This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Sam Gentile. Original Post: Don is suprised... Feed Title: Sam Gentile's Blog Feed URL: http://samgentile.com/blog/Rss.aspx Feed Description: .NET and Software Development from an experienced perspective - .NET/CLR, Rotor, Interop, MC+/C++, COM+, ES, Mac OS X, Extreme Programming and More! Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Sam Gentile Latest Posts From Sam Gentile's Blog

... by the fact that his book has gone into its 9th printing and “demand for old-school programming techniques.” I'm not. Frankly, Don  and his cohorts need to get out of the Mothership and get out into the streets a lot more and they will find two things out extremely quickly:

• Penetration of .NET is still extremely slow (but getting much better)
• COM has been, and continues to be the number one most successful component technology on the planet with billions of lines of “legacy“ COM code out there in production use and millions more continuing to be added

The fact of the matter is, that as much as as old original CLR .NET DM list stalwarts like Don, Brent, John, Jeff, Chris, and myself all think the CLR is a way of life now (remember us geeking out of the IJW transition thunk that Don, Brent and I were discussing in 2001?) and “Old fashioned” and “accepted” after three-four years of living with it, we forget that its not the way it is out there. To us the CLR is “old news“ and we are on ot the next thing or evolution of it. Don and DM preeched “COM is Love” from 1993-2000 and we all drank the cool aid, didn't we? So much so, that today COM reigns everywhere beyond everyone's wildest dreams. Is it not the right solution today with the CLR around? Of course not. Is COM dead in a CLR world? Of course it is. Are there better ways with the CLR (and for that matter Java, COM+, etc)? Yes, again. But that doesn't change the fact of the inertia and the fact that COM works well at solving problems, even if does mean causing mass depression in the developers that have to program the darn thing. We need to realize that its out there solving real business problems today and will continue to do so. If nothing else, it points to the continuing need of the bastard child of the .NET Framework.