The benefits of .NET
In an economic climate where IT Directors are having to rigorously justify their investments and where businesses are looking for clear evidence of positive ROI and improved competitiveness before sanctioning expenditure, developers are having to deliver faster, better, cheaper development in order to keep their customers. Microsoft's launch of the Visual Studio NET framework and Visual Studio tool set, which radically cuts the time and cost of systems development, could not have been more timely, nor more welcome.
The benefits of .NET
The .NET environment allows today's architects, analysts and developers to spend more time and effort focusing on their clients' business issues and less time wrestling with the limitations of the technology itself. This alone is good news for IT Directors. Furthermore, .NET is at its best when it is being deployed against new business processes which take full advantage of today's interconnected world.
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.NET is exceptional at building transactional, interactive web sites using ASP.NET. It allows the architect to design rich and complex interfaces within a browser environment and it can deliver these without the programmer having to make extensive use of client side or server side scripts. This means that many internal business systems can now be rolled out targeting browser front ends.
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.NET is excellent for web service based applications, both as a consumer and provider of web services.
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.NET's ability to use the same code across all environments, server, internet, desktop and mobile device makes the targeting of multiple devices a relatively simple matter and the integration of mobile devices with central systems, for example, a far less daunting task than with previous or alternative development environments. |
Although it is easy to produce interactive, transactional web sites with .NET, the drag and drop nature of the tool, linked with the event-driven model (familiar to VB Programmers) also means that prototype applications can quickly become production applications.
Faster, better, cheaper development
.NET delivers:
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Faster development of applications that work for businesses
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Faster performance for interactive transactional internet applications
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Flexibility to use developers across different target solutions, thanks to their use of the same development environment, APIs (or objects) and languages.
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.NET delivers:
Easy deployment of the end solutions, (in developer jargon, "the end of DLL hell").
One development environment that targets all platforms: from services on the server or client to console applications, internet applications, ASP.NET components, web services, enterprise transactional components, GUI components, Windows applications, Pocket PC applications and Smart-Phone Applications.
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Abstraction from low level programming, greater architectural choice, full Object Orientation
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Choice of language, depending upon internal skills (VB, C# or C++)
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Scalable architectures
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Built-in support for XML and Web Services. Plus the intrinsic capability to build and use XML and Web Services, making .NET a future-proofed platform
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Ability to choose architectures that are robust, reliable and secure
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Security features integrated within the frameworks
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The .NET framework is to be embedded into the next release of SQL Server, and the next release of MS Office |
.NET delivers
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cheaper development - significantly less time is needed to develop applications within .NET compared with previous languages
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cheaper deployment - deployment can be done through the browser. Conflicts with other suppliers' code are rare and there are no DLL conflicts as with Windows API programs
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cheaper maintenance - if you are writing an ASP.NET solution, all you need is a Windows Server, running IIS. No additional costs are required (unlike J2EE, where you need the server and operating system, and an application server to run the application) |
Implications for systems architects
With all these advantages, one can't help but wonder if there is a corresponding downside to .NET? In creating c# and vb.net Microsoft have substantially eased the learning curve for programmers wishing to use NET. However, for the system architect the situation is more complex. .NET has architectural possibilities that simply were not available in VB6. Understanding how to make best use of these is a challenge both for them and for designers: how should code be written to maximise its portability from web server to handheld? When should entity classes be used instead of typed datasets? What data access strategy should be employed for different components?
The power and flexibility of .NET means that architects are offered a much wider range of options than before. The existence of such choices is exciting, and yet the challenge remains of gaining the understanding and experience required to make informed decisions. It not only takes time and real world development experience to use .NET. but also when developing in .NET the importance of using an experienced systems architect is far greater than before, if the full potential of the environment is to be realised. .
NET versus J2EE
There are three main areas that need to be considered when comparing .NET and Java: the languages, (and the way in which the languages run), the enterprise architectures delivered with the languages, and the way the development is carried out. Considering all these together, I can only come to one conclusion: I would choose .NET over Java, since it allows me to deliver business benefit more quickly.
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Java and .NET are both part of an evolution in the way software is now being developed. When you look at the basic fundamentals of Java and .NET as actual languages and also at the way in which they work, there is little difference: both have runtimes and class libraries and both are true object-oriented implementations. I enjoy programming in both languages, and both will be here for a long time to come. The passage of time will show that just as machine code and assembly language are rarely used by today's developers, the 3GL languages, Pascal, Fortran, C, C++ will be confined in the future to specialist niche areas
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Over and above the languages, Java and .NET are complex to grasp, unless you have been programming in an object-oriented fashion for years. When you look at Java application servers, and the set of choices offered by J2EE with Entity Beans, Session Beans, or J2ME with its different profiles, there is a bewildering set of options to consider. At present, however, although it has a complex set of options, .NET is cleaner, it has one framework to develop internet sites, rather than three: java servlets, JSP and STUTS, and overall, compared to J2EE, it has a relatively simple set of architectural choices, while still offering challenges for the Enterprise Architect
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It is only when you examine the way developers work that you see where Microsoft's investment in producing an outstanding development toolset - Visual Studio.NET - has really paid off. The toolset allows the developer to produce solutions quickly. Personally, I consider the .NET development environment to be a major improvement over previous versions and better than any of the Java toolsets I have seen or used. Although there are a large number of programs written with VB6, C++ (and the MFC), embedded Visual Tools, and Visual Interdev, these must now be considered legacy applications. I would recommend that you do all new developments using Visual Studio .NET 2005 – one tool for all solutions rather than four for different types of solution |
Conclusion
As a business analyst, solution developer and leader of large development teams who has developed in C++, Java, Smalltalk, PowerBuilder and VB, I feel confident that I can deliver faster, cheaper and greater business benefit using the .NET tool-set than using any other development environment.
