Even if you don't write code dedicated to Microsoft platforms, you have probably heard by now about Microsoft .NET, Microsoft's latest volley in their campaign against all things non-Windows. If you've read the media spin from Microsoft, or browsed through the scant technical material available on the MSDN site, or even if you attended the Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference (where the .NET platform was officially "launched"), you're probably still left with at least two big questions: Current ruminations about .NET in various forums are reminiscent of the fable of the three blind men attempting to identify an elephant: It's perceived as very different things, depending on your perspective. Some see .NET as Microsoft's next-generation Visual Studio development environment. Some see it as yet another new programming language (C#). Some see it as a new data-exchange and messaging framework, based on XML and SOAP. In reality, .NET wants to be all of these things, and a bit more.
The .NET core works on Windows only but theoretically supports development in many languages (once sub-/supersets of these languages have been defined and IL compilers have been created for them). Also, Net's SOAP capabilities will allow components on other platforms to exchange data messages with .NET components. While a few of the elements in .NET, such as SOAP and its discovery and lookup protocols, are provided as public specifications, the core components of the framework (IL runtime environment, ASP+ internals, Win Forms and Web Forms component "contracts", etc.) are kept by Microsoft, and Microsoft will be the only provider of complete .NET development and runtime environments. There has already been some pressure by the development community for Microsoft to open up these specifications, but this would be counter to Microsoft's standard practices. These last points highlight some of the key differentiators between .NET and J2EE, and point towards Microsoft's real play here...........................
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