Microsoft .Net report card

Determining exactly what .Net is may be the hardest part of measuring its success. The confusion goes way back to June 2000, when Bill Gates framed the .Net initiative in consumerish terms as an Internet "platform" to support all sorts of devices. As it turned out, .Net mainly manifested itself as a collection of technologies for developers, and that's how we have chosen to evaluate it.

Microsoft's real goals were many and ambitious. At the core of .Net, the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and its associated Framework (class library) would usher Microsoft developers into the world of managed code, of which the benefits were already well-known to their Java counterparts. In parallel, Web services would become the pivotal integration technology, and XML the lingua franca of data representation.

These were, and still are, the central themes. Don Box, architect of Longhorn's Indigo communication subsystem, put it plainly on his Weblog: "We're betting that the future is managed code and XML."

Of course there were grander promises, too. In the new .Net era, software was to be delivered as a service, and a set of Microsoft-operated services known as HailStorm would pave the way for a new style of network-centric computing. But the retreat from HailStorm, in the face of widespread resistance to the notion of Microsoft as an infrastructure and identity provider, set the movement back. Yet .Net succeeded in providing key pieces of the foundation for delivering software as a service.

Another setback was self-inflicted. When Microsoft removed the .Net label from its enterprise servers in 2003 and reasserted the Windows brand over that of .Net, the move raised questions about .Net's near-term longevity. Nobody should have expected that a sweeping transition to .Net could be achieved in just a few years, nor should it be surprising that much of the consolidation around managed code promised for 2003 is now scheduled for Longhorn in 2006 or later.

But developers want to exploit .Net's benefits today in their existing Windows operating systems and applications. In some ways, that remains harder than it should be. In others, .Net has exceeded expectations.

The devil's in the details. For the past few years developers have been digging in and evaluating specific .Net promises to simplify application deployment, beef up security, support a range of programming languages, streamline the programmable surface area of Windows, and enrich the user experience. We'll drill down into these topics to see what developers have concluded so far. Here's the rundown and what it means to you.

The State of the Windows Programming Art

Windows programmers who use .Net tend to like it a lot. They say they're more productive than before and for many of the same reasons cited by their Java counterparts. These include modern object-oriented languages (C#, Visual Basic .Net); a virtual machine with automatic memory management; and a robust class library that embodies best practices and simplifies use of the operating system's services.