Forum OpenACS Q&A: What do you mean by ".NET?"

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Posted by Ben Adida on
Be very careful when you use the term ".NET" a bit too generically,
because you're falling into the very carefully thought-out Microsoft
bundling propaganda. dotNET is composed of many unrelated elements:
the Common Language Runtime, the C# programming language, SOAP
services, and Hailstorm user services. Which do you mean? All of them?
I hope not!

If you mean you want to enable SOAP services in ACS, I completely
agree with you. There is a need to interface with ACS components in a
platform-independent way.

If you mean you want to authenticate ACS users against Hailstorm,
again, I'm in agreement with you. Sounds useful.

If you mean you want to build a Tcl-to-Common-Language-Runtime
compiler, I am still in agreement with you, although I suspect that
won't immediately allow our Tcl code to run within the .NET framework.

However, if what you mean is that you want to convert 250,000 lines of
Tcl code to C#, then I completely disagree with you. You'll waste
thousands of programmer hours producing absolutely zero additional
end-user functionality. In fact, people who are currently simply
porting their stuff to the Java language (Vignette comes to mind) are
going to start seeing
marketing competition from C# in the next few months. If their
reasoning is purely marketing based (and not technology-backed), I
suspect they'll be sorely disappointed.