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by Udi Dahan.
Original Post: .Net 2.0 no big deal?
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"The 2.0 framework doesn't really give you a massive amount of really new really cool features. There is one-click, which we probably wouldn't use anyway, generics (which are useful as a time saver, but don't really do much that you can't do without them), and some other little features... but the best part about the 2.0 framework is probably the IDE/dev experience, not what customers get out of it."
Granted, One-Click is nothing to write home about, but the runtime level additions, they just totally changed the way I write code. I'm talking about generics, anonymous methods, delegate inference, and the rest. The rest of 2.0, like the enhancements of the provider model in ASP.Net, well you would have developed the same kind of framework yourself if you were doing serious web development.
The whole 3.0 story, I've got to tell you, I'm pretty underwhelmed. Everybody seems to be jumping up and down about WPF, and yes, it's new and shiny, but there still the clunkety Windows message pump in the background. No real changes in how you're going to write multi-threaded UIs, which seem to be the real future given the rise in multi-core processing. The visual aspects of client side code in the systems I write run at around 5% of the overall effort. So the UI will look better, I dunno, 4D buttons and stuff, sorry for not falling over with enthusiasm.
And then there's WCF. Ah, wait, no publish/subscribe. Bummer, most of my systems being asynchronous in nature are built on the pub/sub model. An OO interface for interprocess communication? Who wants it - I need a message-based interface.
Don't forget WF - what was that for again? The main place where WF can fit my needs is for handling long-running workflows between systems, since I don't use Biztalk. But the performance of WF doesn't seem to fit this environment, it seems to be more suited for human workflow times.
If anything, I'd have to say that .Net 2.0 was a relatively big deal. 3.0 will probably be just as important with the runtime level enhancements like lambda expressions, extension methods, anonymous types, and implicitly typed variables. All the rest of the hyped up stuff in 3.0, I don't really expect it to change anything in how I work today.
You mention the ASP.NET 2.0 provider model, but I already mentioned I use 2.0 server side. It's the client side where I don't see 2.0 as all that great compared to WinFX/3.0.
PS: Just to be clear, I am looking at this from a customer benefit side of things, not dev. benefit. VS 2005 and the C# enhancements in 2.0 are things I love, but it doesn't really make a difference as far as the customer is concerned.