01.01.11
.NET and Windows Presentation Foundation Abandoned by Evernote, “Multi-platform” Means Microsoft-Only
Summary: Rejection of Microsoft development software and criticism of its operation even within the limited environment which it’s available on
Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza is still managing Microsoft projects at AttachMSFT/Novell, notably Mono and Moonlight (which empowers the dying Silverlight). What is the point of it? This only spreads Microsoft’s APIs, which are of course encumbered by patents. De Icaza would like us to believe that these APIs are inevitably going to win, despite lack of any evidence (the contrary is easily proven) and based on this good news from Evernote, they are dumping .NET (lots of code down the drain) and rewriting it all in C++. They got intoxicated by the Microsoft Kool-Aid and a development site summarises it thusly:
Evernote’s popular note-taking technology has recently moved to release version 4.0 with some major structural changes in terms of the technology’s previous adherence to Microsoft .NET and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), versus native code.
The company says that Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way, but that there were some problems that it simply couldn’t fix while using Windows .NET and WPF.
[...]
Evernote says that it decided to start over from scratch and use speedier native C++ code that it felt it could rely on.
Microsoft is a marketing (and litigation) company, so its frameworks are rejected by a lot of people, for reasons ranging from portability to stability and performance. Here is an example of new Microsoft gimmicks which nobody actually needs. It’s an example of marketing at the expense of pragmatism:
The Sound of Code was created using many Microsoft products, including Silverlight 4, Expression Encoder 3 SDK, .NET Framework and Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.
They make it sound like a whole universe full of diversity, but .NET only really works in Windows while words like “multi-platform” are being misused. Watch what Microsoft calls “multi-platform” these days:
She said the company’s digital formats, which now include Xbox 360 formats, in-game advertising, Windows Phone 7, search engine Bing and performance advertising through the Microsoft Media Network, were now so diverse it was difficult for marketers to understand how they could be used to create impact.
Even compatibility within Windows is a challenge and “C# legacy” is a subject which was recently covered by this article which names the the Gartner Group:
The C# legacy is already part of something that Gartner coined the “IT debt” in a recent report. While the U.S. national debt approaches $14 trillion, the IT debt is estimated by Gartner to be $500 billion, with the potential to grow to $1 trillion by 2015.
Why would anybody want C#? It is just a Java ripoff and it is controlled by a company that is a bully. Evernote’s own tough lesson speaks volumes on its own right. Exactly one year from now (first day of 2012) AttachMSFT/Novell will have run out of Microsoft ‘protection’. █
“There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.”
–Bob Muglia, Microsoft President
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The Mad Hatter said,
January 1, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Because Microsoft is trying to expand Windows market share, so they are pushing it. Mono allows them to say it’s cross platform. Unfortunately no matter how good a job the Mono devs do, they are locked into playing catchup. Microsoft won’t tell them what changes are implemented until the new version is released, which means Mono always lags.
This makes Mono, which is probably superior to .NET, look less capable. And yes, Mono is probably superior. Miguel in particular is a damned good programmer, it’s too bad he’s wasting his time on this project.
I rather wish Miguel would take my advice, and take Mono in it’s own direction rather than trying to imitate Microsoft. Then Mono could be useful.