mlw wrote:
> I had the misfortune of having to attend a .NET forum. It was
> interesting, it seems like Microsoft is gonna may anyone's dog able to
> write web service applications. The catch being that it will only run
on
> Windows .NET.
Ah, so you were in heck: how was the weather?
Seriously, .NET is an interesting platform on many different levels. I
think the database layer, ado.net, should be regarded with great
suspicion because at some point Microsoft is going to release an OS
level data server which will deal directly with the ADO.NET dataset
objects and bypass the traditional sql server. Once complete, this
'server' will feed data as raw xml or xml in a quasi-proprietary format,
not traditional tabular sql result sets. As it stands right now, they
made it deliberately difficult to leverage features from the database
outside of queries and transactions. The architecture strongly
encourages a disconnected 3-tier model with most of the action happening
via c# code, not database widgets. To me, they kind of overdid things
and this is hurting .net's adoption by the larger pool of database
developers. This is kind of tragic, because C# is an extremely well
designed language, even beautiful (designed by the same genius who came
up with delpi, btw).
In the future, (should Microsoft's plans reach fruition) it is
reasonable to conjecture that database needs filled by access right now
might no longer require a packaged 'database' engine but would only be a
collection of wizards for using the native file system. I think their
plans will likely fail because they overestimated: a. IT manager's
unhappiness with standard 2-tier client-server data models for small and
medium installations, b. enterprise manager's desire to switch gears
adopt a new platform (from j2ee, and c: developer support for an xml
driven data engine.
As for MySQL, the idea of that database providing ado.net enterprise
apps is pretty much a joke to me, not much else to say about that.
One point about your comment: asp.net + ado.net + IIS (or apache) does
not require .net on the client platform (at least right now), unless you
return .net objects inline to your web page (like activex), or use
client side C# scripting. This deserves clarification because you
brought this up in the context of web service applications which can be
written for any platform, even linux as the desktop target.
Merlin