Agreed. Although Office staying Win32 sure doesn't send the signal to others that its worth the effort to move software like that to .NET. Anyway, I'm always surprised how few things seem to be .NET, here nearly 11 years after it was introduced.
.NET has a very good inter-op story for win32. If you started with MFC, WPF, or another framework and then needed to add win32 flourishes you can do so quite easily.
It's quite a different thing to try and retrofit a traditional win32 message pump application with one of these frameworks. Especially if it's in an entirely different language and runtime. Had Office been born in the early 2000s its quite likely they would have tried to use .NET and had the same issues as Longhorn. I think Microsoft did have broad ambitions for the framework, but reality was the tech couldn't handle large scale software at that time and Longhorn failed as a result.
I think your right it is a little unfortunate win32 is needed if you want to make a million LOC desktop application. I don't think there really was anything better for native code up until recently with modern C++. The ugliness of COM and MFC are really due to limitations of C and C++ at the time. Now I don't think there is enough demand to really justify something radical.
.NET Always did reasonably well for web backends, and I think they have the right strategy to keep pushing there.
I think that sentiment comes from Microsoft saying back in the day (if I remember right) that they were going to rewrite much of their user software (such as MS Office) to use .NET.
I think there is migration away from .NET underway, as Windows loses market share to other OSes. Desktop apps are becoming more rare. Web apps are being written in open-source platforms. A lot of the companies still using .NET are large fortune 500 ones, maintaining existing systems. Remember Cobol? I'm almost at the point where I consider .NET legacy. Perhaps, not yet, but maybe in 5 years. Does this mean the well is dry for .NET developers? Not at all. Large companies will pay small fortunes to find people to maintain their legacy systems. Either way, I think it's important for developers to become proficient in multiple programming languages.
I skipped .NET bandwagon for desktop completely. Comparatively to Delphi there were exactly zero business reasons for me to move my code or use .NET for new apps.
On a technical side there were no gains and numerous limitations.
.NET is alive and well in corporate environments. For web development I'd never choose it, however for Windows apps it's my goto. Visual Studio is great.
Is this a real question or a silly jab at Microsoft? I think you're underestimating the number of existing businesses who have .NET at their core, in which case the question is what justifies moving off of .NET? In my experience .NET can be - while not as hip - a very solid framework.
Totally agree. The .NET team itself is probably costing above 100 million every year, probably more. Microsoft is not ditching .NET, they are heavily investing it.
The office division is implementing some code in Rust while the same division just posted a success story of their usage of migrating some low latency server code to .NET Core.
Microsoft is a big company and like any other they use JS, TS, Rust, C++, Python, Go and so on. The only thing they do not use is Java ... And I am not 100% confident there.
So let us congratulate Rust for entering the office domain and stop writing swan songs about .NET.
.NET is not going away anytime soon. If anything I feel this further deprecates silverlight. There is no way that MS expects the majority of apps to be written in HTML+JS, it's just an option to make it easy for those used to HTML+JS to write apps on the platform, in the same vein as writing an HTML+JS app for iPhone. Most serious Windows applications are written in C++ for Win32 anyway, VS which is becoming more and more .NET everyday still has heavy roots in COM/Win32. Office integration is still best done in C++. No these apps aren't whats fueling the consumer web but they make big bucks for the vendors who write them, and ensure platform lockin to Windows as MS tries to transition away from their desktop monopoly.
MS is not stupid enough to pull another Vista and make apps that used to work not work. Even if MS were very serious about transitioning everything to HTML+JS you'd be looking at a 10-15 year timeline. The day you see Office written in HTML+JS is the day to start worrying if you're a Win32 / .NET app developer.
Up until very, very recently .NET was absolutely useless on non-Windows platforms, only supporting the bare minimum APIs you need for web apps. It's still not very useful on non-Windows platforms.
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