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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Microsoft's new software development tools are more than just nifty -- they are a great boon to humanity.
Feb 14, 2002 | In 1454, Johann Gutenberg changed the world forever when the first of his Bibles rolled off the world's first printing press. Three centuries later, in 1791, Charles Babbage was born. Best known for his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, his work is widely acknowledged as providing the earliest steppingstones from which the modern computer would emerge. Again, the world would never be the same.
William Henry Gates arrived on the planet in 1955. Whether you love him or detest him with every ounce of your moral fiber, there is no denying the contribution Bill has made to this earth. Without Microsoft, the PC we have today would be a very different beast. Without Microsoft, ".Net" would be just another domain name suffix.
Bill Gates has already changed the face of the world as we know it, but his magnum opus has yet to be fully appreciated. On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled Bill's greater masterpiece -- in the guise of the Visual Studio.Net development tools suite.
It would be easy to dismiss this as just another Microsoft product launch, just another example of the Redmond behemoth rolling ever onward in its quest to gain enough funds to brand a continent. Don't. Visual Studio.Net will have as profound an effect on the way that we live our lives as the labors of love Babbage and Gutenberg gave us. To dismiss Visual Studio.Net and the technology it encompasses is to go back in time and dismiss Henry Ford's automobile as a passing fad.
Visual Studio.Net is going to change the world -- no doubt about it -- so it's time to suck it up and jump on the bandwagon. Microsoft says so. The world's largest companies also say so. Even some of the free software movement's most vocal advocates are saying so.
First, let's get the myth out of the way. .Net is not a product. It's a marketing term, a brand applied to a whole bunch of technologies, all of which Visual Studio.Net makes available to developers today. .Net is a platform based around open standards such as XML (for managing self-describing data), SOAP (for XML-based, Internet-wide component reuse) and UDDI (for locating and deploying other "Web services" based on these standards). .Net is also a framework, a set of objects that developers can reuse over and over again in their code to take the grind out of their daily work.
But most of all, .Net is a vision, a vision where applications will run on the most suitable client -- most suitable from the point of view of the user, whether that client be a desktop PC, hand-held computer, refrigerator, mobile phone or probably even the dog's collar when some inventor gets around to it.
Right now, the Web is no more than a mirror image of the bad old mainframe days with dumb clients speaking to central all-powerful servers. .Net will free us from that. .Net is about your data and your applications running anywhere, on any device, at any time. .Net is about freedom to share information, freedom to get at and manipulate data in the ways that you want to manipulate it. .Net is the future.
