First 24 hours of .NET and the next chapter.

This article is a reflection of sorts and a starting point for another. One chapter is done (Beta), another one is starting, RTM. Over the course of the last 24 hours, the .NET framework v1.0 has been released. The last 1 1/2 years, ASPFree.com has been a beta tester for .NET. Along with ASPNG.com (by Charles Carroll) our websites were the first two production .NET sites. The experience has been over-whelming to say the least. The people who brought us .NET (Mark Anders, Scott Guthrie, Rob Howard, Susan Warren, Eric Olson and many many others & maybe even Bill Gates, someone had to pay for this) put thousands of hours and were very open minded working with us. The .NET framework is world class period!

For someone who is reading this article and is new to .NET or ASP development, they are probably asking them self, "What is the big deal with this .NET framework?". That question will be answered over the course of the next months and years how profound the .NET framework really is and its impact on the business and developer communities. Is it going to solve world peace? I doubt it but it will make web development more flexible and way more powerful. The team at Microsoft who developed this technology has put 4+ years and 1000's of hours to make something really special.

Today was a very special day, to the normal person, it was only Wednesday. To an ASP.NET geek like me and 1000's others that have been working through the beta process. ITS ALIVE!! No more can people say, "its only beta" the transformation can officially begin. As part of working with the .NET framework, what I call real developers (Objected-Oriented types, C/C++, Assembler, developers who know more than VB type languages, someone who can invent code without copying and pasting as ASPer's like me have done!). Not to say VB is bad at all Many of the developers mentioned above have been around since programming early days(Unix, Mainframe etc..). They understand the basics of programming and what being a software engineer is really like. A lot of my experience in ASP its been learning from the school of hard-knocks. (American term for making many mistakes along the way). The .NET framework allows beginners to have a powerful environment to work in along with "real developers". Both will benefit from its flexible and powerful tools that are available.

Being opened minded, I wanted to learn how to think like a software engineer instead of a copy and paste, spaghetti code ASP person. Not to say every person who writes ASP puts out bad code but a person takes a few steps back when first starting out. Early in the beta cycle, Java & open source kept coming up in conversations. The folks who work in this field generally are pretty smart, a bit brash but smart. Before I could complain about these worlds, I wanted to understand what .NET was up against. What came out of the research was respect, at the end of the day I still do Microsoft stuff. My knowledge of what Java architecture is and what open source can do is creditable. In many ways on the surface the .NET framework is similar to the Java world. MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language aka Bytecode in Java). JVM (Java Virtual Machine) in Java, CLR (Common Language Runtime) in .NET. These are only a couple of hi-level examples but the idea is they are pretty much the same, its a business decision and what meets the solution a company is trying to solve. The .NET framework will allow businesses to have more choices now when deciding on technologies to solve problems. Isn't that what technology is really about?

For those who are coding in classic ASP, .NET framework is a gift from heaven. No more will you have to bake code to do such things as have session variables work in web farms, store the form values inside hidden forms or some customized technique to present data to the user after validating it, no more DLL hell when publishing new DLL's or registry entries, very rich set of client-side and validation tools. I think the coolest thing about this is classic ASP applications and ASP.NET app's can run side-by-side. The one feature breaks down a lot of walls when it comes to integrating this new technology into an existing web-infrastructure. Another HUGE thing that .NET has going for is the performance. Classic ASP is interpreted, ASP.NET is compiled. These are only a little hi-level view of what ASP.NET can do. The .NET framework is very powerful, one of the main drivers for ASP.NET was the ease of classic ASP and how fast developers could do RAD development. This is what got me hooked and however the limitations became quickly evident when working on larger projects. Doing traditional ASP types of stuff has gotten tons easier and it scales much easier than ASP ever will.

In conclusion, I want to thank all our faithful and dedicated viewers of ASPFree.com throughout the beta cycle. This article isn't technical but does bring to light when working with the .NET framework, there are many things that can be done. There really is competition out there and many more exciting opportunities to develop. Will it topple the world and bring more of a monopoly to Microsoft? Not sure, but they've raised the bar for web developers (both in Microsoft and non-Microsoft worlds a like). One thing is for sure, ASPFree.com will continue to bring articles sharing peoples different experiences with .NET.

Happy .NET'ing,

Steve Schofield
steve@aspfree.com

Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET
http://aspfree.com

Few thought provoking articles

The Other Side of .NET:
Why Microsoft Could Still Fail With .NET and How They'd Likely Recover From That Failure

Caught in a .NET:
Don't Expect Microsoft to Give Up One Weapon Without Acquiring Another -- How .NET Assures the Continuation of Monopoly

Sharper Than Ever:
Microsoft's C# Language Might Be the Death of Java, but Sun's the One to Blame

Fun Facts about .NET....

This was obtained from http://ASPFriends.com list run by Charles Carroll and posted by Scott Guthrie (ASP.NET founder)

- 8,400,000,000:
# of ASP.NET Pages served by www.msn.com site (with beta2!)

- 5,343,271:
# of lines of source code in the project

- 3,500,000:
# of ASP.NET Beta2 CDs distributed in magazines

- 252,000:
# of downloads of the IBuySpy samples

- 178,920
# of cans of soda (approximately) consumed by team during project

- 21,453:
# of attendees at the 1 TechEd and 2 PDC events so far about .NET

- 14,926:
# of hours of server stress on the RTM bits (with zero failures!)

- 7,400:
# of customers that deployed ASP.NET Beta2 apps w/ Go Live License

- 3,473:
# of .cs source files in the .NET Framework source tree

- 1,491:
# of days since ASP.NET V1 started (4 years ago!)

- 904:
# of samples in the ASP.NET Quickstarts

- 314:
# of days since IBuySpy News app was supposed to go live (oops!)

- 66:
# of ASP.NET Community Sites listed on www.asp.net

- 33:
# of international languages ASP.NET will be localized into

- 31:
# of .NET code languages that developers can use with ASP.NET

- 30:
# of ASP.NET books on bookshelves today (40+ more coming!)

- 28:
# of times ASP.NET is faster than J2EE on SUN's Petstore app!

- 4:
# of MSFT buildings we have occupied (buildings 6, 31, 10, 42)

- 3:
# of product names ASP.NET has had (XSP, ASP+, ASP.NET)

- 0:
# of days you need to wait for ASP.NET V1 to ship - it is here now!