Apps.NET.Already?
Most of what's out there are development tools, but that's not all. There are many Web sites, Web services, and even software products. Consider Australian company Active Data Online, a company formed to sell .NET software and already in business. They are already selling ASP.NET software. Well, I don't know if they've actually sold any, but they have it for sale. It may even work well now, but buying it now is a commitment to an adventure, to being a test site both for Active Data Online and for Microsoft. Dart Communications is selling TCP/IP tools for .NET already. And you can already subscribe to Web services that perform tasks, like the "Tee-Times" service that lets you reserve time at a golf course.
One of the companies already relying on .NET is Microsoft, which is kind of reassuring when you think about it. In fact, after David Berlind reported information about a crash of a Microsoft .NET Web site, several readers wrote us to say that they took comfort in the fact that Microsoft was actually using and relying on the beta of its own products.
I guess I'm not surprised that Microsoft is using and relying on its own beta products. (There's a long-standing tradition at Microsoft that NT architect David Cutler called "eating our own dog food.") If Microsoft is going to pitch something to the world, they should at least have the courage to use it themselves. They did this with NT and Windows 2000 long before Windows .NET.
It's quite another matter for third parties to eat Microsoft's dog food while it's still cooking. Where did we get the idea that customers should spend time and money testing a vendor's product for them? Admittedly, the software industry has always been different in this way, and the complexity of software products argues for it. And to be fair, Microsoft hardly invented this practice. I suppose it was Netscape that invented Internet Time and the notion that there's no difference between the latest development version and a tested release version. And to be really fair, even when something is tested and labeled "release" it doesn't mean that it's perfect. Just a couple weeks ago Linus Torvalds released a new Linux kernel only to discover a couple days a couple days later that it had a serious bug in it. He fixed it and upped the version number quickly.
I should warn you all that I'm on the edge of hypocrisy here: For the last couple years I've been mostly living on beta Microsoft operating systems, starting with Windows NT 5 beta 2 (later Windows 2000). They have been very stable for me; I honestly think that the later betas of Windows 2000 were much more stable than the release version of Windows NT 4. The only times Windows XP betas have crashed on me were when loading unsigned device drivers. Why shouldn't the .NET Framework be stable enough for other people to use?
I'll tell you why: If it were finished they wouldn't be calling it "beta." I'm a one-man shop, and if some beta screw-up causes me to lose some work and time I can kick myself for making a mistake. But I won't have employees sitting around and I probably won't delay my customers much (I have enough extra systems around here and I perform backups constantly). Unlike me, most of you work for real companies with real customers and real stockholders. You have to take your computing infrastructure seriously.
There's a big difference between implementing/relying on a beta product and testing it. Like many a Microsoft product before it, .NET already has a vibrant development community built around it. If you're interested, the best starting point is http://www.gotdotnet.com/. There you'll also find some of the third party resources I mentioned.
You can find a large collection of language products for .NET at the GotDotNet Resource Center. Apparently, nobody's stupid enough to try to compete against Microsoft for C/C++, but there is Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, Perl and Python products, plus others for a lot of oddball computer-sciencey languages like Eiffel, Haskell, Scheme, and ML.
Things are definitely different with .NET in terms of actual use. Microsoft told me months ago that they'd had so many requests from customers who actually wanted to implement Web sites on .NET that they modified the license to allow for it. In fact, there are even .NET hosting services available. Microsoft has been very liberal about distributing free CDs of the beta .NET SDK--you can download it (127MB) for free, or find it on CDs included with magazines. Next week's annual Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles will be dominated by .NET issues.
Speaking of hypocrisy, let me get back to my original thesis that Microsoft betas have been getting more stable and reliable over the last few years. You'd still be a fool to let some aspect of your business actually rely on them, but it is getting easier these days to develop for new platforms early. You'd probably be a fool to avoid them.
What's your take on using the .NET Framework while it's still in beta? E-mail Larry or post your thoughts in our Talkback forum below.