I ask you all, will XP and .NET spell doom for us all? Will Microsoft complete their plans of world domination with the release of these technologies? Is this the end or there life after XP? Since I am not Nostradamus I cannot say but listen to what I have to say: I have been hating Windows and Microsoft ever since I began using their products (oh the good old days of the C64). I heard that Win NT4 is supposed to be so *stable* and good. Well I can tell you that after about 6 months of using it I began to get crashes. At first programms crashed with stupid "This program tried to access memory at location 0x0000, the memory could not be read" kind of errors (in Winamp, Office 2k and Total Annihilation among others). Then I began to get Blue Screens of Death. One thing that would always give me BODs was runnig Winamp and then running a DOS game that I made using Allegro. With Win NTs long bootup times this is very BAD. Then I got weird crashes where the screen would go white. Also at the same time Office2k was crashing whenever I would go to help or use some of the wizards (not good when you are doing a project for university and you find that Excel will always crash when you try to use the graph wizard). Eventually Windows crashed so badly that it couldn''t recover and kept telling me that some vital .dll was missing or corrupt. So I reinstalled it and now it works again though it has already crashed a few times. On my new computer I have Win2K and that has actually been working but I have only had it for a few months. So you say move to Linux. I installed RH Linux but guess what? The modem doesn''t work in it and the modem drivers I have are all for Windows only. And then there is DirectX which I like much better then OGL and Visual Studio which is perhaps the only M$ product that I have no complaints about yet. Almost everything M$ makes seems to screw up (can anybody tell me why IE5.5 will not let me into Hotmail and gives me freaky "DANGEROUS ACTIVEX CONTROL" alerts all the time even on lowest security setting?). At the same time I have found that many things about M$ are good, like the fact that we have one dominant OS because of them which means programs will run on almost all computers (except for the incompatabilities between 9x and NT which may finally be solved in XP). Anyway, now that I have covered the past I will try to glimpse into the future (using logic and not magic powers I''m afraid): WindowsXP will not be as menacing as it sounds or Microsoft will go bankrupt as everyone will use Linux instead. Microsoft will implement .NET and after their server crashes for the 3rd time and companies loose $8billion in lost productivity Microsoft will revert back to the old style software (or they go bankrupt). Microsoft products will continue to crash and we will continue to have to put up with it because we don''t really have much of a choice. Now what does XP stand for any way? -eXperience Points? Not likely. -eXPensive? Maybe. -eXtra Problems? -XenoPhobic? Anyway, I doubt that WinXP and .NET will last if they are at all as nasty as what I have heard but lets assume they are (always assume the worst of a Microsoft product) then will Linux be able to save us? Will it rise to clense us all from the evil that is M$? Is it up to the challange of leading us into a new era of computing? Saddly it is not. It is good but not good enough. It may still reach maturity in time but the chances are slim. If M$ goes ahead with XP and .NET then we may all be doomed and the computer world may well be dipped into chaos with rival OSes fighting for supremacy as M$ struggles to hold onto the thrown. Rogue hackers will release viruses to wipe out systems running one OS or another and computers will become virtualy useless. Alternatively we may just find that we have to live with the Microsoft vision forever simply because we have no other choice. Sorry about the long rant but I had to get all that out of my system. Ahhh, I feel better already. 150 Brownie points to anybody who actually read all that. Whew, well I guess that''s it folks. I could write pages about this topic but I will restrain myself. Now it is your turn... -Xargon, Master of the Infinite Void.

XP = eXPerience. (Bill Gates got laid... finally )

Personally I''m sticking to Win2K & BeOS... my two favourite operating systems in the whole world.

You think Visual Studio is good. BeOS''s dev tools *drools* are *drools more* sweet. *drools again*.

I don''t think that the OS market will split as much as you predict, because software is generally developed for windows, so unless we want to rewrite 50 billion trillion lines of code... it''s pretty likely we''ll be sticking with Window''s for a while. Wine is a good attempt to "rewrite" window''s api''s... whether it will be good enough is another story.

w00h00 brownie points galore

BeOS dev tools... Have you used the Visual Studio .NET Beta 1 package yet? There is now only one fully integrated IDE for each development environment. Toolbar Windows can autohide themselves (like the option for the Win9x/2000 taskbar). Much better class browsing support (ala ClassView etc). Help system is more integrated. .NET supports system classes/packages instead of a collection of silly Win32 APIs (some of them redundant). C# is looking just that, sharp. Visual Basic just rocks now. WinForms make developing GUI applications simplistic in ALL languages (no more dialog editor for C++ programs). It is very VB-esque like for developing forms - yet we have the nitty gritty power of straight Win32 GUI application development.

Personally I'm excited about the possibilities of .NET. I just need to find more time to get up to speed on the details.

Instead of bashing it from the reports you are reading, you should try using it (especially Visual Studio .NET Beta 1).
I myself always said that Win2K (now with SP2) will be enough of an OS for me. It is very stable, fast, and everything I need. Still, Windows XP is really starting to look interesting, from a programmers point of view...

BTW In my opinion Office XP looks incredible.


Dire Wolf
www.digitalfiends.com

Edited by - Dire.Wolf on May 21, 2001 1:12:14 PM

I am not very excited about the whole software as services thing, BUT the .net framework seems to be quite an intersting developper platform :

You can mix any of the supported languages inline. Also you can derive a class in VB from a class made in C++ and vice versa with other supported languages. Of course, you have to restraint yourself, like in my example, the C++ class cannot inherit from multiple classes. But this is easy to workaround.

All the languages can now be used for web application because you have the possibility to compile them to byte code.(which is open, so someone could easy write an interpreter for any other platforms).

Actually .NET doesn't use byte code. It uses MSIL, which is an assembly-esque language with OOP support. The .NET framework compiles the code to the native system dynamically from that...so it runs much faster than byte code.

Dire-
Beta 2 is even better. 1/3 the load time, much improved overall speed, less of a memory hog, and finalized languages.

Personally I'm excited about XP. All versions of WinXP will have terminal services (currently only Win2k servers come with it, NT4s version is nothing like the new one). If you're unfamilar with TS lemme explain:
It allows you to connect to a Windows machine remotely, giving you full access to the box. It is effectively like telnet (ala Unix) for Windows....similar to PCAnywhere in theory, but not in practice. PCAnywhere basically copies a picture of the desktop and sends it over the wire. Only 1 person can be using the computer at a time, either console or remote. Terminal Services is fast, works very well even over 56k modem, and can have multiple users at the same time, including the console. So from anywhere you can login to your computer at home, type up a word doc just like you're at the console. While someone else is actually sitting at the console playing Quake 3. The only thing shared b/w the client and the host is the clipboard. Everything else (printers, scanners, CD-Roms, etc) are the server's...

Home user will allow EITHER a console or a remote access...Pro will allow console AND 1 remote...servers will allow console and however-many-licenses-you-want-to-buy remotes (comes with 2).

That's really the only reason I'm going to get XP...

Epolevne

Edited by - Epolevne on May 21, 2001 1:27:35 PM

The problem is you use WinNT. WinNT sucks. Win2000 is about 2000 times better. I use WinNT everyday at work and it''s Gawd Awful!!!

I''d recommend checking your hardware. I havn''t had issues with any version of Win9x or Win2k.

You mention a modem with windows only drivers...wouldn''t be a winmodem would it? You''re not using some HP or Gateway computer are you?

Ben
http://therabbithole.redback.inficad.com

Epo,

How did you get a copy of Beta 2 when it is not supposed to be out until June 17th (earliest release I could find):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/teched/



Dire Wolf
www.digitalfiends.com

I''ve got some family that works for MS.

Beta 2 is currently in QA...available for download on the MS internal VPN. Should only be minor changes b/w what I have and the July release version.

Epolevne

Xargon- I was writing this after reading your first post here. I used to think MS made alot of really cool stuff, more recently I'd have to agree their quality seems to have gone down the toilet. Alot of people I know who have PC's (and are not what you would call "geeks") still use Windows98 because they tried more recent versions of windows and didn't like them (to put it mildly). Most of these people won't use Linux or anything like that. They'll just use their old version of windows until MS, or someone else comes out with something better.

"A man can't just sit around." 'Lawn Chair' Larry Walters (1982)

Edited by - Tracy on May 21, 2001 6:03:57 PM