.NET Framework ??

Jim Thompson wrote

The Real Andy wrote:

Complete hogwash.

Genome wrote:

Andy is no more right than you are. Unless he's trying to say that dot-Net is similar to Java in that it is *a layer*, he is just blowing smoke. The (open source) equivalent of dot-Net, is Mono:

I agree with those who are saying that uninstalling it (and reinstalling it later) has the propensity to do damage. Before long, Jim will come across some other idiot who wrote some tiny app that requires this monstrosity.

As Jasen said, by that time this version may be obsolete. 8-( Mark Chun (qrk) really hit the nail in the head when he mentioned *version hell*.

Actually, i think you will find that the fundamental design is essentially the same these days.

Every app I write now uses the .net framework. The other day I wrote an app for one of the tech support guys in half a day that would have taken me a week in MFC. The app is going to less susceptable to bugs than an MFC equivelent, and the code is far more secure. Thats why people use it.

The idea behind .net is that you can install multiple versions of the framework, and they will all work alongside each other. You could not do that with DLL's.

As for dot net, there is 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0. With vista comes 3.0, but that is pretty much 2.0 with WCF and WPF rolled in.

The code behind maybe different, but the model is essentially the same. Both are managed languages, both compile to an intermediate language, both are JIT compiled at runtime.

.net is robust in the same sense as java. Sure you can write unsafe code (in fact MS even use the term unsafe in the languages) but then you are being plain mad.

Cripple and Slow? You quite clearly have never used it in a commercial environment. I do, in an enterprise environment, and I can assure you it not cripple and slow.

Microsoft love people like me because we spend money on their products. I don't buy the MS marketing, I buy the products because I can develop in a shorter timeframe and my code is a lot more robust. In a commercial environment that means a lot, the business gets what they want on time, I get paid and they then give me more work because I can deliver. Its pretty simple.

Sorry, I meant Win32. However in saying that, when Borland dropped OWL they began paying MS a licence fee to use MFC. I have not touched Borland for some time now, so I don't really know what the deal is these days.

I did just knock back a job that involved Borland C++ however. Also knocked back a Delphi job too, both in preference for a job doing enterprise .net systems.

You must be Borland user.

Java runs in a safe and secure "sandbox" it cannot gain access to anything you don't give it access to. It is safe by design... that said, I don't write Java, or C#... I prefer the embedded world.

I never found that to be true. I have found that Microsoft's applications tend to confound my efforts to write good software. I would much rather work with opensource.

The problem as I see it, is MiracleSlop has such a monopoly on seats in the computer world that finding opensource work is difficult. It is worth the effort, though, as it is so much easier and more reliable.

-Chuck

Crap , crap and double crap. .NET is not the same in the background.

Typical young coder.. I've been around the barn far longer than you think. I feel sorry for people like you getting lead down that dark path.

Yeah i know, it's pretty simple. MS loves simple users. glad you finally admitted it.

Borland has never implemented any of MFC in any of the produces to the end user. I don't know where you got this information from but it's clearly incorrect. Borland has there own set of class libraries that simply sprang from the early days of OWL. they call it the VCL now. VCL = Visual Control Library.

Don't feel bad, you did them a favor by not letting them hire you.

Yes i am , i'm also a MS VC++, VS , user. write code for Windows Mobile etc.. I've been in the field sense the day's of punch card computers and have fallow the product line's of Borland, MS, Symantic, Watcom to say a few. Now that we're done with our pissing contest, go back to your slow .NET MS controlled applications. and hope you have fun writing slow bloated code. Just think, since you're suck a good MS customer, maybe they won't make you wait for months to fix a crash/serious bug that arises in your code due to a frame work error that only MS can fix.

--
"I\'m never wrong, once i thought i was, but was mistaken"
Real Programmers Do things like this.
http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5

Well, finally some one that knows something!

--
"I\'m never wrong, once i thought i was, but was mistaken"
Real Programmers Do things like this.
http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5

Ha ha ha, i take that as a compliment.

The path to finacial success. Its funny how when people lose an argument they resort to insulting people.

Ahh, remember when Borland dropped OWL, they licenced MFC? Remeber that there was some condition regarding the approval that prevented Borland from continuing with MFC? It was about this time that everyone stopped using broland products. VCL is completely different.

Its funny how when people lose an argument they resort to insulting people.

Excellent, you must be very successful in your job.

I still cant see where you get slow and bloated from. You really should spend some time using .net, you will be surprised.

Hasn't happened to me yet, and I have been using .net for 4 years now.

[...]

IIRC, Borland licenced MFC around the time of C++ 5. It was only included for compatibility reasons so that you could compile your MFC apps with BC++, and it didn't always work 100% (due to the dependence of MFC on MSVC undocumented extensions). OWL was still very much the focus of BC++ 5.

BCB was the next product in line, and this used VCL instead of OWL. OWL wasn't dropped until BCB5, though it was (like MFC) included only for compiling older projects with the newer compiler. MFC compatibility is included all the way through the BCB line AFAIK, though it's for compiling only. You can't use the designer to make MFC GUIs.

There was a big debate a couple of years ago in one of the borland NG's about when/why/how Borland "lost" the C++ market. Their marketshare had dropped substantially long before BCB was released, or OWL was ditched for that matter. The basic problem was versions 4 and 5 of BC++ were pretty bad (especially the IDE), and OWL was simply not being updated and fixed very quickly. While they picked up some new people with the VCL (though more with Delphi than BCB) they'd lost their momentum in the C++ market, and with MS's aggressive pushing of MSVC (and later poaching of a significant number of key Borland developers) it was pretty much impossible to come back again.

[...]

You've never tried running a .NET application on a machine with 512MB of RAM, I guess? :)

Cold start times for .NET applications are terrible. Even a simple winforms "Hello World" takes somewhere between 15-25 seconds (depending on the phase of the moon) to start where the CLR isn't already loaded (for example, after a reboot, or if you have 512 MB of RAM as the CLR files fall out of the cache pretty quickly). Warm start times are better, though still in the order of 3-4 seconds. Compared to, say, firefox, which cold-starts in a bit under 10 seconds and warm-starts basically instantly. While this isn't a problem for applications that run all the time, it prevents .NET from being used for small utility applications - I don't want to wait for 3 or so seconds while calc or notepad starts, for example. Similarly, meory usage is terrible for .NET apps - a "Hello World" takes up around 7MB of RAM.

As MS forces more and more .NET stuff on people, these problems wil become less significant since the framework will always be loaded - it's not really a nice solution, though, as all that means is that you've got bloat loaded all the time (taking up space that could be used for better purposes), not just when you run an app that needs it.

Performance-wise, it's a bit hard to compare. For complex FP stuff , .NET is slower (at least on K7 Athlons and P4's), no questions there. It depends on the exact algorithm, but I've typically seen anything from a 20% to a 100% increase in computation time required. CPU-intensive stuff in general is slower, but most of the tests I've done are FP-based things so I can't give a decent range for other types. For I/O intensive stuff such as throwing files through sockets, most of the time is spent outside the application, so although the application may only be operating at half the speed of a native app it doesn't really matter. I could go on and on ... basically, CLR is significantly slower than C++ code compiled to native code, but unless your application is CPU-bound in your code, it doesn't matter a whole lot.

The biggest problem I've found is that, although you can code a .NET to be fast, it's not encouraged. A lot of the things that make .NET development easy also make the resulting application slow. The end result of this is things like ATI's CCC - massive memory use, slow startup times, laggy interface, etc etc. While I know that CCC is not representitive of a "good" .NET app, it is representitive of a vast majority of .NET apps.

While I can't say I've run into a problem that *can't* be worked around, some bugs (mainly in the 1.0 and 1.1 era) have required significant and/or ugly workarounds (which had to be developed using trial and error). One of the things I love about Borland's VCL is that you get the source code, which means you can easily trace into the VCL and see where something is going wrong. This makes it much easier to develop workarounds compared to developing them for .NET where if you tell MS "{x} doesn't work correctly" you just get the response "don't do {x}, and it may be fixed in a future service pack". At which point, if doing {x} is important to your code, you have to start the tedious process of black-box debugging the framework. Reflector can help a bit if you've narrowed it down, but it's still nowhere as nice as being able to trace into the code.

--
Michael Brown
Add michael@ to emboss.co.nz - My inbox is always open

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:05:59 +1000, The Real Andy Gave us:

Borland died because their main products, Paradox and Quattro Pro could not compete with Foxpro or Excel.

They could not get themselves out of the DOS world cleanly, and was never able to catch up in a Windows based realm.

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:18:52 +1100, "Michael Brown" Gave us:

They were unable to compete in the "visual" based development realm.

Sorry, I screwed up once again :( I meant to write that MFC licence condition was valid only if Borland dropped OWL. That was some time ago now, I cant really remember what happened.

Most of our customers run 512mb ram (on PC's supplied by us).

Ok, so the lowest CPU speed I have app's running on is around 2GHz. These are AU$400 PC's shipped with 512mb RAM, running XPSP2. I have never seen one take more than a few seconds to load the framework, even after a reboot. BTW, there is tonnes of information out there on how to reduce cold start times of app's. In fact MSDN mag did an article on such not so long ago.

Hardware is cheap, development time is quick, results are relatively robust (you can still write bad code). The whole idea with .net and java is that you sacrifice some resources for the huge benefits gained from safe, secure and reliable code.

Fair point. I don't do FP stuff. Things such as casting classes to binary buffers can be slow, but by marshalling to unmanaged and back it is real fast. What's great about that is the marshaller will not let you exceed the bounds of the array. You cant overrun a buffer. Big plus. Does not matter how bad you code, you cant do it. It won't let you. This is just one of the benefits. I challenge anyone to tell me that they have not had a buffer overrun, even if it was found before production.

I wonder what agent uses. Currently in my process list (Sysinternals) I have Agent at 10MB, followed by explorer(Win GUI shell) at 13MB, and Visual Studio 2005 at 40Mb. SO I wonder what language agent is written in? I have seen C++ app's (Borland and MS) that have been more bloated than C# app's.

Maybe that's where I differ. I don't want the source code. I don't care about it. The last thing I want to do is spend time learning my way through some library. I just don't have time. My experiences with .net have been good. What I cant do with it, I can do with Interop, and its rare that I need to go there. This is especially so with .net

1. All I really care about is giving the business what it wants, and if I can do that, on time with a product that does not have bugs, then I keep the business happy. If I keep the business happy I get rewarded, both financially and with more work.

I agree, and that is when most people gave up on Borland. MFC was always ahead (even if it was crap) and the OWL compatibility debacle in the early 90's (IIRC) was just a plain fucken pain in the arse.

[...]

Initially this was the case, which is why it took so long for BC++ to become MFC compatible (Watcom, Symantic, etc had MFC support years before Borland). MS finally relented and allowed Borland to use both - I have no idea why. Presumably money was involved somewhere.

[...]

Are you sure that you're actually testing a "cold boot" scenario? For example, if you use ATI graphics drivers, the framework gets loaded during boot. The warm and cold start times are about the same on my main computer because of this (and somewhere around 1-1.5 seconds due to better hardware). The times I mentioned above are on my "clean test" machine, an XP1700 with

512 MB RAM. This is a cleaner machine than most when it comes to stuff in RAM, since I'm only testing a single app at a time (more or less just XP + .NET frameworks). On another machine that I use (P4 ~2GHz, 512 MB RAM, but with lots of junk loaded like a virus scanner, firewall, web/email clients, etc ) I observe similar or worse times - worse because when I exit a .NET application the framework tends to fall out of the cache pretty quickly as memory is tight. Resulting in times closer to cold starts than warm starts.

Yes, there are things you can do to improve cold (and warm) start times ... but these times are for a "Hello World" app, which doesn't leave many options for improvement.

[...]

Safe and secure, maybe, but reliable? Allowing people to be sloppy when coding is just asking for reliability issues further down the line. The "ideal" language (IMO) should be strictly typed (no magic float-to-int conversions for you!), require explicit memory allocation and deallocation (with a garbage collector there solely to slap you if you forget) and allow you to get your hands dirty and bit-bash if you want to. Ideally it should also treat fundamental types as fundamental types - an integer is an integer, not an object. Basically, make the programmer think about what (s)he is writing, not just spew out a whole lot of code and make random changes until it works. Unfortunately, the trend seems to be away from every one of these aspects and towards allowing - even encouraging - poor programming practices. While in the short term this may seem like a good solution, 5 years down the line you'll end up with millions of lines of poorly written code just held together by comments such as "I don't know why the following line is needed but things break if it's removed".

/me gets off his soapbox :)

[...]

I can't recall the last time I had a buffer overrun in any of my Delphi code. I have had the odd one when mixing Delphi and inline assembler (the overflow in the assembler part), but assembler is assembler and those things happen :) In my C++ code, I've had the odd one in parts which I've been aggressively optimizing (as in "we need to squeeze more performance out of this procedure, new is slowing us down, so lets coalesce all the unrelated new calls into a single malloc and bitbash some things around" aggressive) but not AFAICR in "normal" code. In these cases, a managed language would have prevented the buffer overflows simply by not allowing me to optimize so aggressively. Not exactly a plus in that case.

The reason for this IMO is that I've always been quite conscious of buffer overruns and the like, coming from an assembly and software security background. Of course, I can't say I've never had one - my memory doesn't go back far enough, and I'm pretty certain that when I was starting programming I overflowed a few buffers (either accidentally or on purpose ...). Defensive programming beats a safety net any day of the week - a (prevented) buffer overflow in a .NET application usually results in the application crashing or being terminated. While this is better than a buffer overflow, it's better still that the app figures out beforehand that the buffer is too small and handles it gracefully. Additionally, most C/C++ compilers now support buffer overflow detection with guard words. While this results in guaranteed termination of the program (rather than possible recovery with an exception), the result is not all that different to an exception firing where you did not anticipate it happening.

As far as I can tell, it uses MSVC (and wxWindows for the gui). It's a combination of C and C++. Though this is just from a quick glance through the executable using notepad - it may be being crafty :)

Heh, Explorer on this computer is at 17 MB - tis what you get when you don't log off for 9 days ... Biggest memory users at the moment are Opera (103 MB), Delphi 7 (35 MB), OE (31 MB). However, I wouldn't consider Opera bloated - I've got about 25 tabs open across 2 windows, and then the cached renderings for the previous page, plus cached files ... Delphi and OE are also quite "busy", and the memory is being put to good use. The award for bloat (being defined as memory used for no good purpose) on my computer goes to the annoying ATI tray icon that just won't go away. It's currently using up 7 MB to display an icon in the tray that if I double-click on it starts up CCC.

[...]

I'm coming somewhat from the same direction but with different experiences ... I don't have time to be trying to second-guess what's happening inside a library. If an application isn't behaving as it should, there's either a bug in my code or a bug in the library (or very occasionally a bug in the compiler). Maybe I've just been unlucky with hitting lots of .NET framework bugs, but I'm pretty sure I've spent more time in the last couple of years trying to isolate and work around .NET bugs than I've spent tracing through the VCL source code (and it's not due to spending a lack of time with VCL). Since I've written quite a few Delphi components I already knew (or had to know) what a typical VCL component looks and acts like. Since the VCL follows the same rules as the components I write, tracing through it is pretty easy.

[...]

--
Michael Brown
Add michael@ to emboss.co.nz - My inbox is always open

True enough, although when that happens it's an easy way to know that the piece of software is crap and you shouldn't bother using it if at all possible!

Say Andy,

What do you think of Python (with, say, wxPython for the GUI) vs, say, C#?

Yeah... I understand peoples' frustration with needing all the various version of the framework on their PCs, but at least they do appear to have eliminated "DLL Hell."

To be honest, i have never looked at python. I probably never will either, as I have just taken a consultancy role at a 100% MS shop! However, I have hearld lots about it, and I will endeavour to have a look in my onw time, maybe when I buy my Mac.

%<

IIRC the boxes i am using have an onboard video compliments of intel.

All my testing is done on clean installs. A PC that you use for dev is always going to be bloated with crap, and any app you run on it is going to be slow. Same for running CAD apps.

However, I do have a few .net applications that i do run on my dev machine for support reasons, some of which are quite big, and the start times of all of those are quite good to. Mind you, I am going to go and test cold start times of those now!!

If you are doing .net dev, its worth reading this MSDN mag article.

There are some other good ones around too.

You will always get programmers that write bad code, in any language. .net and java are helping the cause by taking care of that aspect as much as possible.

Those values were for Vista.

%<

BTW: WCF was microsofts benchmark test for using c# internally. WCF was written completely in managed code. Its only a matter of time before your PC will have to run the .net framework as MS ramps up internal development in .net. It would be interesting to know if Vista uses any .net framework, because I cant see it load. Vista starts pretty quickly too, and .net apps seem to boot fast on vista.

If the software is crap to begin with, why do you expect the uninstaller to work??