>The good news is that a new version of .NET is being created at this very moment! It promises to deliver everything any software developer has ever dreamed of. Or was that what every Microsoft Marketing person has ever dreamed of? Perhaps it will even work! :)
>

Yeah, the MSFT FUD machine has been on overdrive with .Net...

.Net may be good or it may be bad but in the short to medium term, it doesn't matter. .Net is going nowhere. Let me repeat. .Net is going nowhere (IMO).

Rightly or wrongly, here's my reasoning: Regardless of the hype, .Net requires new machines and new OSes for each developer ** and ** for each user (I'm not talking theoretically, but practically. Theoretically you probably can run WinXP in 128 Meg RAM but I wouldn't recommend it...). Hardware inventory turnover for computer makers such as Dell and Gateway are the longest it's been in 10 years. Nobody's buying. That's a fact.

Why? Simply put, the economy. For the most part, companies aren't interested in buying new computers but getting their 15 good computers out of storage and doing something useful.

Here's another bad omen: Gartner just released some study about .Net. To be fair, I haven't read it but I understand the highlights to be like this: Gartner reports that the ROI for .Net doesn't kick in for three to five years. IOW, do .Net work for three to five years and you may, just may, get some of your development money back. Then again, maybe not.

Uhh, that upside is way too risky...

I've seen studies that indicate that software projects will get funded when there's a 10x perceived benefit ** today ** . To repeat, 10 times benefit from current systems today, not some vague benefit five years later.

In the short to medium term, .Net can be safely ignored (again, IMO. And this is coming from someone who will probably take .Net training in September...).

None of this is reflecting on the stability or the benefits of .Net. There's just larger economic factors in play.

Bill Anderson