mlw wrote: > I had the misfortune of having to attend a .NET forum. It was > interesting, it seems like Microsoft is gonna may anyone's dog able to > write web service applications. The catch being that it will only run on > Windows .NET.
Ah, so you were in heck: how was the weather? Seriously, .NET is an interesting platform on many different levels. I think the database layer, ado.net, should be regarded with great suspicion because at some point Microsoft is going to release an OS level data server which will deal directly with the ADO.NET dataset objects and bypass the traditional sql server. Once complete, this 'server' will feed data as raw xml or xml in a quasi-proprietary format, not traditional tabular sql result sets. As it stands right now, they made it deliberately difficult to leverage features from the database outside of queries and transactions. The architecture strongly encourages a disconnected 3-tier model with most of the action happening via c# code, not database widgets. To me, they kind of overdid things and this is hurting .net's adoption by the larger pool of database developers. This is kind of tragic, because C# is an extremely well designed language, even beautiful (designed by the same genius who came up with delpi, btw). In the future, (should Microsoft's plans reach fruition) it is reasonable to conjecture that database needs filled by access right now might no longer require a packaged 'database' engine but would only be a collection of wizards for using the native file system. I think their plans will likely fail because they overestimated: a. IT manager's unhappiness with standard 2-tier client-server data models for small and medium installations, b. enterprise manager's desire to switch gears adopt a new platform (from j2ee, and c: developer support for an xml driven data engine. As for MySQL, the idea of that database providing ado.net enterprise apps is pretty much a joke to me, not much else to say about that. One point about your comment: asp.net + ado.net + IIS (or apache) does not require .net on the client platform (at least right now), unless you return .net objects inline to your web page (like activex), or use client side C# scripting. This deserves clarification because you brought this up in the context of web service applications which can be written for any platform, even linux as the desktop target. Merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
