This morning, one of the Microsoft head honchos had a high level conversation with the crowd, where he explained that:
Microsoft is a software company.
Microsoft lives to make Windows the most compelling platform.
A lot of the crowd didn’t get this. There was a lot of talk about open sourcing Windows (huh?), and porting the CLR to other platforms. They aren’t in that business. It isn’t going to happen. Mono is out there, and MSFT are watching it, and they think that it is cool the Miguel and company think .NET is cool, but that is it for now.
Since MSFT is all about Windows, they are very interested in making Java more compelling on the Windows platform. I think they are hoping that the check to Sun will help them in this regard.
I would love to see a windows.* or com.microsoft.* package which allows me to do the cool low level things that I can do in the CLR. What about Indigo from Java? Avalon with Java? etc etc.
Who knows what will be allowed here, but I would be happy to see this support, from a pragmatic perspective.
Obviously, there is an interesting tension between Microsoft wanting you to run Java on Windows, and Sun wanting to have Java as a platform to allow you to work on other areas.
March 17th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
“I would love to see a windows.* or com.microsoft.* package which allows me to do the cool low level things that I can do in the CLR.”
Now I find that statement amazing. I was floored when I heard it come out. And I don’t mean this in a sarcastic way (ok, maybe a little bit ;-) but isnt that exactly what MS did with the MSJVM oh so many moons ago and the Java community went into a tizzy over the whole thing? I know some of the frenzy was whippped up by the rancor between Sun and MSFT, but I know many Java advocates that took MSFT to task for “tainting Java” by extending it to work better with Windows. Isn’t that the same thing that you (and others) are now advocating?
Again, just an interesting sea change if that is indeed the current thinking. It of course, begs the question, why not just use the CLR if you need those things?
Just wondering since I thought it was a very interesting view point, especially if common among Java developers.
March 18th, 2005 at 7:40 am
Hi :)
One thing to remember. Sun went into a tizzy over it. This doesn’t mean that the Java community did. Vendors? Sure. Users/Developers? Only some.
Developers just want to get their work done so they can go home at 5pm :) Many people liked the Microsoft JVM.
The reason not to use the CLR is that on some projects you want to use Spring, Hibernate, [insert other technology here] but you also want low level access to Microsoft components since you know you are going to be on that platform.
Or, you could be writing code which will be shared, but you can abstract out that low level stuff and have a factory which returns Microsoft stuff, Linux stuff, Mac stuff, depending on the platform.
Dion
March 18th, 2005 at 11:57 am
I remember those early days of java. I remember jview was actually much faster then java. Also both were very compatible.