C# in Depth

22 CHAPTER 1 The changing face of C# developmentAgain, while Microsoft was busy with Vista and other products, the rest of the worldwas innovating too. Lightweight frameworks have been gaining momentum, andObject Relational Mapping (ORM) now has a significant developer mindshare, partlydue to high-quality free frameworks such as Hibernate. The SQL aspect of LINQ ismuch more than just the querying side we’ve seen so far, and marks a more definitestep from Microsoft than its previous lukewarm ventures into this area, such asObjectSpaces. Only time will tell whether LINQ to SQL or perhaps its cousin theADO.NET Entity Framework hits the elusive sweet spot of making database access trulysimple—they’re certainly very promising.Visual Studio 2008 was released in November 2007, including .NET 3.5, C# 3, andVB9. It contains built-in support for many features that were previously only available asextensions to Visual Studio 2005, as well as the new language and framework features.Continuing the trend from Visual Studio 2005, a free Express edition is available foreach language. With the ability to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework andonly minimal solution and project changes when migrating existing code, there is littlereason not to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008—I expect its adoption rate to be far fasterthan that of Visual Studio 2005.Dynamic languages have become increasingly important, with many options vyingfor developers’ attention. Ruby—and particularly the Ruby on Rails framework—hashad a large impact (with ports for Java and .NET), and other projects such as Groovy onthe Java platform and IronRuby and IronPython on .NET are gaining support. As partof Silverlight 2.0, Microsoft will release the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), whichis a layer on top of the CLR to make it more amenable to dynamic languages. Silverlightis part of another battleground, but this time for rich Internet applications (RIAs),where Microsoft is competing with Adobe Flex and Sun’s JavaFX. Silverlight 1.0 wasreleased in September 2007, but this version was based on JavaScript. At the time of thiswriting, many developers are currently awaiting 1.1, which will ship with a “mini-CLR”and cater for multiple platforms.1.2.5 Historical perspective and the fight for developer supportIt’s hard to describe all of these strands interweaving through history and yet keep abird’s-eye view of the period. Figure 1.5 shows a collection of timelines with some ofthe major milestones described earlier, within different technological areas. The list isnot comprehensive, of course, but it gives some indication of which product versionswere competing at different times.There are many ways to look at technological histories, and many untold storiesinfluencing events behind the scenes. It’s possible that this retrospective overemphasizesthe influence of Java on the development of .NET and C#, and that maywell partly be due to my mixed allegiances to both technologies. However, it seemsto me that the large wars for developer support are taking place among the followingcamps.Licensed to Rhona Hadida