[TriLUG] C# and .NET

[Robby Dermody]

The article on slashdot got me thinking...

A few weeks ago I took a look at a C# book, at the language itself. It looks
like a very nice evolutionary step past C++ (and it also looks like MS's
attempt to kill Java). However, the Mono and dotGNU attempts to build
portable C# compilers and .NET frameworks sounds very exciting to me. I
think Microsoft, as usual, might try to be a big pain in the behind over
control of the specs/framework and will try to make the lives of the people
working on this open software alternative very difficult. This keeps me wary
of diving head first into starting to work with C# a bit later, but I admit
I'm quite ignorant on this topic and would love to hear more from someone
with more insight. I've heard it was all standardized, but so was Java and
MS created Visual J++...

Has anyone done any programming in C# for .NET? Complaints/compliments about
the pair?

I see there is both a Mono/Ximian and GNU effort to do this. With a casual
browse, I can't find anything on their sites talking about what makes their
project different from the other's effort. Any ideas?

Just from what I read in the book about C#'s language features, it's got me
excited. C++ has a lot of advanced features and functionality, but a good
amount of that (templates, namespaces, some auto_ptr functionality, etc) was
added as an afterthought, and I feel there are too many ways to shoot
yourself in the foot with the language. Being derived from C and offering C
compatability also hurt it in the complexity dept. Objective C looked nice
from what I've seen, but it never really had the support for it. I really do
like C, but it's showing its age in the face of the more advanced languages
like C++, Java, Objective C, etc.

Some other developers might related to this: I'm working on porting a good
amount of my code from Linux/gcc to Windows/MSVC (v6 and soon to be 7). Most
of my problems are turning out to be lack of standards compliance, and lack
of advanced language features on MS's part (I'm thinking about C99 and some
STL features for C++, as this is both C and C++ code). I found out MS's own
STL libraries seemingly aren't standards compliant. Gee whiz...

As an amusing aside: In one compiler bug with MSVC v5 _and_ 6, a bunch of
useless warnings are given about the length of STL debugging symbols being
truncated a 255 characters by MS's STL headers. Okay, the messages might be
useless, but the bug is that you can't disable all of these warnings using
their #pragma construct for it in a certain STL header...so I look on MS's
knowledge base...they acknowledge the problem as a bug, but their solution
is basically "you know...Visual C++ v7 fixes these problems *wink wink*".
They mentioned ignoring them, but it spewed out tons of these messages.
Man...that's soooo....typical Microsoft. :)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q167355

Robby
www.avalonent.org