posted 22 years ago
From a superficial point of view, .NET promises to be an easy-to-use means of developing web applications. Microsoft recently claimed that a .NET webapp was 1/4 the complexity of an equivalent Java app. Of course, they didn't say if it was - like so many MS apps - 1/4 as secure and 1/4 as reliable.
My greatest concern is that .NET is an awfully ambitious leap ahead and hasn't yet shown it can handle the technical challenges. And, until the legal challenges come to an end, there's no real guarantee that key parts of .NET may not end up requiring a radical redesign. Microsoft's not known for being overly interested in backwards compatibility. VB.Net may be one of the more visible examples, but long before that, I was getting nicked by incompatabilities between C++ releases.
But you can read all this and more here at the Ranch - you're not the first to ask, so fire up the "search" and look for ".NET".
Often the most important part of the news is what they didn't tell.