First off, I generally found Richard Grimes to be an interesting read. His farewell statement is included in that assessment.
Please read the article first, but here is my reaction to it. (Note: registration required)
Link
First thing Grimes talks about is the marketing snafu's that occurred in naming their system .NET and the language C#. Both are excellent examples of marketers on drugs. I think their conversations must have gone something like this: "Hey, nice weed man. How about we create names for the products so that no one can find information on them, including on our own developer sites. Then we can blame Google and we will come out like heroes, because, we're like Microsoft man."
Second: Mr. Grimes basically says that the .NET Framework is geared to VB developers looking for something better and more powerful (that is the same reason I moved to Delphi years ago). But that in all reality, C# is the most natural language for .NET and VB.NET never should have been written. Mostly because it has broken every single VB program ever written and pissed off a lot of developers who never wanted to be developers in the first place.
Also he argues that the framework is too big (25 meg) and to complex. And really, if you are coming from the simplistic world of VB, it probably is. From a Delphi stand point: it is still missing stuff. But he does have some good observations on how he thinks the .NET Framework was built and some of its shortcomings.
Third: He says that Microsoft isn't really committed to .NET because they really haven't written anything in it, or ported any of their old applications to -- specifically, money generating ones.
I disagree on this point. SharePoint and Reporting Services are both .NET applications, and SQL Server 2005 is going to have .NET built into it (though, that is not the same as saying that SQL Server 2005 will be built with .NET), and you will be able to execute .NET code in Stored Procedures and use .NET types as columns. IIS has some tie ins as well. And if you want the latest version of IIS, you have to get the latest version of the OS. I'd say that is a money generator myself.
The question comes back to: what has Microsoft done with .NET? They have built server applications. It might be a little disconcerting that they have not built much in the way of Windows applications, but truthfully the jump from Delphi or VB to WinForms wasn’t that great. The jump from ASP to ASP.NET was huge!
For myself, I know I have cost myself jobs because I refused to do traditional ASP development. I hate it. Loath it. I prefer assembly to traditional ASP. At least you get debugging with assembly and you are only dealing with one language! For traditional ASP you had to know the ASP object model, HTML, css, JavaScript, and VBScript.
With ASP.NET, that story is mostly changed. I can write an entire web application without writing a single line of HTML, JavaScript, or css. Now add that XML support is built in, better component support, the framework itself, and the list goes on. With ASP.NET, web programming is almost fun! It is almost like Windows development! Who knew?
But do you really want a Word or (gasp) Excel written in .NET? Is that the best place for the tool? Probably not. And I think it is important to remember that the .NET Framework is just a tool. Not THE tool. It is one way to get things done, and depending on the job, their might be better ways. I still use VB for some jobs, I still use Delphi for other, but for most I use C#. Just as Richard Grimes will continue to use his beloved C++.
