From Hussein: As a Java developer, I was curious about the release of C#. Unfortunately, the list price of more than $1,000 for Microsoft’s developer environment, Visual Studio .NET, extinguished the appeal. I wanted to play with the language, but I couldn’t afford the investment. Thankfully, I discovered a free .NET development environment called SharpDevelop.
"Of course, the flexibility and expressiveness of C++ that allowed this kind of thing to be built at the library level, instead of directly into the language itself, was both its best feature and its worst problem. C# eschews this kind of flexibility, and the complexity that follows, by simply building a foreach statement into the language that knows how to handle both arrays and custom types."
From Razvan Caciula: "The .NET Framework Service Pack 2 (SP2) release focuses on security issues and other problems Microsoft has found since SP1's release; this release also includes all the fixes from .NET Framework SP1."
From Razvan Caciula: "This product also feature full support for new and emerging Web Services, integrated model driven development, and preview capabilities for the Microsoft.NET Framework. Delphi 7 supports a first true model driven architecture with new UML solutions bundled in, updated cross-platform testing capabilities and Linux support with KylixTM 3."
SP1, as far as I can tell, introduced a bug wherein applications that had specific code groups granting them permissions with a membership determined by a strong key could not run when launched via the href-exe/moble code technique. Keith Brown did some spelunking and determined that ieexec.exe (the hosting process for such an app) would (mistakenly?) require that code from the site as a whole had at least Execution permissions before taking any of the other permissions for the specific assembly into account. The upshot is that to let wahoo.exe run on a .NET SP1+ box, you had to have two code groups, one that gave Internet permissions or greater to assemblies w/ a strong name and one that awarded at least Execution permission to all assemblies from sellsbrothers.com. I've updated the Wahoo! site w/ an MSI that creates both of these code groups along with the full source so that you can do the same for your own assemblies. Enjoy!
"We still get people saying to us, 'What is .Net?'" Gates said at a conference held two weeks ago specifically to answer that question. "It's one of those great questions that people can say, 'Yes, it's come into focus at the infrastructure level,' but a little bit where we go beyond that has been unclear to people."
You’d have thought they would have learned their lesson from COM, OLE and ActiveX before this. I guess the slack caused by the Internet boom has taught even Microsoft bad habits.
