.NOT

Can anyone provide a short, non-marketing-bullshit description of what this steaming pile of shit really is?  Is there ANY reason that a competent developer would ever use it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

THIS LANGUAGE
IT IS NOT MY LISP
WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO WITH MY LISP

it's like the java runtime, but with a lot less suck.
better languages, better performance, more portable, etc.

Is there ANY reason that a competent developer would ever use it?
it's like the java runtime
So, "No," then?

>>4
"it's like java, but better" works great on management-level idiots, and c#, f#, and jscript.net have very good support for functional programming.

>>5
But it's true. It's not like you can't have other languages under the JVM either: Closure, ABCL, Bigloo, Ocaml-Java, etc show this ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages ).

I do consider .NET more comfortable than the JVM, but they're still pretty similar.

>>6
yes, there are other languages on the jvm, but the jvm was designed to run java, and only java. the clr was designed from the start to support multiple languages.

they are similar, but microsoft did learn a lot from sun's mistakes.

So it's basically a virtual machine and a C/C++ programmer should avoid .NET at all costs?  Does it even support C/C++?

>>8
C/C++
0/10

Does it even support C/C++?
It has an usable FFI and it also supports native code (see: managed c++) and some other things. Not really portable, for obvious reasons.

>>9
Delicious venduh lock in is delicious

>>9
an usable
Back to grammar school, please.

>>11
Back to Germany, please.

.NET is basically

The CLR - Common Language Runtime, the virtual machine that runs

The CIL - Common Intermediate Language, the machine language to which every .NET aware language must compile. The CIL abides to
 
The CTS - Common Type System a standard that specifies how "type definitions and specific values of types are represented in computer memory". Thanks to the CTS we have

The FCL - Framework Class Library, a vast library of types that's available to .NET developers.

Besides all of these, Microsoft created some new languages for .NET, though any language with flexible object semantics can be ported to it. The most popular .NET language is Microsoft's C#, which is basically a less verbose version of Java that isn't stuck in time.

>>10
fuckoff back to /b/ you fucktard pedo loser

>>13
It just sounds like the most awful thing ever created.  It sounds like "Hello World" would be 100MB and would have to dynamically link to another 2GB of run-time shit, consuming 100% CPU in the process and taking five minutes for the application to start up.

>>15
Just because something is complex doesn't meant it can't be made efficient.

I've seen many games written in SEPPLES with dozens of dlls which can easily take up a lot more space than most .NET applications. Ever heard of dynamic loading? Precompilation? JITs?

I'd be surprised if it'd take much more than some 20-40MB upon loading, while executables would be as big as you'd make them (tiny ones are perfectly possible as it's just an extended PE file which contains the .NET bytecode), but don't ask me as I don't really use .NET anymore, however those were my experiences with it before.

>>15
It's not bad, actually. You may examine .NET executables with Microsoft's IL disassembler and see for yourself.

.NET executables - "assemblies" in .NET jargon - have a metadata section referencing every type used in the application. The CLR only loads the stuff that's needed.

The complete .NET library (Framework 4) is like ~50MB, but the redistributable packages are smaller. Most Windows machines today have it installed.

A "Hello world" in .NET is 3.5KB big.

The JIT compiler gives very decent performance.

>>16,17
I remember the day I thought I was king of the world because I had a system with 8MB RAM, and that was enough to load all of Doom onto a RAMDISK and still have enough left over to run it.

>>18
There's the time/space tradeoff to consider. Both Java and .NET will run fine on mobile devices (Though with cut-down standard libraries).
It's mostly about what you do. Even at that time you could just as easily have chosen to bog down your system with a Smalltalk environment, or with Emacs.

>>18
i remember when i was able to load the entire contents of my hard drive into a RAM disk and still have plenty left over... on a machine with only 640KB of RAM.

>>20
Why would you even

Please use Mono instead. It's free (as in freedom).

or with Emacs.
Emacs isn't that bloated, evince was using more memory earlier today.

>>23
scratch that, I somehow read that as meaning RAM rather than harddisk.

>>24
RAM my anus

>>21
If you weren't 14, you'd know, or at least be able to figure it out.