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发信人: Junhot (倚浩), 信区: Visual
标题: .NET brings the fun back to programming
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (Wed Jul 11 23:28:11 2001), 转信

John O'Donnell Intermediate 07/11/2001

Introduction

Let me introduce myself. I have spent the last 13 years working with P.C
on both DOS and Windows. I have written code in Assembler, Pascal,
C, Microsoft Access, Office VBA, Microsoft Visual Basic, Java and now
C#. I remember running Dos 3.3, Windows 286, 386 and then the excitement
of loading Windows 3.0 on a 386 P.C with 4mb Ram costing roughly 6000
dollars! I also remember logging support calls with Microsoft where
the answer was either to be sent an upgraded printer or video driver.

Software development 13 years ago

Today, we are all comfortable sitting in front of our high powered
computers running graphical user interfaces and compiling code in
sophisticated development environments. Spare a thought then for guys
like me who developed on compilers such as Borland Turbo Pascal.
Imagine writing code today and having to write everything yourself. I
could not just declare a class and suddenly add in printing
functionality. We had to get the printer development tools and write our
own code to create printouts. This author even had pleasure of
designing a font specifically for faxing and did it by building his
own tools.

Like everything though at the time I was sitting in front of my IBM PC
XT compatible computer with a 20MB hardcard and 640k Ram thinking 搘ow I
am really a power user now? Strangely enough I had the same thought
when I finally got a 286, 386, 486 etc

At this point in time Borland was the cool company, IBM was dull and
Microsoft was the underdog. To me and my colleagues Borland produced the
coolest set of tools like Turbo Pascal and Turbo C and a few more which
I can抰 remember. The point was I could write a 20,000 line Turbo
Pascal program and compile it in about two minutes. Of course it didn抰
matter that to write an application could take months as you spent time
writing interfaces or more often than not, menu systems.

In those days of limited computing resources we spent too much time
perhaps, trying to gain an extra few bytes here and there and make our
code run faster. We agonized over languages like Modula-2 and wondered
if switching to compilers from company like Topspeed would speed up
our code. The point was we were working very close to the core of the
computer but were paying the price by producing code where every program
had a different interface and almost always was written from the ground
up rather than utilizing old routines etc.

From command line to Graphical User Interface (GUI)

My first real taste of Microsoft Windows was really Windows 386.
Compared to today Windows product it looked basic but had some
useful functionality. Hands up all those who remember running two
programs at the same time and thinking how cool it was.

Of course all the UNIX gurus out there will be thinking so what, we have
been multi tasking for years. This may be true but Windows bought
multitasking to the masses rather than the techies.

Enter Microsoft Windows 3.0 / 3.1

Windows 3.0 finally was the operating system that really made people
go WOW this is cool. It performed well and more importantly looked
awesome. All the Macintosh people out there said hey it抯 just like
our o/s while we just got on with using it. We were proud DOS users
and would never lower ourselves to using a Macintosh J

Notice something here? Now Microsoft was being seen as being a bit
cooler than before. If only they produced some good apps. Of course with
the release of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word they did. Like it
or not, Microsoft Excel was an amazing product and even had in later
releases a macro language so I could write functions to produce new
calculations ?wow I am a windows programmer?well not quite.

Now I started to hear of Petzold and his C programming book. My
company looked long and hard at Borland and thought when will we be able
to produce applications under Windows? Time went by and for a long time
nothing came out of Borland until the release of Turbo Pascal for
windows. This was a great development system but in reality still
meant you needed to do a lot of work to make anything happen on screen.
If you were new to GUI then the idea of writing an application for
windows was almost your worst nightmare. In those days the number of
PC computing books could be counted on one hand, unlike today where
you could almost run a store just to cater to computer users. So more or
less we started using Windows but kept on writing DOS applications as
before.

C versus Pascal

In the old days C programmers were called the ?ighter pilots?and Pascal
programmers were the ?uiche eaters? We didn care as we coded in
Turbo Pascal 4, we could produce code faster and more reliably and that
all that mattered.

I was not a C programmer and am still not. I guess a background learning
to program in Pascal means you like to code in a certain way and C
programmers like to code in other ways.

Enter Visual Basic

For non C programmers Visual Basic was a miracle. Here was me, a non
C coder and I could not create a Windows application in a matter of
minutes. Okay so the first applications didn look good as we didn
bother to read the Microsoft Windows design guide but at last we were
Windows programmers. Again not quite; with Microsoft Visual Basic we
were given a number of tools like drop down boxes, radio buttons etc
to drag onto our forms but of course when you looked for the tool that
you needed to complete you application, Microsoft had not implemented
it. In light of this a whole industry sprung up overnight around
Visual Basic producing additional tools to use in your applications.

Visual Basic was and still is a strong development system but for my
it got you tantalizingly close to creating a windows app but did not
give you enough control when it was needed.

Microsoft Access and Access Basic

I was developing databases with Borland Paradox when I heard of and
got a copy of Microsoft Access 1.0. Here was a powerful database
development tool that used SQL as its database query language. It gave
me a forms designer, a report writer and queries and it was awesome to
work with. You know what, it was even fun to work with and today that is
something that missing. Programming is a creative process and
should be treated like writing a book. Up until .Net that seemed to be
missing.

Java

How I thought I had finally reached my goal when I heard of Java. True
it could run on many platforms and had strong development features
like object orientation etc. However I wanted to produce a full featured
windows application. Java would let me sort of make a Graphical User
Interface but not a full blown application with all of Windows features.
I walked away frustrated.

Today programmers

Today we have programmers of many different abilities. We have people
who spend all their time writing code in Office VBA to perform mail
merges, calculate spreadsheets and much more. You may laugh but they are
still programming. Next up we have the hobbyist who likes writing
windows applications with terrible interfaces. Chances are he using
Visual Basic and having lots of fun.

Moving up the development ladder we have the professional Visual basic
programmer who maybe works at a bank or some such company. In his
hands a visual basic app can look the same as an app coded in C and I
for one am amazed at what some visual basic developers can achieve in
a quarter of the time of a C programmer.

Climbing further up the software development ladder of success we
reach the C++ programmer. This guy writes robust code that runs
quickly and can put out a great Windows application but takes a lot
longer than the visual basic guy. If your employed as a c++ programmer
you probably think of yourself as a real professional.

At the very top of the tree from a performance point of view is the C
programmer. Even today you can write a complete windows app in C. In
fact if your writing for machines such as a Pocket PC then C is the
way to get maximum performance out of it. Using C means you will take
a lot longer than both the C++ and definitely the Visual Basic guy.

Why are we constantly chasing our tails.

Why in todays society are programmers constantly have to switch
technologies to do a job. Instead of learning one language and being
able to code all development tasks in that language it now means that
you have to look at your latest development task and wonder, okay
which language do I have to know now?

Does my next task require me to know C++ or does it need ASP, VBscript
or Jscript with a smattering of Java. Wouldn抰 it be great to use my
existing skills or even build on top of them?

What I want for software development.

Over the last 13 years or so I have seen many changes in software
development. I have seen attempts to make program development easier and
more reliable however what I have not seen is software development
being fun again. I read Microsoft Systems Journal, I really did, but
reading C++ code using Microsoft Foundation Classes quite honestly
turned me off completely. I could more or less follow the Charles
Petzold style of Windows C programming but the time taken to build an
application made me walk away.

I also have a dream?.

My dream is I wake up in a perfect world where I can turn on any
computer anywhere in the world at any company and be able to write
code on it without have to spend weeks or months learning a new language
or a new development library.

Ahhaa your saying, learn C as that is the only true portable language.
Actually to an extent this is true. You can get a C compiler for
probably every computer out there. However the portability fails when
you want to start writing code for a graphical user interface. Windows
does it one way, Mac does it another and X does it another.

Okay so what about Java? Well its true that Java gives you lots of
graphical functionality, the reality is that java apps have to be
rewritten or hacked around to get them to work because your machines JVM
is not as compliant as you thought. If Sun had succeeded with Java they
would not have needed a 100 percent Java certification program.

I loved java as a language as it was so close to Pascal with a touch
of C but it was not quite what I needed.

I want to be able to write programs that are as sophisticated as the guy
writing Petzold style C programs using Win32 API calls. However I don抰
want to take years to do it.

Enter .NET

Imagine that perfect world. I an ex Pascal programmer, youe a C
coder, your colleague thinks Visual Basic is cool, his friend actually
is quiet old and programs in Cobol.

Can these people ever co-exist in a development environment? They can
with .NET

The idea behind .NET is that you write in what whatever supported
language you want and use the same compiler. So I could write in C++
or you could write in Visual Basic but we would run the same code and
more or less output the same runtime.

This gets better. Rather than use existing languages, Microsoft has
added a new language to the fold and called it C#. This language is like
taking Pascal, Java and a smattering of C++ and mixing them in a huge
software development pot. The result is a clean easy to use language and
should be considered a next step up from Visual Basic. In fact I
would say that C# should be taught in place of where Pascal used to be.

So imagine this. The next release of Microsoft Windows you install has a
new runtime called the .NET CLR or common language runtime. You write
your application in either C++, Visual Basic, C#, Cobol or many others
and compile to something called MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language)
and this is fed through the CLR and produces your app. In fact you can
actually look at the resulting MSIL code and see it bears more than a
resemblance to assembler!! In fact you could even code an entire
application for .NET in MSIL using nothing more sophisticated than
Microsoft Notepad.

Consider this, Today if I want to write an app I would write in VB, if I
want to code a web page I will use asp, if I want to write a Windows NT
Service server I will use C or C++. .NET gives me the ability to use
the language I am most familiar with.

Good grief we can all use the same libraries and produce the same
output. No longer will the C++ programmer scoff at me because his apps
are more powerful. Now I am a C# programmer and nobody kicks sand in
my face anymore

The story doesn stop here though

Imagine Microsoft produced their runtime for other platforms?

Imagine the CLR on Apple OSX, FreeBSD, Linux or Solaris. Youe
getting the picture? Maybe now we can get to a point where we really can
use one language across an entire of computers.

If your are coding in .net perhaps you too are thinking wow this is
fun again. Microsoft have given me a great language and also a rich
feature set. I can extract data across the web and analyse it using 10
lines of code.

All the java people out there are probably saying, wait a minute what
your talking about is Java. While its true that the promise of Java
was great, the execution was lousy. Whether you like it or not
Millions of programmers create Windows programs. If Sun had wanted
Java to succeed they should have made it possible to use Java and all
the richness of the Window O/S. What we were stuck with were very
basic classes and no chance of producing a rich Windows application in
Java.

I hope that some day I can switch on an Apple Macintosh running OSX, a
P.C running FreeBSD or Linux and be able to write a C# program just as
easily as I can under Windows.

Conclusions

With .NET Microsoft has created an extremely rich programming
environment however Microsoft has a larger opportunity. By now most of
you will have seen that Fujitsu are bringing out COBOL for .NET. The
opportunity for Microsoft is to deliver a programming platform to
whoever needs to write a program, not just to the guys writing windows
applications

I firmly believe .NET and the CLR is the most exciting technology to
have come out of Microsoft and I hope you抣l join me in congratulating
them on a job very well done.

Programming just became fun again.

--
战意渐去，红尘琐事不关己，归隐故里。
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