I'll reply to both Steve and Steven. On Saturday 12 November 2005 12:00 pm, Steve Graegert wrote:
On 11/12/05, Steven T. Hatton
wrote: On Saturday 12 November 2005 12:56 pm, Kai Ponte wrote:
Yes, the C# and CLI were submitted to the ECMA back in '01 or '02, fairly soon after they announced .net. They hoped that someone like Miguel would come along and write a competing product to VS.net so that they could say it was an "open" standard.
I'm actually using this information in my arguments at work as to why we should move from VB to C# (as opposed to moving to VB.NET). I have been patiently explaining that we could leverage the C# to run on our new mainframe (IBM z890) as back end or middleware while running C# clients on the desktops (mostly running Windows).
My brief exposure to Mono indicated to me that it's not yet all there. That was a few months back, but it's hard for me to believe they've made the kind of progress it would take to get it polished. Quite honestly, I'm not sure C# is the best thing going for the CLI. As much as I dislike the idea of corrupting C++ in spirit and form, I have the impression that C++/CLI may prove the better language.
What would be the rationale behind using C++ in .NET?
AFAIK, there isn't one really. We've breached the idea of usin C++ in .net but realized quickly there's almost no value.
It's ironic that Microsoft is not touting this technology when a few years back they went out of their way to destroy the browser market for a company that had the lead in platform abstraction. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/reference/html/index.html
Don't see any parallelism here. Could you please elaborate on your thoughts.
Honestly never heard of NSPR. I somehow doubt that was the rationale for destroying Netscape's market share. IIRC, it was simply a matter of survival. If MS didn't have a browser that they couldn't dominate with then Sun, et. al. would grab more market share.
Qt also provides some of the same functionality the CLI provides.
Really? What would that be? Are you talking about language bindings?
I'd like to find out, too. I appreciate Qt and will make it my next language to use. I've never used C++ but will soon learn. I've moved from VB (since '93) to PHP and Java and am ready to take on either C# or C++. I really like the Qt and KDevelop interface designers. Once I finish my current Java project (donutmonster.com) I'll move onto a C++ learning project.
I find Qt quite nice to work with. It took me a bit of getting used to, but once I got the hang of it, I started to perceive the underlying unity of the toolkit. Not to say I'm an expert by any means. It's a lot simpler than Java. That means that sometimes I have to build things that Java would provide for me. OTOH, some of what Java provides is fairly difficult to figure out. For instance, their tables and trees.
Besides Windows Forms, which has a eliminated a lot of the Swing problems, Java is one of the most powerful and easy to use platforms for GUI development. While Qt and C++ can't compete in this discipline, speed of execution is unmatched, of course.
Powerful, yes. Easy, ha! :) I dunno. I'm still struggling with it. Of course, I've been lazy the past few years doing stuff without strong typing in PHP and ASP before that.
IMHO, for development of native UNIX applications, C/C++ is still the one and only tool, although I prefer GTK+ over Qt, but that is another issue.
Of course, I've yet to see a decent looking GTK+ app. LOL! -- kai www.perfectreign.com linux - genuine windows replacement part