Development cycle of technology is accelerating... by Jason Short On Jul 24, 2007

There is no doubt that the development cycle of new technology is accelerating.  Take a look at Dot Net alone (forget the rest of CompSci that is evolving almost as rapidly).  Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2008, 3.0, 3.5, LINQ, LINQ to SQL, SQL CE, XAML, Silverlight, Mono, etc, etc. Just keeping a handle on that very small subset of what is coming out in the next 12 months is almost a full time job.

I worry for the hobbiest.  How can they be expected to even know what all the current buzz words and terms mean these days?  If this is not your full time profession you would probably be discouraged and not bother.  That is a major loss to the shareware / freeware communities.  Many of us who are now commercial programmers started as hobbyists.  If you lost those passionate few I think you are losing a lot of what fuels the creative energy of our trade.

I get questions a lot of new users asking what they should read or study to be able to make a small program for themselves.  It is hard to recommend anything that would seem totally over the top for most users.  How many people would be willing to spend a year or more of their free time reading and learning to write a small program for themself?  Not many.

It is great that we have all this new technology for specialists and for certain fields.  But I feel that Microsoft and Dot Net 3.x are pushing the barrier to entry too far away from novice / starting programmers.  Many of the young students I speak with today want to learn javascript and other web related technolgies because they think they are easier. 

Keep up the good work Mahesh, I think sites like yours help to lower that barrier rather than raise it.  People need information and you guys are doing a great job at sorting through the buzz words and helping people learn that they really need to know.

I agree BUT by Mahesh Chand On Jun 28, 2007

I agree that MS has different types of audiences BUT none of them are happy with the speed of new technology MS is pushing. The reason I know this is I work very closely with many companies simultaneously.

1. Managers/Decisions Makers are confused about should they choose Vista or Not? .NET 1.1, 2.0, or 3.0 or wait for 4.0?

2. Developers are confused - Should they learn new tech to keep their jobs? I get questions every day in emails. What is going to happen with ASP.NET and Windows Forms? In .NET 3.0, they have no role? They will be obselete. Do you know, many companies are havily investing to migrate their staff from C++/VB/Java to .NET 1.0 and some are from .NET 1.0 to 2.0.

Question is not about giving new technologies. The Question is, before MS give us any thing, make sure you stick to it.  

Now ADO.NET will be replaced with DLINQ. I already see so many problems with DLINQ. MS should have improved ADO.NET than giving us something totally new.

It's all about making $$$. MS rather have you buy (pay for) new Vista than fixing its existing problems in XP and 2003. They would rather give you VS 2008 than fixing VS 2005 and they have been doing this for year and years and its working pretty well for them.

Trust me. The time I spend on learning new things, there is hardly one one who does. But there is point when enough is enough !!!

I seriously think after .NET 4.0, they should take a long pause and let us developers digest it for a while. 

contrareply to Mahesh by NESTOR SANCHEZ AHUMADA On Jun 27, 2007

Mahesh: Thinking about your point of view...

- There is more than a unique target audience for MS: it's not just "developers", "industry", "customers", "final users"... the dynamics and needs for them are diffrent.

- If "most of the companies are still developing on .NET 1.0 and 1." .. then it's time for them to jump over .NET 2.0 and VS2005 and migrate when .NET 3.5 and VS2008 make their debut.

- ¿Why a company should migrate all of their staff at the same time to a new technology? ... for sure there will be new projects that would benefit from new technologys, but legacy projects could mantain its platform/tools.

- I believed in this globalized world innovation (make or use new techs/trends) would make more opportunities, just think on Ruby... it gives new things in new ways and, like as C# did with Java, it could be taked and improved...  maybe in the same C# :)

I remember Steve Prefontaine, an olympic runner that always gived his maximum effort and inspired a running boom in the 70s.

At the end this issue is philosophical... is like the question of "why to build machines if there will be unemployed workers?"

MS must mantain speed for satisfy customer expectations and compete with google, apple, ... even in some areas they should go faster.

A Car Race with No Pit Crew? by Mike Gold On Jun 25, 2007

It does seem that Microsoft has accelerated the technology path.   I wonder if there is some correlation between developing a new software technology and increasing profit.  At first you would think this was true because a new technology means selling training, software, and seminars for the new technology.  On the other hand, you have to maintain a massive support network to maintain so many different technologies.  The question is does

$new technology - $support = a large enough profit to make it worth it.

One thing is definitely true.  Every time Microsoft opens a new technology, it creates a huge opportunity in the software market.

Also, let's not forget that Microsoft is competing with the likes of Google, Oracle, Sun, and Adobe, so to some extent, the solutions Microsoft provides is driven by the competition from these other companies.

Sometimes it seems to be like one big car race, where developers are like the pit crews trying to keep the wheels in motion.

The problem may be that the car is getting beyond the mechanics ability to change the tires. 

Reply to Nester by Mahesh Chand On Jun 25, 2007

Nestor,
Question is not being too slow or too fast. Question is, Are companies moving with Microsoft? No. They are not. I work as an independent contractor/consultant with many companies and I know most of the companies are still developing in .NET 1.1.

Now, many of the decision makers are confused with Microosft's moves. Their teams are still working with .NET 1.1, they are undecided wheather they should move to .NET 2.0 or wait until 3.0 or 4.0 are stablized?

Now let's say, you have a 100 people IT developers staff and you migrate all of them to .NET 2.0. As a company, its going to cost you and COST YOU A LOT. Now, after all that training and migration, company finds the same team has to learn something totally new to move to .NET 3.0? That company will be bankrupt in just training.

Microsoft is been confused since .NET 1.0. They wanted to push C# to their C++ and VB 6 developers but it didn't work as they expected. Developers didn't move from C++ and VB6 to C# (only some did) and Microsoft end up building VB.NET and C++ .NET.

Now, Microsoft is reaching at the same point. ASP.NET and Windows Forms are just started getting recognition and now they will be history after .NET 3.0. Microsoft has already shutdown their GotDotNet site and change their WindowsForms.net to WindowsClients.net. That said, ASP.NET and Windows Forms will still be around for years (as C++ .NET is still around).

Here question is not giving a good and complete solution but question is, SHOULD MICROSOFT TAKE THEIR TIME BEFORE THEY GIVE DEVELOPERS SOMETHING NEW?

Yes every line is correct... by Deepz On Jun 25, 2007

Yes mahesh you are correct. This seems like as Tigers or any other carnivorous needs to kill an animal every day to live another day, we .NET developers also need to keep up with new and every day new technologies offered by newer versions of .NET.

Microsoft needs to slow down. I know they need more and more money, but that should not hinder their ultimate customer i.e. the software developer. We really need some time to cut the new cake.

I disagree with you by NESTOR SANCHEZ AHUMADA On Jun 23, 2007

I think MS should continue improving .NET and leveraging as many as new technologies, paradigms, languages and tools as they can.

The question is... why we developers should know every tech-paradigm out there?  We should focus on our job and interests area. For example in my case, my job requires to have a good knowledge of OO, DB, low level access to files and some Winforms and services, but very little or nothing about web front-end, mobile applications, Silverlight, Ajax or XML things. I'd been using the best products when i needed them. It was very useful to get generics and WCF for a couple a projects and sadly still cannot use LinQ for SQL things (still atached to string queries or ORMs).

If you and many others developers think MS is too fast, I think no... you/we are too slow as consequence of human nature. This is like a worker in the industrial revolution trying to learn to handle every new machine of the factory. So the solution is to be an specialist and improve the managment of your agenda and company, or take other aproaches (i remember using every odd number version of PowerBuilder years ago... 5.x, then 7 and finally 9).

For the .NET versions I think the jump from 1.0 to 1.1 was result of the inmaturity of the platform. From 1.1 to 2.0 there was a notorius evolution (ie generics), but from 2.0 to 3.0 these was just -excellent- extensions (no "every thing is changed" as you stated). Version 3.5 promises to be a new positive big jump (specially LinQ). And -i hope as soon as possible- in the future there could be STM (transactions in memory, parallelism, more functional/dynamic programming stuff ... ala Ruby? (hope without that ugly syntax of course)).

IMHO,

Néstor.

Will fix it by Mahesh Chand On Jun 22, 2007

Thanks Fabio.

I will keep in mind to get that fixed. We are constantly updating the site, fixing things, and adding more features.

BTW by fabio pedrosa On Jun 22, 2007
Just wanna to say, in the trying to post my previous comment, I lost it 3 times (hypothetically, because I saved it) because, for 3 times simultaneous times, the page sent me somewhere (register->login->post) and never saved the text. Need an upgrade to Web2.0 :P

Something else by fabio pedrosa On Jun 22, 2007
My humble opinion, is that no one should try to keep up. No matter what the buzz are, in the new products, developers shouldn't feel obligated to "upgrade". There are certainly lots of reasons to upgrade to newer version of the .NET framework, but if you don't need to, why should you? One new feature in VS2008 is going to be Multi-Targeting, that will allow you to maintain the the same solution different projects for different framework. Allowing you, for instance, to develop in the .NET1.1 in the VS2008. I guess sometimes developers tend to spend so much time following the buzz on new technology's, must of which could be ignored.

Exactly by Mahesh Chand On Jun 21, 2007

Let's not forget full-time job and community contributions ;)

sloooowww down MS by kevin kizer On Jun 21, 2007
I am still on .net 1.1 and JUST YESTURDAY starting cracking the books on .net 2.0. I just simply dont see how anyone keeps up with the new technologies! maybe if you dont have any kids, not married and have no social life could you find time to keep up with all of this! I've always wondered if other people thought this too or if i was just sloowww lol CRAZY!