the case against .NET

Am I imagining it, or is Microsoft more inclined to speak my language of late?
I’m hearing less about Indigo, Avalon and XAML, and more about REST, Ajax and RSS. And that’s the way it should be - the future lies with cross-platform interoperability, especially with mobile devices such as smartphones, and not with fancy [...]

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In my opening post I mentioned that, in the past, I might have called this blog “the case against C++”. In other words, I’m taking issue with developers who unquestioningly use languages and technologies without looking at what’s most appropriate for their application (i.e. the herd mentality). .NET is simply the most recent [...]

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Dave Winer reports on a couple of patent applications from Google and Amazon.
The Google application is particularly bizarre. It covers the inclusion of targeted ads in syndicated feeds (e.g. RSS). Even if Google is granted this patent, it’s impossible to see how they could defend it while maintaining their “not evil” image.
It’s [...]

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I had my worst ever software installation experience a couple of days ago. I’d previously thought that Visual Studio .NET installation was pretty bad, simply because it’s so painfully slow. However, the VS.NET setup process is a model of excellence when set alongside that for Borland Delphi 2005.
In mitigation, I should say that [...]

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So Longhorn is to be “Windows Vista”.
Actually, I think this has a nice sound to it. My dictionary, however, says a vista is “a long narrow view”. I think many would agree that Microsoft’s biggest current problem is its narrowness of vision.

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Steve Teixeira, Microsoft’s Director of Partner Strategy for Visual C++, has some advice to Visual C++ developers on choosing between MFC and .NET WinForms.
The thing to notice here is that, for the most part, Microsoft has always chosen to use neither MFC nor WinForms for its own application development.
Steve suggests we use .NET for XML, [...]

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Just installed the latest update to Raxco’s excellent PerfectDisk defragger utility. The list of changes includes this gem:

Corrected a bug in the boot time defragmentation. PerfectDisk records the current time on shutdown and compares it to the system time at reboot. On Windows XP, Service Pack 2, the system time at reboot can be earlier [...]

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