Tag Archives: .net

.net, java, microsoft, mono, open source, oracle, professional, software development, Sun

What you are saying about the Java crisis

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A week or so ago I posted about the Java crisis and what it means for developers. The post attracted attention both here and later on The Guardian web site where it appeared as a technology blog. It was also picked up by Reddit prompting a discussion with over 500 posts.

So what are you saying? User LepoldVonRanke takes a pragmatic view:

I’d much rather have Java given a purpose and streamlined from a central authoritative body with a vision, than a community-run egg-laying, wool-growing, milk-giving super cow pig-sheep, that runs into ten directions at the same time, and therefore does not go anywhere. The Java ship needs a captain. Sun never got a good shot at it. There was always someone trying to wrestle control over Java away. With the Oracle bully as Uberfather, maybe Java has a place to go.

which echoes my suggestion that Java might technically be better of under more dictatorial control, unpalatable though that may be. User 9ren is sceptical:

Theoretically, the article is quite right that Java could advance faster under Oracle. It would be more proprietary, and of course more focussed on the kinds of business applications that bring in revenue for Oracle. It would be in Oracle’s interest; and the profit motive might even be a better spur than Sun had.

But – in practice – can they actual execute the engineering challenges?

Although Oracle has acquired many great software engineers (eg. from Sun, BEA Systems, many others), do they retain them? Does their organizational structure support them? And is Oracle known for attracting top engineering talent in general?

In its formation, Oracle had great software engineers (theirs was the very first commercial relational database, a feat many thought impossible). But that was 40 years ago, and now it’s a (very successful) sales-driven company.

There’s an important point from djhworld:

Java is hugely popular in the enterprise world, companies have invested millions and millions of pounds in the Java ecosystem and I don’t see that changing. Many companies still run Java 1.4.2 as their platform because it’s stable enough for them and would cost too much to upgrade.

The real business world goes at its own pace, whereas tech commentators tend to focus on the latest news and try to guess the future. It is a dangerous disconnect. Take no notice of us. Carry on coding.

On Reddit, some users focused on my assertion that the C# language was more advanced than Java. Is it? jeffcox111 comments:

I write in C# and Java professionally and I have to say I prefer C# hands down. Generics are very old news now in .Net. Take a look at type inference, lambdas, anonymous types, and most of all take a look at LINQ. These are all concepts that have been around for 3 years now in .Net and I hate living without them in Java. With .Net 5 on the horizon we are looking forward to better asynchronous calling/waiting and a bunch of other coolness. Java was good, but .Net is better these days.

and I liked this remark on LINQ:

I remember my first experience with LINQ after using C# for my final-year project (a visual web search engine). I asked a C# developer for some help on building a certain data structure and the guy sent me a pseudocode-looking stuff. I thanked him for the help and said that I’d look to find a way to code it and he said "WTF, I just gave you the code".

From there on I’ve never looked back.

Another discussion point is write once – run anywhere. Has it ever been real? Does it matter?

The company I work for has a large Java "shrinkwrap" app. It runs ok on Windows. It runs like shit on Mac, and it doesn’t run at all on Linux.

write once, run anywhere has always been a utopian pipe dream. And the consequence of this is that we now have yet another layer of crap that separates applications from the hardware.

says tonymt, though annannsi counters:

I’ve worked on a bunch of Java projects running on multiple unix based systems, windows and mac. GUI issues can be a pain to get correct, but its been fine in general. Non-GUI apps are basically there (its rare but I’ve hit bugs in the JVM specific to a particular platform)

Follow the links if you fancy more – I’ll leave the last word to A_Monkey:

I have a Java crisis every time I open eclipse.

.net, apple, development, flash, java, microsoft, mono, open source, oracle, professional, silverlight, software development, Sun

The Java crisis and what it means for developers

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What is happening with the Java language and runtime? Since Java passed into the hands of Oracle, following its acquisition of Sun, there has been a succession of bad news. To recap:

  • The JavaOne conference in September 2010 was held in the shadow of Oracle OpenWorld making it a less significant event than in previous years.
  • Oracle is suing Google, claiming that Java as used in the Android SDK breaches its copyright.
  • IBM has abandoned the Apache open source Harmony project and is committing to the Oracle-supported Open JDK. Although IBM’s Sutor claims that this move will “help unify open source Java efforts”, it seems to have been done without consultation with Apache and is as much divisive as unifying.
  • Apple is deprecating Java and ceasing to develop a Mac-specific JVM. This should be seen in context. Apple is averse to runtimes of any kind – note its war against Adobe Flash – and seems to look forward to a day when all or most applications delivered to Apple devices come via the Apple-curated and taxed app store. In mitigation, Apple is cooperating with the OpenJDK and OpenJDK for Mac OS X has been announced.
  • Apache has written a strongly-worded blog post claiming that Oracle is “violating their contractual obligation as set forth under the rules of the JCP”, where JCP is the Java Community Process, a multi-vendor group responsible for the Java specification but in which Oracle/Sun has special powers of veto. Apache’s complaint is that Oracle stymies the progress of Harmony by refusing to supply the test kit for Java (TCK) under a free software license. Without the test kit, Harmony’s Java conformance cannot be officially verified.
  • The JCP has been unhappy with Oracle’s handling of Java for some time. Many members disagree with the Google litigation and feel that Oracle has not communicated well with the JCP. JCP member Doug Lea stood down, claiming that “the JCP is no longer a credible specification and standards body”. Another member, Stephen Colebourne, has a series of blog posts in which he discusses the great war of Java and what he calls the “unravelling of the JCP”, and recently  expressed his view that Oracle was trying to manipulate the recent JCP elections.

To set this bad news in context, Java was not really in a good way even before the acquisition. While Sun was more friendly towards open source and collaboration, the JCP has long been perceived as too slow to evolve Java, and unrepresentative of the wider Java community. Further, Java’s pre-eminence as a pervasive cross-platform runtime has been reduced. As a browser plug-in it has fallen behind Adobe Flash, the JavaFX initiative failed to win wide developer support, and on mobile it has also lost ground. Java’s advance as a language has been too slow to keep up with Microsoft’s C#.

There are a couple of ways to look at this.

One is to argue that bad news followed by more bad news means Java will become a kind of COBOL, widely used forever but not at the cutting edge of anything.

The other is to argue that since Java was already falling behind, radical change to the way it is managed may actually improve matters.

Mike Milinkovich at the Eclipse Foundation takes a pragmatic view in a recent post. He concedes that Oracle has no idea how to communicate with the Java community, and that the JCP is not vendor-neutral, but says that Java can nevertheless flourish:

I believe that many people are confusing the JCP’s vendor neutrality with its effectiveness as a specifications organization. The JCP has never and will never be a vendor-neutral organization (a la Apache and Eclipse), and anyone who thought it so was fooling themselves. But it has been effective, and I believe that it will be effective again.

It seems to me Java will be managed differently after it emerges from its crisis, and that on the scale between “open” and “proprietary” it will have moved towards proprietary but not in a way that destroys the basic Java proposition of a free development kit and runtime. It is also possible, even likely, that Java language and technology will advance more rapidly than before.

For developers wondering what will happen to Java at a technical level, the best guide currently is still the JDK Roadmap, published in September. Some of its key points:

  • The open source Open JDK is the basis for the Oracle JDK.
  • The Oracle JDK and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) will continue to be available as free downloads, with no changes to the existing licensing models.
  • New features proposed for JDK 7 include better support for dynamic languages and concurrent programming. JDK 8 will get Lambda expression.

While I cannot predict the outcome of Oracle vs Google or even Apache vs Oracle, my guess is that there will be a settlement and that Android’s momentum will not be disrupted.

That said, there is little evidence that Oracle has the vision that Sun once had, to make Java truly pervasive and a defence against lock-in to proprietary operating systems. Microsoft seems to have lost that vision for .NET and Silverlight as well – though the Mono folk have it. Adobe still has it for Flash, though like Oracle it seems if anything to be retreating from open source.

There is therefore some sense in which the problems facing Java (and Silverlight) are good for .NET, for Mono and for Adobe. Nevertheless, 2010 has been a bad year for write once – run anywhere.

Update: Oracle has posted a statement saying:

The recently released statement by the ASF Board with regard to their participation in the JCP calling for EC members to vote against SE7 is a call for continued delay and stagnation of the past several years. We would encourage Apache to reconsider their position and work together with Oracle and the community at large to collectively move Java forward.  Oracle provides TCK licenses under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms consistent with its obligations under the JSPA.   Oracle believes that with EC approval to initiate the SE7 and SE8 JSRs, the Java community can get on with the important work of driving forward Java SE and other standards in open, transparent, consensus-driven expert groups.   This is the priority.   Now is the time for positive action.  Now is the time to move Java forward.

to which Apache replies succinctly:

The ball is in your court. Honor the agreement.

.net, adobe, flash, multimedia, professional, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Microsoft pledges commitment to Silverlight – but is it enough?

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Microsoft’s president of Server and Tools Bob Muglia has posted a response to the widespread perception that the company is backing off its commitment to Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform runtime for rich internet applications. He is the right person to do so, since it was his remark that ”Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted” which seemed to confirm a strategy change that had already been implied by the strong focus in the keynote on HTML 5 as an application platform.

Muglia says Silverlight is in fact “very important and strategic to Microsoft”. He confirms that a new release is in development, notes that Silverlight is the development platform for Windows Phone 7, and affirms Silverlight both as a media client and as “the richest way to build web-delivered client apps.”

So what is the strategy change? It is this:

When we started Silverlight, the number of unique/different Internet-connected devices in the world was relatively small, and our goal was to provide the most consistent, richest experience across those devices.  But the world has changed.  As a result, getting a single runtime implementation installed on every potential device is practically impossible.  We think HTML will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across all these devices.  At Microsoft, we’re committed to building the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows, and at the PDC, we showed the great progress we’re making on this with IE 9.

The key problem here is Apple’s iOS, which Muglia mentioned specifically in his earlier interview:

HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.

Muglia’s words are somewhat reassuring to Silverlight developers; but not, I think, all that much. Silverlight will continue on Windows, Mac and on Windows Phone; but there are many more devices which developers want to target, and it sounds as if Microsoft does not intend to broaden Silverlight’s reach.

Faced with the same issues, Adobe has brought Flash to device platforms including Android, MeeGo, Blackberry and Google TV; and come up with a packager that compiles Flash applications to native iOS code. There is still no Flash or AIR (out of browser Flash) on Apple iOS; but Adobe has done all possible to make Flash a broad cross-platform runtime.

Microsoft by contrast has not really entered the fight. It has been left to Novell’s Mono team to show what can be done with cross-platform .NET, including MonoTouch for iOS and MonoDroid for Google’s Android platform.

Microsoft could have done more to bring Silverlight to further platforms, but has chosen instead to focus on HTML 5 – just as Muglia said in his earlier interview.

Whether Microsoft is right or wrong in this is a matter for debate. From what I have seen, the  comments on Microsoft’s de-emphasis of Silverlight at PDC have been worrying for .NET developers, but mostly cheered elsewhere.

The problem is that HTML 5 is not ready, nor is it capable of everything that can be done in Silverlight or Flash. There is a gap to be filled; and it looks as if Microsoft is leaving that task to Adobe.

It does seem to me inevitable that if Microsoft really gets behind HTML 5, by supporting it with tools and libraries to make it a strong and productive client for Microsoft’s server applications, then Silverlight will slip further behind.

adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development, Web, web authoring, windows

Microsoft’s Silverlight dream is over

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Remember “WPF Everywhere”? Microsoft’s strategy was to create a small cross-platform runtime that would run .NET applications on every popular platform, as well as forming a powerful multimedia player. Initially just a browser plug-in, Silverlight 3 and 4 took it to the next level, supporting out of browser applications that integrate with the desktop.

The pace of Silverlight development was unusually fast, from version 1.0 in 2007 to version 4.0 in April 2010, and Microsoft bragged about how many developer requests it satisfied with the latest version.

Silverlight has many strong features, performs well, and to me is the lightweight .NET client Microsoft should have done much earlier. That said, there have always been holes in the Silverlight story. One is Linux support, where Microsoft partnered with Novell’s open source Mono project but without conviction. More important, device support has been lacking. Silverlight never appeared for Windows Mobile; there is a Symbian port that nobody talks about; a version for Intel’s Moblin/Meego was promised but has gone quiet – though it may yet turn up – and there is no sign of a port for Android. Silverlight is no more welcome on Apple’s iOS (iPhone and iPad), of course, than Adobe’s Flash; but whereas Adobe has fought hard to get Flash content onto iOS one way or another, such as through its native code packager, Microsoft has shown no sign of even trying.

In the early days of Silverlight, simply supporting Windows and Mac accounted for most of what people wanted from a cross-platform client. That is no longer the case.

Further, despite a few isolated wins, Silverlight has done nothing to dent the position of Adobe Flash as a cross-platform multimedia and now application runtime. Silverlight has advantages, such as the ability to code in C# rather than ActionScript, but the Flash runtime has the reach and the partners. At the recent MAX conference RIM talked up Flash on the Blackberry tablet, the Playbook, and Google talked up Flash on Google TV. I have not heard similar partner announcements for Silverlight.

Why has not Microsoft done more to support Silverlight? It does look as if reports of internal factions were correct. Why continue the uphill struggle with Silverlight, when a fast HTML 5 browser, in the form of IE9, meets many of the same needs and will work across the Apple and Google platforms without needing a non-standard runtime?

Here at PDC Microsoft has been conspicuously quiet about Silverlight, other than in the context of Windows Phone 7 development. IE9 man Dean Hachamovitch remarked that “accelerating only pieces of the browser holds back the web”, and last night Microsoft watcher Mary-Jo Foley got Server and Tools president Bob Muglia to admit that “our strategy has shifted” away from Silverlight and towards HTML 5 as the cross-platform client runtime, noting that this was a route to running on Apple’s mobile devices.

The Silverlight cross-platform dream is over, it seems, but let me add that Silverlight, like Microsoft itself, is not dead yet. Microsoft is proud of its virtual PDC streaming application, which is built in Silverlight. The new portal for Windows Azure development and management is Silverlight. The forthcoming Visual Studio Lightswitch generates Silverlight apps. And to repeat, Silverlight is the development platform for Windows Phone 7, about which we have heard a lot at PDC.

Let’s not forget that IE9 is still a preview, and HTML 5 is not a realistic cross-platform application runtime yet, if you need broad reach.

Muglia’s remarks, along with others here at PDC, are still significant. They suggest that Microsoft’s investment in Silverlight is now slowing. Further, if Microsoft itself is downplaying Silverlight’s role, it will tend to push developers towards Adobe Flash. Alternatively, if developers do migrate towards HTML 5, they will not necessarily focus on IE9. Browsers like Google Chrome are available now, and will probably stay ahead of IE in respect of HTML 5 support.

I hope these latest reports will trigger further clarification of Microsoft’s plans for Silverlight. I’d also guess that if Windows Phone 7 is a big success, then Silverlight on the Web will also get a boost – though judging from the early days in the UK, the new phone is making a quiet start.

Finally, if Microsoft is really betting on HTML 5, expect news on tools and libraries to support this new enthusiasm – maybe at the Mix conference scheduled for April 2011.

microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development

Lessons from Evernote’s flight from .NET

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Evernote has released version 4.0 of its excellent note-taking product. Software developers have taken particular interest in the blog post announcing its release, because of what it says about .NET, in this case the Windows Presentation Foundation, versus native code:

Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.5 (Windows .net and WPF) was incapable of resolving. As a result, we ended up chasing down platform bugs rather than adding the great features our users wanted.

So we decided to start over from scratch, with fast, native C++ that we knew we could rely on. As you’ll see, the results are amazing. This new version will set a foundation for rapid improvement.

Evernote 4 is designed to give you a great experience on any computer that you use, whether you’re on a netbook, a five year old Windows XP machine or a super fast top-of-the-line Windows 7 computer.

On our test hardware, Evernote 4 starts five times faster, and uses half the memory of Evernote 3.5.

A bit of background. WPF was introduced in Windows Vista and was originally intended to be the main GUI API for Windows, until the notorious reset midway through the Vista development cycle which marked a retreat from managed code back to native code in the operating system. I’d guess that the issues faced by the Evernote team were not so different from those faced back then by the Windows team at Microsoft.

WPF is not only based on .NET. It also uses DirectX and hardware acceleration under the covers, enabling rich multimedia effects. The layout language of WPF is XAML, giving freedom from scaling issues which cause hassles in the native API.

So what are the lessons here? Is WPF no good?

It is not so simple. WPF is brilliant in many ways, offering the productivity of .NET coding and a powerful layout framework. However it was a technology which Microsoft itself hardly used in its key products, Windows and Office – a warning sign.

When Microsoft built Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, the development team used WPF for the Visual Studio shell. This move by an internal team to create such a complex product in WPF was good for the framework itself. The font issue was addressed, performance improved. Evernote might not have found all its issues fixed in version 4.0, but it would likely have been better.

After I tweeted about Evernote’s experience, a couple of Microsoft folk contacted me to make this point. The trouble is, even version 3.5 of WPF was not the first version, and it never sounds altogether convincing if, when a customer complains about your product, you tell them everything is fine in the latest and greatest build. Why did Microsoft not get this right before?

That said, I am sure the latest WPF is better than before, though it is still heavyweight relative to native code. Factors that might suggest a WPF solution include:

  • The application only needs to run on Windows
  • There is no need to support older machines
  • The application makes use of data visualisation or other multimedia effects
  • The development team lacks the resources to build equivalent functionality in native code

The last point is important. Maybe a hotshot team of C/C++ developers could make a better job, but if you don’t have such a team or the money to hire it, it is not so relevant.

There is another possible approach, without abandoning .NET. Silverlight has many of the features of WPF, is lightweight, and runs on the Mac as well as Windows.

google, java, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

Microsoft lets go of IronPython and IronRuby

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Visual Studio corporate VP Jason Zander has announced that IronPython and IronRuby, .NET implementations of popular dynamic languages, are to be handed over to the open source community. This includes add-ons that enable development in Visual Studio, IronPython Tools and IronRuby Tools. Of the two, IronPython is a more mature and usable project.

Why? Here’s a few reflections. For what it must cost Microsoft to maintain these projects, versus the goodwill it earns in the open source world, I would have thought they represent good value and I am surprised to see them abandoned.

On the other hand, it is easy to see that they are not commercial propositions. I’d guess that they were more valuable a few years back, before C# acquired dynamic features, and when dynamic languages were strongly in vogue and Microsoft was keen not to allow .NET to fall behind. To some extent dynamic languages are still in vogue, but we are now well past what is “the peak of inflated expectations” in the Gartner Hype Cycle, and few are likely to abandon .NET because it does not have an official Python or Ruby.

The other reason they are not commercial propositions is that Microsoft has under-invested in them. I recall Martin Fowler at ThoughtWorks telling me that JRuby, an implementation of Ruby for the Java Virtual Machine, is important to their work; it lets them work in a highly productive language, while giving clients the reassurance of running on a trusted and mature platform. JRuby performs very well, but IronRuby is a long way behind. Perhaps if Microsoft had really got behind them, one or both of these language could be equally significant in the .NET world.

The fact that F# rather than IronRuby or IronPython turned up as a fully supported language in Visual Studio 2010 is also significant. After talking to F# leader Don Syme – see the interview here – I understood how F# was important to some of Microsoft’s key customers in the financial world; and I’m guessing that neither Python nor Ruby had that kind of case made for them within the company.

Although it is a shame that Microsoft is withdrawing official support, the clarity of Zander’s statement is better than leaving the projects in limbo. The folk appointed as project leaders are also very capable – Mono guru Miguel de Icaza is on both teams and a great motivator, though it seems unlikely he will have much time to devote to them given his other commitments – and this may actually be good rather than bad news for the projects themselves.

Jim Hugunin, creator of both Jython (Python for Java) and IronPython, is leaving Microsoft for Google, and his farewell is worth a read. He says C# has evolved into a nicer language than Java, but notes:

I like to have a healthy relationship with Open Source code and communities, and I believe that the future lies in the cloud and the web. These things are all possible to do at Microsoft and IronPython is a testament to that. However, making that happen at Microsoft always felt like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole – which can be done but only at major cost to both the peg and the hole.

.net, java, microsoft, mobile, software development, windows

Can Microsoft repeat history and come from behind with Windows Phone 7?

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This week is Windows Phone 7 week. Microsoft is announcing details of the launch devices and operators, and I shall be watching and reporting with interest on the joint press conference with CEO Steve Ballmer and AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega.

But how significant is this launch? I think it is of considerable significance. Mobile devices are changing the way we do computing. It is not only that more powerful SmartPhones and tablets are encroaching on territory that used to belong to laptop and desktop computers. We are also seeing new business models based on locked-down devices and over-the-air app stores, and new operating systems, or old ones re-purposed. It is a power shift.

Despite its long years of presence in mobile, it feels like a standing start for Microsoft. A recent, and excellent, free day of training on developing for Windows Phone 7 was only one-third full. Verizon will not be offering the phone, and its president Lowell McAdam suggests that the market belongs RIM, Google and Apple, and that Microsoft’s phones are not innovative or leading edge.

I disagree with McAdam’s assessment. Although I’ve not yet had a chance to try a device for myself, what I have seen so far suggests that it is innovative. While the touch UI does borrow ideas with which we have become familiar thanks to iPhone and Android, the dynamically updating tiles and the hub concept both strike me as distinctive. What McAdam really means is that the phone might not succeed in the market, and such views from someone in his position may be self-fulfilling.

The application development platform is distinctive too, being based on .NET, Silverlight and XNA. I have followed Microsoft’s .NET platform since its earliest days – which as it happens were on Windows Mobile, in the form of the Common Executable Format – and Silverlight seems to me the best incarnation yet of the .NET client. It is lightweight; it performs well; it has a powerful layout language that scales nicely, and it has all sorts of multimedia tricks and effects. Visual Studio and the C# language form a familiar and capable set of tools, supplemented by the admittedly challenging Expression Blend for design.

Still, having a decent product is not always enough. Palm’s webOS devices were widely admired on launch, but that was not enough to rescue the company, or to win more than a tiny market share.

Microsoft has resources that Palm lacked, and a reach that extends from cloud to desktop to device. It may be that Windows Phone 7 has better chances. The problem is that the company’s recent history does not demonstrate the success in coming from behind that characterised its earlier days:

  • Microsoft came from behind with a GUI operating system, even though Windows was inferior to the Mac’s GUI.
  • Microsoft came from behind with Excel versus Lotus 1-2-3.
  • Microsoft came from behind in desktop database managers with Access versus dBase.
  • Microsoft came from behind in networking and then directory services versus Novell and others.
  • Microsoft came from behind with .NET versus Java, which I judge a success even though Java has also prospered.

I am sure there are other examples. Recent efforts though have been less successful. Examples that come to mind include:

  • Internet Explorer – still the most popular web browser, but continues to lose market share, even though Microsoft has been working to regain its momentum since the release of IE7 in 2006.
  • Zune – now a well-liked portable music player, but never came close to catching Apple’s iPod.
  • Silverlight – despite energetic development and strong technology, has done little to disturb the momentum behind Adobe Flash.
  • Tablets – Microsoft was an innovator and evangelist for the slate format, but Apple’s iPad is the first device in this category that has caught on.
  • Numerous examples from Windows Live versus Google and others.

Now here comes Windows Phone 7, with attention to design and usability that is uncharacteristic of Microsoft other than perhaps in Xbox consoles (red light of death aside). In one sense Microsoft can afford for it to fail; it has strong businesses elsewhere. In another sense, if it cannot establish this new product in such a strategic market, it will confirm its declining influence. The upside for the company is that a success with Windows Phone 7 will do a lot to mend its tarnished image.

.net, microsoft, open source, professional, software development, visual studio

NuPack brings package management to Microsoft .NET

Microsoft has announced the beta release of NuPack, which is a package manager for .NET projects, mainly focused on open source libraries. NuPack itself is open source.

I downloaded NuPack and took a look. It installs as a Visual Studio extension, and I used it with Visual Studio 2010. Once installed, you get a new Add Package Reference option for any .NET project, which opens this dialog:

image

There seem to be around 40 projects currently available, including some familiar names:

  • Castle Inversion of Control
  • fbConnectAuth Facebook Connect authentication library
  • JQuery – though this already appears by default in many ASP.NET projects
  • log4net logging library
  • Moq mocking library
  • NHibernate object-relational mapper
  • NUnit unit-testing framework

Once you find the package you want to add, click install and it is automatically added to your project, complete with any necessary configuration changes. There is also a PowerShell-based console. In some cases it is better to use the console, as a package can add new commands which you can call from there.

NuPack strikes me as a great idea; one comment to Scott Hanselman’s post on the subject calls it GEM for .NET, GEM being the Ruby package manager. That said my quick go with NuPack has not been entirely smooth, and I got an error on my first attempt at adding NUnit to a project, fixed after restarting Visual Studio.

My main reservation is whether Microsoft will really get behind this and support it, or whether it will end up as another promising initiative that after a while is abandoned.

.net, adobe, flash, iphone, java, microsoft, mobile, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Latest job stats on technology adoption – Flash, Silverlight, iPhone, Android, C#, Java

13 Comments

It is all very well expressing opinions on which technologies are hot and which are struggling, but what is happening in the real world? It is hard to get an accurate picture – surveys tend to have sampling biases of one kind or another, and vendors rarely release sales figures. I’ve never been happy with the TIOBE approach, counting mentions on the Internet; it is a measure of what is discussed, not what is used.

Another approach is to look at job vacancies. This is not ideal either; the number of vacancies might not be proportionate to the numbers in work, keyword searches are arbitrary and can include false positives and omit relevant ads that happen not to mention the keywords. Still, it is a real-world metric and worth inspecting along with the others. The following table shows figures as of today at indeed.com (for the US) and itjobswatch (for the UK), both of which make it easy to get stats.

Update – for the UK I’ve added both permanent and contract jobs from itjobswatch. I’ve also added C, C++, Python and F#, (which hardly registers). For C I searched Indeed.com for “C programming”.

  Indeed.com (US) itjobswatch (UK permanent) itjobswatch (UK contract)
Java 97,890 17,844 6,919
Flash 52,616 2,288 723
C++ 48,816 8,440 2470
C# 46,708 18,345 5.674
Visual Basic 35,412 3,332 1,061
C 27,195 7,225 3,137
ASP.NET 25,613 10,353 2,628
Python 17,256 1,970 520
Ruby 9,757 968 157
iPhone 7,067 783 335
Silverlight 5,026 2,162 524
Android 4,755 585 164
WPF 4,441 3,088 857
Adobe Flex 2,920 1,143 579
Azure 892 76 5
F# 36 66 1

A few quick comments. First, don’t take the figures too seriously – it’s a quick snapshot of a couple of job sites and there could be all sorts of reasons why the figures are skewed.

Second, there are some surprising differences between the two sites in some cases, particularly for Flash – this may be because indeed.com covers design jobs but itjobswatch not really. The difference for Ruby surprises me, but it is a common word and may be over-stated at Indeed.com.

Third, I noticed that of 892 Azure jobs at Indeed.com, 442 of the vacancies are in Redmond.

Fourth, I struggled to search for Flex at Indeed.com. A search for Flex on its own pulls in plenty of jobs that have nothing to do with Adobe, while narrowing with a second word understates the figure.

The language stats probably mean more than the technology stats. There are plenty of ads that mention C# but don’t regard it as necessary to state “ASP.NET” or “WPF” – but that C# code must be running somewhere.

Conclusions? Well, Java is not dead. Silverlight is not unseating Flash, though it is on the map. iPhone and Android have come from nowhere to become significant platforms, especially in the USA. Beyond that I’m not sure, though I’ll aim to repeat the exercise in six months and see how it changes.

If you have better stats, let me know or comment below.

.net, adobe, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie: We have 200+ engineers working on Silverlight and WPF

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Microsoft is countering rumours that WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) or Silverlight, a cross-platform browser plug-in based on the same XAML markup language and .NET programming combination as WPF, are under any sort of threat from HTML 5.0.

We have 200+ engineers right now working on upcoming releases of SL and WPF – which is a heck of a lot.

says Corporate VP .NET Developer Platform Scott Guthrie in a Twitter post. Other comments include this one:

We are investing heavily in Silverlight and WPF

and this one:

We just shipped Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 last week, and WPF Ribbon about 30 days ago: http://bit.ly/aB6e6X

In addition, Microsoft has been showing off IIS Media Services 4.0 at the International Broadcasting Conference, which uses Silverlight as the multimedia client:

Key new features include sub-two-second low-latency streaming, transmuxing between H.264 file formats and integrated transcoding through Microsoft Expression Encoder 4. Microsoft will also show technology demonstrations of Silverlight Enhanced Movies, surround sound in Silverlight and live 3-D 1080p Internet broadcasting using IIS Smooth Streaming and Silverlight technologies.

No problem then? Well, Silverlight is great work from Microsoft, powerful, flexible, and surprisingly small and lightweight for what it can do. Combined with ASP.NET or Windows Azure it forms part of an excellent cloud-to-client .NET platform. Rumours of internal wrangling aside, the biggest issue is that Microsoft seems reluctant to grasp its cross-platform potential, leaving it as a Windows and desktop Mac solution just at the time when iPhone, iPad and Android devices are exploding in popularity. 

I will be interested to see if Microsoft announces Silverlight for Android this autumn, and if it does, how long it will take to deliver. The company could also give more visibility to its work on Silverlight for Symbian – maybe this will come more into the spotlight following the appointment of Stephen Elop, formerly of Microsoft, as Nokia CEO.

Apple is another matter. A neat solution I’ve seen proposed a few times is to create a Silverlight-to-JavaScript compiler along the lines of GWT (Google Web Toolkit) which converts Java to JavaScript. Of course it would also need to convert XAML layout to SVG. Incidentally, this could also be an interesting option for Adobe Flash applications.

As for WPF, I would be surprised if Microsoft is giving it anything like the attention being devoted to Silverlight, unless the Windows team has decided to embrace it within the OS itself. That said, WPF is already a mature framework. WPF will not go away, but I can readily believe that its future progress will be slow.