Today S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division, announced that WinFX will be rebranded as .NET Framework 3.0. Supposedly the change is in name only and all products will ship as previously planned.
This rebranding isn’t surprising. To me it illustrates how Microsoft is continuing to evolve its managed world.
Update: Joe Wilcox chimes in on the WinFX rebranding and improved bundling of “SDKs.” He sees how the .NET Framework is evolving into a first-class entity of its own–it’s something “competitors like Adobe, IBM, Oracle and Sun shouldn’t ignore.” Technology wise he points out the competitive landscape with Java and J2EE. I’m guessing he’s including Flash dev into that too. He’s right, although I’m also guessing that everyone pretty much understood this up to this point.
At times like this I realize I’m a three-headed C++/Win32/MFC-asaur. Ugly sounding, isn’t it? Heh. I guess that’s why most of the time I have my head(s) in the sand. OK, maybe I have one head above ground, exploring new technologies. Fresh air is good.
And lets keep it that way. My desktop PC can’t even install SP2 (some strange “Access is denied” error…), and my tablet just barly runs .NET 2 and VS.NET 2005.
Seriously, Eclipse IDE (written in Java) loads & runs faster than VS.NET.
Remember before .NET came out, when people thought that the VB6 1.32MB runtime was huge? That’s miniscule compared to the .NET runtime.
Now, if you want some scary stuff, here’s what I use: PHP, Python, VB6 (VB RT/COM, Win32), JavaScript (XPCOM, Web), PIC C (InnovationFIRST), C++ (Win32, ATL), and Java, just to name a few. Count the heads on that one. And the sand? Only 2 or 3 in at any given time. (I’ve used all but the C++ this year.)