.NET 1.1 Visual studio 2002 : After being a c++ programmer (Visual studio 6! a classic in my mind) for quite some time and making my final year project in Java ( and not loving netbeans ... still don't ... but still use it ... i still have a solaris / oracle machine that I manage in the office :) Loved Flex though ... end of rambling) I tried out converting an old java P2P messenger to C# ... first surprise ... the rich edit control had NO way of scrolling to the end without interop win32 dll calls! ... not that I don't understand it (I was a c++ programmer first remember) but I thought swing was more mature.
.NET 2 : Visual studio 2003. Working in Ufone I thought i'd give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised. Winforms was now Miles ahead of Swing! And its weird but even the anchoring layout system was getting the job done (and better/faster than swing). I moved all my code to it immediately!
.NET 3.5 : Visual Studio 2008 : I moved mainly because of the threading debugger support in VS (and I thought that javascript intellisense was awesome). I did a lot of back end MSC/HLR network based automation code in Ufone and this was a GOD send!
So : When I heard about WPF I was highly eager to see what it could do. BUT on my home (old) machine my animation experiments always came out choppy. So had to refrain. Not to mention +200 MB offline .NET installer was simply not going to get a lot of my users to install my software. Just telling that its awesome (if you have a graphics card) AND you need to install this ADDITIONAL file was not going to win over anyone.
2 years down. Every other computer has a decent graphics card (thanks vista :) ... it was a bitter pill but it still paved the way ... no business laptops come with xp and need better hardware!). So I thought I'd give .net 3.5 SP1 another try. Now it is much better (but still slower than winforms) but I believe that microsoft achieves anything it sets it mind to ... and having a controlled platform is what microsoft is all about (and I love the effort it puts in ... makes my life easier ... and saves me from dll hell!). Not to mention the child heirarchy system is the BEST thing I can imagine. You can make a templated image button in seconds ... and a Control out of it in Minutes! Not to mention simple polygon mathematics (due to design surface polygon + click event handler + easy scaling + .... I LOVE IT!) are a breeze. Not to mention Linq! BUT .NET 3.5 SP1 installer (size) is a pain for the client!
Enter the reason for this post:
.NET framework 4.0 for X86+X64 == 54.5 MB Awesome ... I can't wait ... and its going to be on time too .. the product I am making is going to take a while ... I will delay its release till I have stable .NET 4.0 ;)
Update: Well took .net 4.0 for a spin. Its Awesome! PS: you might want to check out smallestdotnet.com/ to see the download size that .net will have for you :) ... was more useful before .net 4 (good job MS) but still fun.
Enjoy!
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