[KLUG Members] Mudslinging

[Jamie McCarthy]

therustycook@yahoo.com (Rusty Yonkers) writes:

> Well I do not know what .Net is but I do know that I am seeing
> a large number of jobs that are asking for knowledge in it.  I
> am not a programmer but I would like a bit of info into what
> makes .Net so special.  Can anyone explain it in laymans
> (non-programmers) terms?

.NET is Microsoft's proprietary version of Java.

There are a LOT of details that I could go into, notably:

    - Java isn't completely open itself
        - Sun is still trying to figure out how to
          make a buck off Java, so it's not open-source

    - .NET will be pretty open for the immediate future
        - until Microsoft decides otherwise

    - .NET refers to several related things things
        - a development environment
            - whose programming language is called "C#"
                - or "X#"
        - a virtual machine, which is a "sandbox" that
          programmers are forced to work in -- this
          has some advantages and some disadvantages
        - an application framework and class library,
          which is a bunch of existing code that lets
          developers write applications in weeks
          instead of years

    - Mono, a big open-source project, is right now building
      an open version of .NET, expected 1.0 release this
      summer, and it's really cool
        - until Microsoft cracks the patent whip

    - in n years, the .NET VM will be the "virtual layer" that
      all Windows software runs on, 3 <= n <= 10
        - so whoever controls the .NET patents, controls
          computing for most of the world

but that first sentence is the nutshell version.
-- 
  Jamie McCarthy
 http://mccarthy.vg/
  jamie@mccarthy.vg