Lazycoder

Why no serious MS Application in .NET yet ?? in dotnet.general

Why no serious MS Application in .NET yet ?? in dotnet.general

The next time you see someone make a statement similar to this, Richard Grimes column in DDJ is the one getting most of the press lately, point them to this post by Don Box.

In looking at the Indigo code base (which was 1123 C# files as of early last week), only 19 of them use the unsafe keyword. Every single use was to do buffer manipulation, either for low-level XML cracking, SSPI munging, or async I/O buffer management.

Could we have written those pieces in unmanaged C or C++?

Sure.

However, by using “Non-verifiable and Managed” C#, we got two advantages.

First, the code was written in the same language the rest of the DLL was written in, meaning that it’s less of a cognitive mode switch for a dev to deal with when they go spelunking (or debugging).

I’d say writing “Microsoft’s framework for building service-oriented applications” in C# qualifies as Microsoft writing a serious application in .NET.

I’m just saying, Microsoft is failing at delivering their message.