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blah!bLaH!BLOG!!

... C# 3.0, LINQ, .NET 3.0, CLR 3.0, Orcas, ADO.NET 3.0, WinFX-->.NET 3.0? Whoaa!! wait a minute !!...

Posted on 9/5/2006 @ 2:15 PM in #Vanilla .NET | 13 comments | 2963 views

You see, I read this blog post by my good friend David Hayden earlier today. Here is an excerpt

“Pablo Castro, ADO.NET Technical Lead at Microsoft, just dealt the development community a huge blow by mentioning in the MSDN Forums that ADO.NET vNext will not be included in .NET 3.0.”

David is talking about this MSDN Forum thread.

I think PC is too PC. Pablo Castro is too Politically Correct. And I don’t think Pablo dealt a “huge blow”, I think somebody had to do the dirty clean up job that needs to be done – thanks to brain dead MS Marketing. And Pablo like the rest of us, is trying to clear out the confusion.

See we had C# 3.0. People talked about CLR 3.0, .NET 3.0, Orcas, ADO.NET 3.0. Until one day out of the blue S. Somasegar declared that WinFX will now be renamed to .NET 3.0.

So the development world was left confused and started hunting for names. Some started calling it .NET 4.0. Or ADO.NET next version, and then the name ADO.NET vNext, .NET vNext started to get stuck. But what is v”Next”?

I have a better idea.

Let’s just call it

ADO.NET v-r-TooConfusedRightNow

(And this is not a criticism of the ADO.NET team or the C# team – this is solely aimed towards the bozos that renamed WinFX to .NET 3.0).

What do you think?

ADO.NET vrTooConfusedRightNow
C# vrTooConfusedRightNow
.NET vrTooConfusedRightNow.

Ok good. Now back to your regular scheduled programming.

On 9/5/2006 6:17:40 PM jc said ..

I'm still trying to figure out whether Atlas will even be included in .NET 3.0. Seems like its a pretty minor update for windows forms, web services, and workflow. Still, XAML is exciting and probably a bigger deal than most people realize. I'd rather have .NET 3.0 now (no matter what the name) than have to wait until orcas for all of it.

On 9/5/2006 6:39:55 PM Sahil Malik said ..

Hmm .. I doubt Atlas would be a part of .NET 3.0. Heck who cares, just download the beta and use it :)

On 9/5/2006 9:36:58 PM Kent Boogaart said ..

Sahil, have you signed the petition? http://www.petitiononline.com/winfx/petition.html

On 9/6/2006 2:08:23 AM Sahil Malik said ..

Kent - The reason I didn't sign the petition, was because I felt renaming it back to .NET 2.5 would cause even more confusion. IMO, MSFT needs to learn from this mistake and learn to consult product teams before renaming products willy nilly. Basically count their losses and move on. SM

On 9/6/2006 2:08:42 AM Frans Bouma said ..

Atlas was supposed to ship in september, though it's now part of orcas. What I find really stunning is that the .NET version of Orcas will be ... 3.5!, so not 4.0, but 3.5, i.e. not enough to justify a major version upgrade. Sure..

On 9/6/2006 2:10:32 AM Sahil Malik said ..

LOL Frans. Just for humor sake, I'd like to find out the process MSFT takes in deciding these names.

On 9/6/2006 7:37:26 AM Mat Hobbs said ..

New version naming standards, three levels: * vNext
* vNextAfterNext
* vObjectSpaces ;)

On 9/6/2006 8:58:25 AM Sahil Malik said ..

Very funny Mat - are you sure you got them in the right order though? ;-)

On 9/6/2006 9:52:44 AM Gabriel Lozano-Morán said ..

I have always said that rebranding WinFX to .NET Framework 3.0 was a bad idea. The reason behind this rebranding is the fact that Microsoft has already invested so much money in the .NET moniker that they had no other choice. If I am not mistaken Atlas will be released by the end of this year and I doubt that it will be an integral part of the .NET Framework.

On 9/6/2006 10:06:04 AM Bill Vaughn said ..

Ah, what makes you think Microsoft learns from its mistakes? The marketing folks that make these blunders keep turning over and don't pass on their experiences to those that follow--they want them to learn by their own mistakes. Too bad it's the same mistakes over and over...

On 9/6/2006 1:14:55 PM Sahil Malik said ..

Gabriel - "WinFX" made perfect sense. We had Win32, now we have WinFX. Maybe WinAPI, or Managed Win32 or whatever. Calling it .NET 3.0 is like calling me Pamela Anderson. It just doesn't feel right. Bill - I hope they don't make the "same" mistake again :). SM

On 9/6/2006 3:43:49 PM Gabriel Lozano-Morán said ..

Sahil I agree but you must admit that WinFX is not even close a successor of Win32. I remember a couple of years ago that Microsoft was planning to document the more than estimated 12.000 Win32 api's with the purpose the inventarise them and rewrite them using their own .NET Framework. I guess that is just a far far away future.

On 9/6/2006 4:02:05 PM Sahil Malik said ..

Gabriel, I remember that man. I also remember that all access was going to be managed, so if you called an unmanaged API, it would then call a managed API underneath. I knew that was horse shit the moment I heard it. So yeah, I agree Win32 >>> WinFX, so lets call it .NET 2.5, or .NET Vista Add-ons .. I don't know what, but not .NET 3.0. SM

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