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| A look forward, a look back |
| 11/1/2004 |
| By Tony
Baer |
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| Because
Longhorn remains a vague concept to most Microsoft customers,
a clue to its eventual success might be found by looking
at how the installed base fared with .NET, released barely
two years ago. The verdicts are mixed. “It’s been slow,
but then again, our clients tend to be slow adopters,”
observes Jeff Bocarsly, VP and division manager for functional
testing services at Real-Time Technology Solutions, a
New York-based software testing consulting firm. For instance,
a cursory glance at message boards and online forums,
such as DevX, reveals that developers are still asking
basic questions about how to transition from classic Visual
Basic programming to the newer .NET-based languages. |
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| “Most evidence
is anecdotal,” concedes Daryl Plummer, group vice president
and research general manager for software infrastructure
at Gartner, who characterizes most .NET adoption as mere
lip service. Although almost all the clients he has spoken
with claim they are building with .NET, he estimates that
perhaps only 20% of the code is actually compliant. |
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| “We don’t
have hard numbers, but anecdotally, managed code is in,”
counters Ted Neward, editor-in-chief of the TheServerSide.NET,
an online forum focusing on .NET technology. |
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| For instance, Corzen,
a New York-based firm that specializes in syndicating
employment data for clients in media, advertising and
financial services fields, adopted .NET technology when
it started two years ago. CTO and co-founder Steve Forte
cites features such as ASP.NET, which automates the generation
of Web pages, for enabling his team to roll out the company’s
product in three months, barely a quarter of the time
it took for a similar job at a previous company. Consequently,
says Forte, Corzen was able to get to market and generate
revenue sooner, thereby avoiding the need to raise venture
capital. “That proved a huge difference in our business
model. We otherwise would have been in debt or had a different
business structure,” he says. |
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| However, for Jay Glynn,
development manager for a large insurance company, the
going has been slower. Although his team has at least
five senior developers relatively well versed in .NET,
they are only getting around to their first major .NET
project this year. In rewriting an insurance agent sales
system, .NET’s object-oriented features should make the
new system far more flexible, capable of responding to
changes in state regulations or market demands without
wholesale application rewrites. Glynn attributes the project’s
timing to a slow economy, which discouraged major new
projects. However, with agent hardware closing in on five
years, the system refresh cycle provided the opportunity
to justify a rewrite. So how has the transition to .NET
gone for Glynn and his colleagues? He notes that, although
learning the syntax of the new .NET languages was fairly
simple, internalizing the new object-oriented disciplines
wasn’t. “Since day one, I’m still having ‘Aha!’ moments,”
Glynn concedes. |
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Please
see the following related stories:
“Longhorn
debuts, but few pay attention” by Tony Baer
“The
basics of Longhorn” by Tony Baer |
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| Tony
Baer is principal with onStrategies, a New York-based
consulting firm, and editor of Computer Finance, a monthly
journal on IT economics. He can be reached via e-mail
at tbaer@tbaer.com.
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