The .NET Vision (aka: the big picture): what are we working towards? [Kit George]

‘What is it that’s preventing, or limiting you from using managed code?’

Andrew Webb — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:22:00 GMT

Nothing's going to stop me from using managed code. But for those people I've talked to who could use .NET but don't... the primary thing that puts them off is the ~20Mb install of the FX distributable. Yes, they can include it with their installer (but they want to have a ~2-4 Mb installer). Yes, users have probably got it already via Windows Update (but you can't rely on that). Yes, a 20Mb download is not a big deal in these days of broadband (but it's still not a no-brainer).

(BTW: I don't know what the baseline for broadband is in the US, but here in the UK it's still 576 Kbps. But this is changing over the next few months; the baseline is soon going to be 2 Meg.)

Anything that can be done to ease the developer's pain of getting the correct, targetted version of the runtime (1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.x...) onto end users' machines should be done IMHO. Now I'm not up to speed on this vis-a-vis Whidbey. You may have made it easier already.

But if not... how about an ultra-small loader of the runtime that's made available as a Critical Update via WU ? It's a no-brainer to get it. It detects attempts to install and/or run managed code, and automatically pulls the correct version of the runtime onto the machine just-in-time. JIT installation of the runtime!

The secondary thing that puts people off using .NET is users' ease of decompilation of their code - their "precious IP" (slight note of sarcasm creeping in). Forget about the Dotfuscator Community Edition (who wants something that's not the best ?). The way to deal with this problem once and for all is to include the BEST obfuscator out there (Demeanor ?) and to give away the full version of it for free. Ideally you - Microsoft - buy the Demeanor product, develop it going forward, and include it with every version of VS.NET.

Now folk could pick holes in the above arguments and suggest good and obvious workarounds or alleviating measures, but I'm talking about fundamentals here. I'm talking about the first-hand experience I've had of talking to people to find out what puts them off and keeps them writing in VB6 or whatever. And it's not the devs who are put off, it's their managers.

My response is not perf-related

Andrew Webb — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:39:00 GMT

Of course, I haven't answered the question in the terms in which it was originally couched - which was mainly performance-related. And my suggestions are probably outside of the remit of the BCL team. But what I'm saying is that, with regards to takeup of managed code, the size of the redist. and the reverse compilation issue are what hinder all the people I've spoken to - not performance.

As a writer of .NET applications, I personally would love to be able to write a beautiful piece of shareware like TextPad, have it be a <2Mb download, and not have to fork out $800 for Demeanor in order to protect my code. But I will (probably) buy Demeanor, because I want protection as much as anyone, although sometimes I think that I'm being a bit silly.

Tips

David Boschmans' Weblog — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 22:16:00 GMT

Tips

Bootstrapper, to Just-In-Time install the CLR

Brian Grunkemeyer — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:36:00 GMT

Mike Sampson from the VB team has written about a bootstrapper to help install the CLR lazily on your clients' machine.

You can read about it here on his blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/misampso/archive/2004/03/11/88402.aspx

re: The .NET Vision (aka: the big picture): what are we working towards? [Kit George]

Ido Samuelson — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 22:18:00 GMT

You guys are doing a hell of a job! although the market needs to "protect" it's code, this not happen even in the j2ee world. Thus, targeting the performance issue is not only more practical but from my experience with clients, much more needed then anything else...besides features :)

Great post!!!

re: The .NET Vision (aka: the big picture): what are we working towards? [Kit George]

Keith Hill — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 20:22:00 GMT

We're shipping managed apps. Our biggest complaint is related to startup time of a winforms app. We have gone back to using splash screens even on a 3 GHz HT pentium. The redist hasn't been too much of an issue although we were very disappointed that XP SP2 didn't just install .NET 1.1 redist. :-) We've also found some bugs on Win98 that don't show up on NT-based systems.

re: The .NET Vision (aka: the big picture): what are we working towards? [Kit George]

Keith Hill — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 20:31:00 GMT

Oh one other big complaint about managed apps is the lack of support for post-mortem debugging. We send minidump error reports home for analysis on our unmanaged apps. We have never been able to get good minidumps from a managed app. This really bites. The best we can do is send back the exceptions and their respective stack traces, loaded module info, running thread info, etc but no local var/parameter values.

Tips

Ido Samuelson — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 19:37:00 GMT

Tips