Shifting Software Industry : .NET Technology

Day by day insecurity is increasing in the softwareindustry, shares are moving down and every body is thinking again overhis future prospectus. So right now the million dollar question is ,what is next ? How software industry will go again to the same place ofblitz? For a time this was an unanswered question and everybody waslooking on the news headlines of the home back jounery of many softwareporfessionals from USA and that is again one of the major causes ofdiscouragement to think to join this sector of career.

Well ! now the time has come to answer, may be this isnot the answer to that unanswered question but definitely will be atrue and perfect direction to find out the right answer. Dot com baloonhas been burst but the reason was being not dot com business modelrather this was the way industry was running Dot com's.

Again microsoft is driving the way to pump theindustry back and to recover the stimulated face of industry. Answerfrom Microsoft is Microsoft.Net . Techonology of the future withpromising future. Right now Microsoft has been brushed its teeths withthe .NET Framework comprising of these future languages, C# (pronounced C Sharp ), Visual Basic.NET, JScript.NET, Visual Foxpro.NETand Managed C++ , bundled as Visual Studio NET.

But out of the box C# (C sharp ) is the best choicefor them who was previously not working with RAD ( Rapid ApplicationDevelopment ) tools like Visual Basic rather with C and C++ or JAVA towash out the dust out of their faces, while Visual Basic.NET is thebest choice for VB programmers but they can also go for C# and thiswill not be a sudden change for them because VB. NET is approaching toC# and having many changes over VB 6.

As Microsoft is always in the habit to work on secretprojects and suddenly to explode the market without giving a chance toits competitors to run along. Its not for the first time, Microsoft islaunching its new venture and before its final release software giantsare already waiting to get some miracles with this.

Now the next questions is: Is it marketing hype orsomethings really worth ?. Well ! At the moment its very difficult toanswer this question , but my personal experience to this new conceptof .NET Framework is really excellent and nearly conforms to thestandards, Microsoft promised uptil now. Before discussing thetechnology ideas, I Would like to tell, for a beginner or a programmerwho was working in different fields except software components wouldfeel it very strange and difficult to understand at first glance butactually the technology I am going to explain is rather easy to learnif you have right guidance and proper steps to learn . But this is notall, you can use this technology in almost every field of yourimagination, not only in what i am going to tell you only butdefinitely that is the ultimate goal of the technology and we must havean idea of that.

Microsoft.NET is actually a new way to think aboutcomputing . With this concept we don't need to think separately interms of application softwares and software components. Even we don'tneed to categories our development process in terms of applicationdevelopment or web development, what all we need to call is integrateddevelopment (Everything at once without communication gap) .Integritywas always a big problem to the whole software industry and the gradualdevelopment of our IT industry made us to think about something whichcan work out the integrated development.

First of all Microsoft started its Journey in thisfield somehow with OLE and with the process of refinement through OLE2, OLE automaton, COM and DCOM, that made a destination finally asMicrosoft.NET. But please don't feel confused, Microsoft.NET is notactually the extention to the series of COM/DCOM but having a verydifferent approach to do and to provide almost everything for oneintegrate development environment (Last release was Visual Studio 6.0)as Visual Studio .NET.

As Sun Microsystem launched JAVA , one great andexcellent effort to really integrate the IT world , which could changethe way to consider it not only as a programming language but also asan internet programming language to talk through and to work throughthe hard process of location transparency.

But again the problem was still there and solutionsdeveloped with JAVA were JAVA only solutions and were not muchcomfortable to the interoperable development, which forced softwaregiants to hire more and more JAVA professionals only. These few linesdo not mean that JAVA is not able to interact with diffrent languagescomponents but the problem was the solution with middlewaretechnologies like CORBA & RMI was very expensive and also later wasagain JAVA only solution.

But this was really something that forced Microsoft tothink again over its design cycle and architecture of the futuretechnologies and definitely success of JAVA as internet programminglanguage showed the industry inclination towards internet.

Finally Microsoft thought a new concept of InternetComponents instead of Software Components. Let develop the applicationsto the programmer without ploughing deep in to the complexities ofmiddleware technologies and the result is Microsoft.NET .TheArchitectre is called Microsoft's Next Generation Windows Services(NGWS) Architecture. So the objective of NGWS is very clear –integration of internet to offer the softwares like word and excel. Butwhats special here, word and excel are already there. Ofcourse Yes, butas we discussed with NGWS we want to develop internet components, soour new NGWS word and excel will work through browser on the computeras well as on a range of devices such as mobile phones and the PersonalDigital Assistant (Plam Pilot etc. )

So, now plan your future with Microsoft and try tolearn as soon as possible to fill the enormous industry requirments innear future and that way you will be the most experienced developer forMicrosoft.Net, except Microsoft software professionals who made itpossible.

Rahul Sharma
Maxutil Computer Skills
…An Engineering Appraoch to Computer Education
Ph. 98390 14157
e-mail : rahul@maxutil.com