what do I know

With my latest employer, I have taken the big dive into the .NET world. I’ve spent most of my career working with ColdFusion, Java, PHP, Flex and dabbled a little bit in the Ruby/Rails and Groovy/Grails world in addition to the obvious set of web technologies and standards that span all of these application languages. My limited experience with .NET was through some undergraduate and graduate work I did with C# as well as helping (if you can call it that) with an ASP.NET a long time ago with a colleague of mine. I am a application developer; even though I dabble in lots of different areas, the bulk of my knowledge is building applications in a corporate IT environment. I focus on implementing business requirements and managing technical concerns as it relates to the software development process. I’ve had jobs in the past associated with business and management roles but at the core I am a plain and simple application developer. As I’ve been getting my hands dirty in .NET over the last few months I figured I’d share some of my initial impressions. Please keep in mind, I may be looking at a lot of things in a very naive light, so read what I have as my opinion, ignorant or not.

With context out of the way, I have to say that so far working with .NET hasn’t been a negative experience. There is the whole you’re stuck with Windows thing, but since I’m in fully entrenched in the MS world now, I’ve been able to get past it. There have definitely been some nuances to get used to, but nothing extremely difficult to overcome. Here are a few comments on some of the things I’ve run into thus far:

• Namespaces in C# aren’t constrained by the file system with respect to partitioning your code. Initially this seemed like a nice decoupling, but I’ve found myself forming more of a dependency on tools to navigate my classes hierarchy rather than just looking into a folder.
• There is no notion of a shared class path as there is in Java. If you want to get a hold of an assembly to use in your application you’ve got to find it and pull it in. I think there is a configuration option on an assembly that you can use to help, but I haven’t had any experience using it.
• Assemblies are pretty nice build artifacts. Versioning is addressed out of the box and integrated with the .NET framework. I’m not sure how they stack up against something like OSGI, but I’m enjoying having them around.
• Everyone says the implementation for generics is better in C# than Java, but as an application developer I don’t notice a difference except that I’ve been told I can use reflection on them in C#. C# also seems to have made a much larger use of them in their core over Java. It seems like stronger typing is a very important practice in the C# world than in my experience with the Java world, but that is probably biased based on how I’ve used Java.
• There appears to be a very balanced view on uses for metadata (attributes) in .NET. Annotations in the Java world were a great addition to the language, but sometimes their use comes off as abuse; look at a JUnit 4 test suite class for a great example.
• There are lots of accepted libraries available that are direct ports from the Java community such as NUnit, NAnt, Spring.NET, CruiseControl.NET, NDocs, log4net, etc. Getting comfortable with these libraries was pretty easy since I’d had experience with the Java equivalents.
• The help systems in .NET leave much to be desired and make me long for Javadocs, Livedocs, RDoc, or anything else. I find myself clicking through a class definitions on MSDN and after two or three links I can finally get to a list of “members” that belong to a class, only to click another link to load another page to see more about the details of that “member”. I have yet to find any easily usable API documentation.
• .NET has a solid component model available out of the box. WCF is a really simple and tight implementation of a component architecture. Service-orientation is a focus with an emphasis on abstracting away protocols, execution environments, and exposing metadata for a more contractual usage. It has the feel of being an API built around WSDL 2 and many of the WS-* standards, but it goes by many of the concepts, although not by name, identified in Patterns of Enterprise Integration. It’s compatible with synchronous and asynchronous operations and did I mention simple to use? I hope to do some posting about it later.
• Getting used to assimilating applications into the bowels of the OS seems to be core to the .NET mentality. This is probably just a matter of perspective for the developer, but based on the examples I’ve seen thus far, the user folder, the registry, and Windows\system32 folder are popular hang outs for lots of applications. I’ve been met by quite a looks of confusion when I mention deploying applications without the use of some type of installer. There is a lot of power that you get from this tight coupling with the OS I’ve been told. Unlike my previous shops, writing cross-platform applications doesn’t seem to be a priority for .NET developers, so tight coupling it is.
• It took me listening to the episode of SER with Anders Hejlsberg to understand better it, but it appears to be that developing in .NET is meant to be an IDE integrated experience via Visual Studio. Regardless of the aspect of development I’ve worked with in .NET thus far, the development experience has been fairly consistent. There is always some visual representation of the code available (where applicable) and a debugger is always around and working no matter the context (desktop, web, etc.). At first it was so simple that I felt like I was missing something, but from what I have read and heard, as much work goes into VS as does the .NET framework, if not more. If anyone has used Netbeans for Java web development, it’s a very similar experience in terms of its integration with the environment.
• I’ve always seen code insight as a supplemental thing, relying on documentation for the majority of my work, but wow, code insight (intellisense) seems to be the major crutch on which a lot of .NET developers place themselves within VS. What’s weird is that I don’t notice anything different than what you’ll experience when working with Eclipse and Java, in fact, the code insight seems to be limited to code only. I have yet to run into a situation where the IDE makes a suggestion on how something could be written or changed as IntelliJ does for Java. I will admit though, maybe I’m missing something.
• The visual editors in VS seemed to get abused by .NET developers. I say abuse because quite a few .NET developers I’ve encountered can’t talk to me about their code in any other context but how they dragged-and-dropped controls onto a screen and edited properties. Since I don’t know the in’s and out’s of the tools quite yet, having a conversation is tough. I try to communicate in terms of language agnostic principles and patterns but most of the time all I get are blank stares and judgmental comments about how I am over complicating things.
• MS alternatives exist in terms of the IDE and runtime, but they don’t seem to be popular at all. I really like SharpDevelop as an alternative to Visual Studio. It’s clean, easy to use, and integrates with a lot of OSS packages out of the box. Mono is available as a Linux-based .NET runtime that has a lot of .NET developers excited because of its potential to allow them to code for the Mac. I don’t know any Mac owners that have Mono installed however, so I don’t know if it’s really a viable cross-platform solution.
• I have some thoughts on ASP.NET web forms that I want to share, but I’ll save that for my next post.
• The developer community has always been important to me and I feel it’s always important to remain active in the community in some capacity. As I’ve begun attending the local .NET user group meetings, I don’t see a lot of topics that are not MS centric. There is no question that MS drives the releases of the .NET framework, but there have been lots of innovations coming out of the community that deserve attention. It feels like there are only a small minority of developers that actually utilize these contributions locally. I have yet to see any presentations on the various unit testing tools, build tools, ORM, IoC, etc. that have come out of this space. I do envy the direct support that MS has for its user groups, but I wonder if my expectations are too high.

In any case, so far the learning curve with .NET hasn’t been very steep and when I do get to code I feel fairly productive. I should be posting in the next few days on my thoughts about ASP.NET web forms so I’m sure that will get me flamed, but it’s a major part of the puzzle I’m having to work with that I feel needs some attention. Until next time.

Tags: .net, actionscript, coldfusion, java, javascript, microsoft, visual studio

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