[mikewarot]

Open source is great, Lazarus does a pretty good job of replacing Delphi.

Microsoft went insane with .NET so VB6 was killed in the process.

Access automatically handled table relationships, building queries and seeing them as SQL, and the report engine was pretty good. Thanks to ODBC, you could use the same database across all of them, or hook up to a real SQL server when it came time to scale up.

What's missing is the desktop and a stable GUI API these days. Windows apps from the 1990s still work, because they are distributed as binaries. Most source code from back then will not compile now because too many things have changed.

I love Open Source, but it doesn't solve everything.

[entrepy123]

> Microsoft went insane with .NET so VB6 was killed in the process.

I'd love to hear more about this perspective or any links to get more of it.

I did a (very) little hobby VB6 and loved it. Never made switch to .NET at that time (I was young, it was a hobby).

Having recently worked through part of a .NET book, I was pretty impressed by how far MS took it (although it seems extremely mind-numbing). Obviously it took a long time and had false starts, but MS stuck with it. On a personal level, I am very opposed to the entire model in an ideological sense, but it does seem to make a lot of business sense for MS, and it seems to cover a lot of cases for a lot of businesses.

So, was Microsoft's insanity with .NET just the obsession part, or doing things poorly for a while, until eventually getting it "righter", or is the insanity still pretty apparent?

I really would love to learn more about the historical-technical aspects of this specific comment quote, from VB6 to modern day, because it fits my experience perfectly, but I've had second thoughts about the position more recently. The more the specifics the better.

[toyg]

The insanity was to abandon the advantage they had with VB/COM, in order to challenge Java on its own ground. They threw away the baby with the bathwater. The C# pivot also slowed down their desktop efforts pretty dramatically, doubling the blow.

They were lucky Sun squandered the opportunity they had engineered with Java, focusing on the hardware side and missing the boat on browser, virtualization and services. If Sun had bought Netscape and then focused on building something like Azure, instead of fighting the inevitable commoditization of server hardware, they would have eaten Ballmer's lunch.

[throw_away54]

Disclaimer: I am not a .Net programmer, so these are just my thoughts and impressions as someone on the outside who followed the development from a distance.

I think a lot of the focus on .Net was driven by MS and Balmer's fear of Java. At the time, almost all desktop computers were running Windows 9x/2k. If 3rd party applications were developed with cross-platform Java, the customers would no longer be locked in to Windows.

First they tried the famous embrace/extend/extinguish approach by creating a Windows-specific version of Java. Sun fought back, and MS decided to push .Net instead.

It seemed to me that the initial strategy was to claim .Net was cross platform, but focus more on Windows and let open source projects like Mono be their cross platform "alibi". They changed strategies after a while, and now I guess the cross platform is more real.

[msla]

> Windows apps from the 1990s still work, because they are distributed as binaries.

Only if you have the right libraries, and runtimes, and OS interfaces, and even if you have all that, oh no, it's a MIPS binary and you don't live in 1996!

Any proprietary API exists precisely as long as the owner says it does. Open standards don't suffer from that malady.

[mikewarot]

>Only if you have the right libraries, and runtimes

That generally only happens with .NET based programs in Windows systems. You always need some .NET v2,3,3.5,4,4.5, etc., runtime.

[tmcdos]

Totally agree. There is no backward compatibility with .NET runtime - if your application is built/linked to a given version, it won't work with any other version of .NET

[neonsunset]

That's simply not true. Newest .NET 8 does not need the assemblies you reference to target .NET 8 - as long as the TFM is any version of 'netstandardx.x', 'netcoreappx.x' or 'net5'+ it will work.

You can even make proxy-projects that target netstandard2.0 but reference .NET Framework and with certain compat shims the code will just run on .NET 8 unless it relies on some breaking changes (which have mostly to do with platform-specific behavior, there have been no breaking changes for the language itself since I think C# 1 or 2? some odd 20 years ago).

As for the runtime itself - the application can restrict itself from being run by a newer version of runtime but you can absolutely do so. The lightweight executable that just loads runtime and executes the startup assembly may complain but just try it - build a console app with 'net5.0' target and then run it with latest SDK with 'dotnet run mynet5app.dll' - it will work.