. You can stuff an XML blob into an array of .NET objects like datagrids, recordsets, datareaders and the list goes on.

The changes are really to long to list. You just gotta pick a topic, download some sample code and pick it apart. Now that I've spent a few months with it, I'm starting to find all kinda cool stuff tucked away. Supposedly, there are over 64,000 methods you can call from the base classes provided by MSFT.

I'm sure it will get beat up by the naysayers but they have certainly given the developer more to work with.