I've read this article (mentioned in the non-tech newsgroup) titled "Vista putting pressure on Windows developers" by Paul Weinberg, certainly not an expert in programming... who keep quoting "Mark Driver, vice president and research director at Gartner", probably another programming genius. The article is full of factual errors, but very interesting because it tells us how Microsoft (or part of Microsoft, the Visual Studio Team in particular) would like Vista to be perceived, as some of the Gartner studies are directly funded by the tech giant. Here is the best of the nonsense:

  • "Something close to a panic is gripping Windows software developers [...] to create new applications under the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista operating system [...] migrating or rewriting tens of millions of lines of legacy Windows code [...] into the.Net framework. "
    I don't see any panic. Most of the existing Win32 applications run fine. I've installed Open Office in Vista, Firefox, Microsoft Office (still a Win32 app), and countless Delphi applications, with very limited problems. And in any case, I can recompile some of those Delphi applications to .NET without rewriting them... but hey, I'm not using VB for Win32, the only development tools the article refers to.

  • "Everything in Vista is based on .Net, or the vast majority of the features are based on .Net."  It is not everything, it is not the vast majority, but it is a very limited minority. How many of the programs shipping with Vista (and there are even more games than in the past) are based on .NET? Even the gadgets are not (see my recent post on the issue). Yes, Vista includes Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) but I don't see many applications based on it installed with the operating system...

  • "Some of the smaller independent software vendors may fall by the wayside in the current switch to .Net, that is being compared to the mass conversion of the IT industry from the DOS to the Windows operating systems more than decade ago." Now even the most stupid user can see the difference between a DOS program and a Windows one. But how many can tell a Win32 (or Delphi VCL) window from a .NET window? With few lines of code you can make even the nasty TApplication's windows behave as Vista expects... No, the switch to .Net has nothing to do with the switch from DOS to Windows.

I'm not saying that .NET is not relevant on Vista or WPF will not become important... but Win32 programs will run just fine on the Windows platforms for many years to come, and business-oriented applications will probably find little benefit from the new Vista and WPF graphics.