Programming Languages: Managed versus Native - The Marketing
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It is no secret that in the last decade, ever since the .Net platform appeared, Microsoft has been trying to push its product. Every single day you will find more articles cropping up about how to work with it. From every corner, you hear that this is what you want to use.
Many native coders have found this to be a good reason to worry. Tom Archer, handling Contest Strategies over at MSDN, tried to answer this question from his own point of view. You are probably aware that Microsoft gets the most out of its Windows operating system and the Office suite. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's main purpose is to spread the operating system and the suite even further. Before any operating system can become popular, it needs to have many task-specific applications so the vast majority can use the OS in the ways they want to. This lets the OS extend to fit other people's desires.
Developing an application from scratch to something close to perfection takes time and effort from an entire developing team. This is not healthy or beneficial for a new OS that wants to spread, as many companies will refuse to pay this price.
The solution is to develop, along with your OS, a language that also integrates well into the operating system and makes it possible to develop complex applications with just a few people in a short period of time. The .Net framework with its C# way of programming was made for this sole purpose.
Surely Microsoft already took advantage of this approach with the Microsoft Foundation Class Library inside C++. As mentioned on the previous page, this is still considered native code, and leaves many agonizing tasks to the user. Microsoft wants to remove that burden.
All of this sounds good in theory, but there is of course a difference between what was intended and what actually came out, which will be covered on the following page. Regardless, to popularize the OS and with it the Office suite, Microsoft decided to make the technology freely available.
The reason that you see more whte papers and articles about C# and the .Net framework on the Microsoft Developers Network (and in general) is because Microsoft tries to promote the new technologies that will make it easier to develop applications for Windows.
In addition, the fact that C/C++ has now been around for 20 years, and C# less than a decade, means that there are more aspects of C# that have not been covered, while the subject of C/C++ has already been explored from every point of view. Until a significant amount of new introductions are made to the languages, it will be hard to produce as much content about C/C++ as is being produced about a completely new and constantly changing language like C#.
In fact, you can observe this in the numbers representing the visitor count to the specific parts of MSDN. The Visual Studio, .Net, VB.Net, and Vista sections receive the most visitors, representing the strongest interest of the public towards the new technologies; in other places, they cannot find reliable information.
These are indicators of an interest in managed coding through the .Net platform, and point out the relatively small amount of information about them. In addition, it is a fact that people will search for what they cannot comprehend or information to help them when they are stuck. Therefore, we have a product that is excessively promoted; nevertheless, the question remains: in theory, everything sounds good, but has Microsoft had success in the execution of this project?
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