Penetration of ASP.NET - Developers continue to use VB6 & ASP

[dotnetforfood]

Joel Spolsky's new article "How Microsoft Lost the API War" at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
describes how .NET has failed, how classic VB6 and ASP continue to be
preferred by developers, and how Microsoft has lost control of the
preferred API.

You really should read the article. Here are some excerpts:

<Joel Spolsky>
"And yet, people aren't really using .NET much.
Oh sure, some of them are..."

"instead of .NET unifying and simplifying, we have a big 6-way mess,
with everybody trying to figure out which development strategy to use
and whether they can afford to port their existing applications to
..NET.

"No matter how consistent Microsoft is in their marketing message
('just use .NET—trust us!'), most of their customers are still using
C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, and classic ASP, not to mention all the
other development tools from other companies. And the ones that are
using .NET are using ASP.NET to develop web applications, which run on
a Windows server but don't require Windows clients, which is a key
point I'll talk about more when I talk about the web."

"if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's
'official' latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment,
WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to
support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely
stillborn. Hope you haven't invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a
slide from Microsoft labelled 'How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' and asks, 'Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer."

"So you've got the Windows API, you've got VB, and now you've got
..NET, in several language flavors, and don't get too attached to any
of that, because we're making Avalon, you see, which will only run on
the newest Microsoft operating system, which nobody will have for a
loooong time. And personally I still haven't had time to learn .NET
very deeply, and we haven't ported Fog Creek's two applications from
classic ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET because there's no return on
investment for us. None. It's just Fire and Motion as far as I'm
concerned..."

"the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web
browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most
people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted
to develop almost every significant new application as a web
application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web
applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course
they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the
brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in
their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared;
they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's
no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it
already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich
client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: 'Microsoft is betting
the company on the rich client.'"

"Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since
moved to the web and refuse to move back. Most .NET developers are
ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft's web server...None of
this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its
API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application
development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.
</Joel Spolsky>

The only sentence in the article that I disagree with is:
JS> "ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web
JS> development for ten years and it's really just a
JS> generation ahead of everything out there."

Whereas in my eyes ASP.NET is not a "generation ahead", but merely a
Microsoft rewrite of some well-known Perl modules available years ago
that:
- use templates to generate dynamic web pages and
- encrypt form data.

dotnetforfood

classic ASP rulez!!!

[Kevin Spencer]

Steve's. Hands down.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Big things are made up
of lots of little things.

"dotnetforf ood" <do***********@ yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:64******** *************** ***@posting.goo gle.com...

"Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]" <St***@Orr.ne t> wrote

It's nothing more than one guy's rambling opinion.

concerning Joel Spolsky's outstanding article "How Microsoft Lost the
API War"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

After 5 days, Spolsky's "rambling opinion" is referenced by over 2500
sites. But only I am reading your (non-informative, boring,
uninteresting, empty, useless, wasted) post!-)

Whose opinions are respected: Spolsky's or yours?

[Sharon Tal]

So basically, what we need is a web based rich client.
http://www.bindows.net/ is a cool attempt, but it is based on JavaScript.
Do you know of any more?
Sharon.

"dotnetforf ood" <do***********@ yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:64******** *************** ***@posting.goo gle.com...

"Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]" <St***@Orr.ne t> wrote

It's nothing more than one guy's rambling opinion.

concerning Joel Spolsky's outstanding article "How Microsoft Lost the
API War"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

After 5 days, Spolsky's "rambling opinion" is referenced by over 2500
sites. But only I am reading your (non-informative, boring,
uninteresting, empty, useless, wasted) post!-)

Whose opinions are respected: Spolsky's or yours?

[Ken Schaefer]

There are plenty of people (like yourself) that like to knock .NET, and
there are plenty of these people on the internet.So references per se are
not a good measure of credibility.

Microsoft employs a lot of very intelligent people, who are working both to
ensure that Microsoft stays at the top of the heap -and- that it keeps its
developers onside (because that's what makes the Microsoft platforms a
compelling choice for business).

So, who's more credible - Spolsky, who has a chip on his shoulder about
..NET? or Microsoft, which is a company that's been a proven winner?

I mean, Spolsky writes stuff like this:

<quote>
And personally I still haven't had time to learn .NET very deeply, and we
haven't ported Fog Creek's two applications from classic ASP and Visual
Basic 6.0 to .NET because there's no return on investment for us. None
</quote>

By his own admission, he knows very little about 'Net. And ROI is not just
about signing new customers - it's also about reducing costs - manageability
and supportability costs. I'm sure Spolsky knows this, but is just being
disingenuous by leaving it out.

He writes stuff like:
<quote>
And here's the clincher: I noticed (and confirmed this with a recruiter
friend) that Windows API programmers here in New York City who know C++ and
COM programming earn about $130,000 a year, while typical Web programmers
using managed code languages (Java, PHP, Perl, even ASP.NET) earn about
$80,000 a year. That's a huge difference, and when I talked to some friends
from Microsoft Consulting Services about this they admitted that Microsoft
had lost a whole generation of developers. The reason it takes $130,000 to
hire someone with COM experience is because nobody bothered learning COM
programming in the last eight years or so, so you have to find somebody
really senior, usually they're already in management, and convince them to
take a job as a grunt programmer, dealing with (God help me) marshalling and
monikers and apartment threading and aggregates and tearoffs and a million
other things that
</quote>

The reason it costs more to hire people like this is because the
applications that *require* this expertise are non-trivial. I can write COM
components without too much trouble. I know a little about threading and
marshalling, but that doesn't mean I can write something that'll work well
in a huge enterprise environment. ON the other hand, the average web
developer doesn't need to work in that environment. There are plenty of web
apps that don't require that expertise. I'm sure Spolsky knows that too, but
he just doesn't bother to mention it. He's choosing to "colour" his story
with the things that support his opinion, leaving out things that everyone
else knows, but which don't support his opinion.

Cheers
Ken
"dotnetforf ood" <do***********@ yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:64******** *************** ***@posting.goo gle.com...
: "Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]" <St***@Orr.ne t> wrote
: > It's nothing more than one guy's rambling opinion.
:
: concerning Joel Spolsky's outstanding article "How Microsoft Lost the
: API War"
: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
:
: After 5 days, Spolsky's "rambling opinion" is referenced by over 2500
: sites. But only I am reading your (non-informative, boring,
: uninteresting, empty, useless, wasted) post!-)
:
: Whose opinions are respected: Spolsky's or yours?

[Roland Hall]

"dotnetforf ood" wrote in message
news:64******** *************** ***@posting.goo gle.com...
: "Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]" <St***@Orr.ne t> wrote
: > It's nothing more than one guy's rambling opinion.
:
: concerning Joel Spolsky's outstanding article "How Microsoft Lost the
: API War"
: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
:
: After 5 days, Spolsky's "rambling opinion" is referenced by over 2500
: sites. But only I am reading your (non-informative, boring,
: uninteresting, empty, useless, wasted) post!-)
:
: Whose opinions are respected: Spolsky's or yours?

(___!_{|})

You know what that is? That's Spolsky's butt with your lip prints tattooed
on it.
I doubt I'll hear more dribble this year, unless you keep talking except
when the Demon-crats have their convention.

There are 3 types of people in the world...
.... those that make things happen
.... those that watch things happen
.... those that wonder what happened.

Guess that makes you the wonderer. What is your goal here? Do you really
expect everyone to ooh and ahh and agree with your mindless rantings? Since
when did Spolsky become the voice for development and when did you become
his campaign manager? Is there really a point here or are you as bored with
your life as we are with your posts?

[Richard]

If fun to see how everyone react to someone's opinion.
I might not be the best programmer and know what everything means yet but I
know for a fact that .NET is much better then all other I program in.
It already saved me hours of development time on several website and it
decreased the "space" being used with a few 100mb on sites.

It already has been profitable for me and my friends for who I am making the
sites. They already saved some bucks on the monthly renting webspace
and all this is made possible by .NET. A friend of mine owns a gameshop and
had a MS Access DB with Frontend build in running but since he's opening
a new gameshop he needed that the program would work everywhere. Guess what,
in just 4 days I made the entire program in .NET while I had 6 weeks to
finish it.

I dont care about money and stuff thats going on with programmers and so,
heck I dont even get paid (althrou I wish I was lol) but I program because I
like it.
I learn new things because I like it. and you know, I like .NET :D

Richard

"dotnetforf ood" <do***********@ yahoo.com> schreef in bericht
news:64******** *************** **@posting.goog le.com...

Joel Spolsky's new article "How Microsoft Lost the API War" at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
describes how .NET has failed, how classic VB6 and ASP continue to be
preferred by developers, and how Microsoft has lost control of the
preferred API.

You really should read the article. Here are some excerpts:

<Joel Spolsky>
"And yet, people aren't really using .NET much.
Oh sure, some of them are..."

"instead of .NET unifying and simplifying, we have a big 6-way mess,
with everybody trying to figure out which development strategy to use
and whether they can afford to port their existing applications to
.NET.

"No matter how consistent Microsoft is in their marketing message
('just use .NET-trust us!'), most of their customers are still using
C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, and classic ASP, not to mention all the
other development tools from other companies. And the ones that are
using .NET are using ASP.NET to develop web applications, which run on
a Windows server but don't require Windows clients, which is a key
point I'll talk about more when I talk about the web."

"if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's
'official' latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment,
WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to
support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely
stillborn. Hope you haven't invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a
slide from Microsoft labelled 'How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' and asks, 'Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer."

"So you've got the Windows API, you've got VB, and now you've got
.NET, in several language flavors, and don't get too attached to any
of that, because we're making Avalon, you see, which will only run on
the newest Microsoft operating system, which nobody will have for a
loooong time. And personally I still haven't had time to learn .NET
very deeply, and we haven't ported Fog Creek's two applications from
classic ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET because there's no return on
investment for us. None. It's just Fire and Motion as far as I'm
concerned..."

"the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web
browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most
people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted
to develop almost every significant new application as a web
application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web
applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course
they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the
brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in
their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared;
they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's
no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it
already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich
client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: 'Microsoft is betting
the company on the rich client.'"

"Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since
moved to the web and refuse to move back. Most .NET developers are
ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft's web server...None of
this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its
API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application
development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.
</Joel Spolsky>

The only sentence in the article that I disagree with is:
JS> "ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web
JS> development for ten years and it's really just a
JS> generation ahead of everything out there."

Whereas in my eyes ASP.NET is not a "generation ahead", but merely a
Microsoft rewrite of some well-known Perl modules available years ago
that:
- use templates to generate dynamic web pages and
- encrypt form data.

dotnetforfood

classic ASP rulez!!!

[Roland Hall]

"Richard" wrote in message
news:40******** *************** @newsreader.ewe ka.nl...
: If fun to see how everyone react to someone's opinion.
: I might not be the best programmer and know what everything means yet but
I
: know for a fact that .NET is much better then all other I program in.
: It already saved me hours of development time on several website and it
: decreased the "space" being used with a few 100mb on sites.
:
: It already has been profitable for me and my friends for who I am making
the
: sites. They already saved some bucks on the monthly renting webspace
: and all this is made possible by .NET. A friend of mine owns a gameshop
and
: had a MS Access DB with Frontend build in running but since he's opening
: a new gameshop he needed that the program would work everywhere. Guess
what,
: in just 4 days I made the entire program in .NET while I had 6 weeks to
: finish it.
:
: I dont care about money and stuff thats going on with programmers and so,
: heck I dont even get paid (althrou I wish I was lol) but I program because
I
: like it.
: I learn new things because I like it. and you know, I like .NET :D

Well said Richard. Giving your opinion about something you've experienced,
good or bad, is informative and a benefit for all. This thread beginning,
and the article referenced, while opinions, are written as "THE WORD" and
any opposition to it returns a comment similar to:

[After 5 days, Spolsky's "rambling opinion" is referenced by over 2500
sites. But only I am reading your (non-informative, boring,
uninteresting, empty, useless, wasted) post!-)

Whose opinions are respected: Spolsky's or yours?]

....which turns this pretty much into nothing more than a flame war. It's
nice to see a refreshing post such as yours.

--
Roland Hall
/* This information is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability
or fitness for a particular purpose. */
Technet Script Center - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/
WSH 5.6 Documentation - http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/list/webdev.asp
MSDN Library - http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp

[Kevin Spencer]

D**n! I could have sworn that horse was dead...

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Big things are made up
of lots of little things.

"Ken" <Ke*@discussion s.microsoft.com > wrote in message
news:24******** *************** ***********@mic rosoft.com...

actually, i thought the article was saying that the Windows API was dead and you're a good example of why. why develop for Windows when making a web
based app is SO much easier to implement/install/etc.?
so he's not saying that asp.net is dead (that's some other guy's title). he's saying that Microsoft lost the app war with the web.
"Richard" wrote:

If fun to see how everyone react to someone's opinion.
I might not be the best programmer and know what everything means yet but I know for a fact that .NET is much better then all other I program in.
It already saved me hours of development time on several website and it
decreased the "space" being used with a few 100mb on sites.

It already has been profitable for me and my friends for who I am making the sites. They already saved some bucks on the monthly renting webspace
and all this is made possible by .NET. A friend of mine owns a gameshop and had a MS Access DB with Frontend build in running but since he's opening
a new gameshop he needed that the program would work everywhere. Guess what, in just 4 days I made the entire program in .NET while I had 6 weeks to
finish it.

I dont care about money and stuff thats going on with programmers and so, heck I dont even get paid (althrou I wish I was lol) but I program because I like it.
I learn new things because I like it. and you know, I like .NET :D

Richard

"dotnetforf ood" <do***********@ yahoo.com> schreef in bericht
news:64******** *************** **@posting.goog le.com...

Joel Spolsky's new article "How Microsoft Lost the API War" at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
describes how .NET has failed, how classic VB6 and ASP continue to be
preferred by developers, and how Microsoft has lost control of the
preferred API.

You really should read the article. Here are some excerpts:

<Joel Spolsky>
"And yet, people aren't really using .NET much.
Oh sure, some of them are..."

"instead of .NET unifying and simplifying, we have a big 6-way mess,
with everybody trying to figure out which development strategy to use
and whether they can afford to port their existing applications to
.NET.

"No matter how consistent Microsoft is in their marketing message
('just use .NET-trust us!'), most of their customers are still using
C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, and classic ASP, not to mention all the
other development tools from other companies. And the ones that are
using .NET are using ASP.NET to develop web applications, which run on
a Windows server but don't require Windows clients, which is a key
point I'll talk about more when I talk about the web."

"if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's
'official' latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment,
WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to
support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely
stillborn. Hope you haven't invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a
slide from Microsoft labelled 'How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' and asks, 'Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer."

"So you've got the Windows API, you've got VB, and now you've got
.NET, in several language flavors, and don't get too attached to any
of that, because we're making Avalon, you see, which will only run on
the newest Microsoft operating system, which nobody will have for a
loooong time. And personally I still haven't had time to learn .NET
very deeply, and we haven't ported Fog Creek's two applications from
classic ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET because there's no return on
investment for us. None. It's just Fire and Motion as far as I'm
concerned..."

"the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web
browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most
people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted
to develop almost every significant new application as a web
application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web
applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course
they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the
brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in
their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared;
they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's
no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it
already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich
client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: 'Microsoft is betting
the company on the rich client.'"

"Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since
moved to the web and refuse to move back. Most .NET developers are
ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft's web server...None of
this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its
API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application
development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.
</Joel Spolsky>

The only sentence in the article that I disagree with is:
JS> "ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web
JS> development for ten years and it's really just a
JS> generation ahead of everything out there."

Whereas in my eyes ASP.NET is not a "generation ahead", but merely a
Microsoft rewrite of some well-known Perl modules available years ago
that:
- use templates to generate dynamic web pages and
- encrypt form data.

dotnetforfood

classic ASP rulez!!!

[Abubakar]

After reading your post, I couldnt convince my self to read that article. But as I read Alvin Bruney's post, I'll read that article when I want a good laugh. For now I already have had a lot of laughs on the new features recently added to the new java, they just added autoboxing!!!! Aint that cool?

The only sentence in the article that I disagree with is:
JS> "ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web
JS> development for ten years and it's really just a
JS> generation ahead of everything out there."
The only thing that you disagree with is perhaps the only thing written right in the article.

Abubakar.
http://joehacker.blogspot.com

"dotnetforf ood" wrote:
Joel Spolsky's new article "How Microsoft Lost the API War" at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
describes how .NET has failed, how classic VB6 and ASP continue to be
preferred by developers, and how Microsoft has lost control of the
preferred API.

You really should read the article. Here are some excerpts:

<Joel Spolsky>
"And yet, people aren't really using .NET much.
Oh sure, some of them are..."

"instead of .NET unifying and simplifying, we have a big 6-way mess,
with everybody trying to figure out which development strategy to use
and whether they can afford to port their existing applications to
..NET.

"No matter how consistent Microsoft is in their marketing message
('just use .NET—trust us!'), most of their customers are still using
C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, and classic ASP, not to mention all the
other development tools from other companies. And the ones that are
using .NET are using ASP.NET to develop web applications, which run on
a Windows server but don't require Windows clients, which is a key
point I'll talk about more when I talk about the web."

"if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's
'official' latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment,
WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to
support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely
stillborn. Hope you haven't invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a
slide from Microsoft labelled 'How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' and asks, 'Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer."

"So you've got the Windows API, you've got VB, and now you've got
..NET, in several language flavors, and don't get too attached to any
of that, because we're making Avalon, you see, which will only run on
the newest Microsoft operating system, which nobody will have for a
loooong time. And personally I still haven't had time to learn .NET
very deeply, and we haven't ported Fog Creek's two applications from
classic ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET because there's no return on
investment for us. None. It's just Fire and Motion as far as I'm
concerned..."

"the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web
browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most
people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted
to develop almost every significant new application as a web
application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web
applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course
they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the
brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in
their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared;
they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's
no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it
already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich
client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: 'Microsoft is betting
the company on the rich client.'"

"Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since
moved to the web and refuse to move back. Most .NET developers are
ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft's web server...None of
this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its
API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application
development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.
</Joel Spolsky>

The only sentence in the article that I disagree with is:
JS> "ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web
JS> development for ten years and it's really just a
JS> generation ahead of everything out there."

Whereas in my eyes ASP.NET is not a "generation ahead", but merely a
Microsoft rewrite of some well-known Perl modules available years ago
that:
- use templates to generate dynamic web pages and
- encrypt form data.

dotnetforfood

classic ASP rulez!!!

[Al-Feed]

Wah Jee Wah!

"Abubakar" wrote:

After reading your post, I couldnt convince my self to read that article. But as I read Alvin Bruney's post, I'll read that article when I want a good laugh. For now I already have had a lot of laughs on the new features recently added to the new java, they just added autoboxing!!!! Aint that cool?

The only sentence in the article that I disagree with is:
JS> "ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web
JS> development for ten years and it's really just a
JS> generation ahead of everything out there."

The only thing that you disagree with is perhaps the only thing written right in the article.

Abubakar.
http://joehacker.blogspot.com

"dotnetforf ood" wrote:

Joel Spolsky's new article "How Microsoft Lost the API War" at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
describes how .NET has failed, how classic VB6 and ASP continue to be
preferred by developers, and how Microsoft has lost control of the
preferred API.

You really should read the article. Here are some excerpts:

<Joel Spolsky>
"And yet, people aren't really using .NET much.
Oh sure, some of them are..."

"instead of .NET unifying and simplifying, we have a big 6-way mess,
with everybody trying to figure out which development strategy to use
and whether they can afford to port their existing applications to
..NET.

"No matter how consistent Microsoft is in their marketing message
('just use .NET—trust us!'), most of their customers are still using
C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, and classic ASP, not to mention all the
other development tools from other companies. And the ones that are
using .NET are using ASP.NET to develop web applications, which run on
a Windows server but don't require Windows clients, which is a key
point I'll talk about more when I talk about the web."

"if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's
'official' latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment,
WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to
support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely
stillborn. Hope you haven't invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a
slide from Microsoft labelled 'How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' and asks, 'Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and
Avalon?' A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer."

"So you've got the Windows API, you've got VB, and now you've got
..NET, in several language flavors, and don't get too attached to any
of that, because we're making Avalon, you see, which will only run on
the newest Microsoft operating system, which nobody will have for a
loooong time. And personally I still haven't had time to learn .NET
very deeply, and we haven't ported Fog Creek's two applications from
classic ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET because there's no return on
investment for us. None. It's just Fire and Motion as far as I'm
concerned..."

"the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web
browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most
people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted
to develop almost every significant new application as a web
application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web
applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course
they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the
brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in
their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared;
they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's
no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it
already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich
client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: 'Microsoft is betting
the company on the rich client.'"

"Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since
moved to the web and refuse to move back. Most .NET developers are
ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft's web server...None of
this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its
API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application
development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.
</Joel Spolsky>

The only sentence in the article that I disagree with is:
JS> "ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web
JS> development for ten years and it's really just a
JS> generation ahead of everything out there."

Whereas in my eyes ASP.NET is not a "generation ahead", but merely a
Microsoft rewrite of some well-known Perl modules available years ago
that:
- use templates to generate dynamic web pages and
- encrypt form data.

dotnetforfood

classic ASP rulez!!!