What is Right About .NET?

Recently, on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to, a member starting bashing .NET. A bit curious as to why there was this strong hatred of .NET, I posed a simple question:

What is wrong with .NET?

The answer I got back somewhat suprised me:

I guess the standard reply is, what is right about .NET?  .NET was invented so that M$ could provide software as a service. You would end up with a minimal OS on the disk, and no applications. When you turned your computer on, it would download whatever applications you needed, or did so on demand; if your subscription was paid up.

That was the PR on .NET when it first came out, to my best recollection.

Your PC was useless, unless your subscription was up to date. Again, as far as I remember, this was the original intention of .NET. It doesn't look like things progressed quite the way they were supposed to.

I felt, that given the opinion was largely based on an erroneous perception, that I should respond:

Yes, the original PR campaign around .NET was a bit of a disaster, if you ask me. It did more to confuse people than anything. You'd mention .NET, and some people would think you were talking about the programming/software development environment, some people thought you were talking about the next version of Windows, and yet others still thought that you were the service concept that was mentioned. And lets just quietly agree to push Passport into a dark pit along with Microsoft "Bob".

These days, when people speak of .NET, they are speaking of the software development platform - i.e. the tools to write software. The concept of .NET as a Microsoft service faded away a while ago.

Now, I will admit that I might have a bit of a bias. My OO programming started with Clipper (using ClassY), then C++, then Java. And when .NET came out in beta, I switched to that.  I've also dabbled a bit using OO in Perl.

In the 5+ years I have been using .NET, the only "subscription" I have paid is for my MSDN subscription, and that I have only paid for since I started consulting. I have written .NET applications without having an MSDN subscription. I know of people that write .NET applications using nothing fancier than emacs. In fact, I know of people that write .NET applications without Windows or using anything from Microsoft. I have never had, nor heard of, anyone having their custom applications "expire" because their "subscription" was unpaid. .NET doesn't force any downloads on you - that is Windows Update.

Using .NET is no different that using Java, IMO. The basic concepts behind each are almost the same. There are pros and cons to each, but in the end it comes down to your preferences (or that of your client). I've worked at places that use both. The .NET camp does borrow a lot from Java, many Open Source Java tools have been ported to .NET. Many of the software engineering principles that the Java camp adopted years ago are finally start penetrate into the .NET world.

So, if you ask me what is right about .NET, I'd say that for many software applications, it's a good choice. I can write web application, Windows applications, Windows services, daemons, and web services. I have have a good set of libraries that allow me to concentration on what I need to get my job done, and not spend so much time on "plumbing" - unless I want to.

I can use the same language for each every application, or I can use one of the many languages that are supported by .NET (C#, VB.NET, Java, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, FORTRAN, COBOL, and a large, large, list of others). I can share my .NET components with each other, regardless of the language I use. I can (and have) also share my newer .NET components with my older Delphi/VB/C++ applications. Thanks to Mono, you can now run your .NET applications on platforms other than Wintel. 

So, for developing software applications, pick your poison. .NET is definitely a viable choice.