Microsoft’s .NET initiative aims to grab the hearts and minds of developers, where it competes directly with Sun’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Developers working in the Microsoft world have welcomed many of the changes brought about by the .NET framework. Prashant L Rao finds that J2EE still scores in stability though .NET is believed to lead on performance

A line has been drawn in the sand and developers are being hustled into two camps. On one side lies the Java camp where Sun and its partners-in-Java—IBM, Oracle, BEA...practically every software major except Microsoft—are making their stand. On the other shore is Microsoft with .NET. What does .NET mean for developers and how does Microsoft intend to win them over?

Just what is .NET?
It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. When Sir Winston Churchill made the above statement in a radio broadcast, he was referring to Russia. However, the same statement aptly fits .NET in terms of the confusion in people’s minds regarding its true nature. Microsoft admits it jumped the gun with .NET. For a while, everything coming out of Redmond had a .NET sticker on it, whether or not it really fit into Microsoft’s master plan to change the face of Windows development and come out with a platform that would give J2EE a run for its money. Today, the world’s largest software vendor has finally got its act together and is very clear that .NET will be its middleware, its development platform for software developers writing business applications.

Common Language Runtime (CLR)—Microsoft’s JVM
“The .NET framework is a software layer to which developers will write Windows applications,” says Dilip Mistry, .NET and developer evangelism director at Microsoft India. As the framework is a huge piece of software, weighing in at 21 MB, Microsoft is taking two routes to get it onto the desktop. Initially, developers will ship the .NET framework with their applications. Eventually, the framework will be bundled with Windows.

Microsoft has taken a page out of Sun’s book, the Common Language Runtime (CLR)—a layer of software that sits between an application and the OS/hardware— is Microsoft’s equivalent of Sun’s JVM (Java Virtual Machine, the runtime middleware for Java).

A platform for business applications
There are no pointers in CLR—which means that coders writing OSs, office suites, games or even ERP applications like SAP R/3 won’t have much use for .NET. It will be corporate IT departments, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) writing business applications who stand to benefit from the framework. From now on, Windows developers writing business applications will be writing to the CLR and not to the OS. This won’t apply to game developers or mainstream application developers (office suites, ERP etc) who will have to rely on DirectX, Open GL and programming constructs such as pointers that bypass the CLR offering better performance. For custom applications, CLR will make development easier and more standardised across languages.

Dilip Mistry says that Indian ISVs can be leaders and Microsoft wants to give them the conviction and confidence to bid for large enterprise projects on its technology

.NET in India
Microsoft has a .NET centre in Bangalore where it helps ISVs port and stress-test their applications. It also undertakes what Mistry calls “deep developer training.” Mistry has a team of 18 evangelists, a majority of who are based in Bangalore. Mistry says, “Indian ISVs can be leaders. We want to give them the conviction and confidence to bid for large enterprise projects on Microsoft technology.” Ten Indian companies have dedicated CoEs (Centres of Excellence) for .NET. Some software majors working on .NET are TCS, Wipro, Satyam and Infy.

Microsoft India is aggressively wooing the big software houses—Infosys, Wipro and company. Bill Gates’s visit to Bangalore recently was just one more round in this dance. The company, however, runs the risk of alienating its traditional partners in the process. Industry pundits believe that the traditional Microsoft camp might well start flirting with Java now that Microsoft is going after the Tier 1 crowd. The big software players will not choose between J2EE and .NET, they will work with both platforms.

Mistry and his team kicked off their efforts in January 2001. In the first wave, 18 companies created products and solutions on .NET using Visual Studio.NET. “40 .NET projects have been undertaken since the launch of Visual Studio.NET in Feb 2002,” says Mistry. 40 percent of VB/VC programmers in India are using VS.NET. However, 80 percent of the applications created using VS.NET are still vanilla Windows applications that don’t make use of the .NET framework. Still, the fact that over 5,000 Indian developers are registered on experience.Net, a website set up by Mistry’s team, is proof enough that .NET is gaining momentum in the country. Mistry’s team has distributed 150,000 CD-ROMs with .NET SDKs on them in the last two years.

Developers take
Karthikeyan E S, senior project manager at Aditi says, “.NET has classes for certain things that had to be written from scratch earlier—for instance, to serialise and push a component across the wire used to be a tough job. Now anybody can serialise and persist objects. SQL Server has new classes (adapters) that are better than OLE DB (the old way). Webforms is a decent concept, there is a mechanism for creating a Web Service, in security you now have scenario-based permissions. Earlier you couldn’t write a NT service in VB, you can do that in VB.NET.” The key disadvantage he feels is, “There is a lot of unlearning to do when you move from Visual Basic to Visual Basic.NET. In VB.NET all the declarations have changed. To rewrite existing VB code, a lot of rework is involved.”

Aditi has created PowerPortal, a product suite that lets you do all organisational activities, including commerce and document management through a single portal product, using .NET technologies like Sharepoint, BizTalk, Exchange, VB.NET and WinForms.

Clarence Xavier, product manager, e-Banking at Logica says, “Earlier you had different tools from Microsoft for Internet application development—Visual Basic, Visual C++. In .NET you have one single tool that lets you develop in any language that .NET supports. You can move from one tool to another without cross training. Earlier you had to modify your content to suit each mobile device, now using mobile controls this problem has been eliminated to a large extent. If a new handset comes out, we have to create a configuration file and the product works on it. In Visual Basic you couldn’t access the Windows APIs directly though it was possible in VC++. In .NET’s CLR, there are common libraries for both languages. It’s just a question of whether you need more VB or VC++ programmers for a given job. In our case, it was easy to make a Web service and transform our product, QA into QA.NET—an extension of QA for Internet banking. We have exploited Web Services for offering features such as a loan calculator that lets a customer use an Excel sheet and do ‘What if’ analysis, where this Web Service gets information from the bank’s server for the loan period and amount. Web Services in VB.NET exposes methods that a client application such as Excel can call the application.”

“It is very difficult to provide standard features to a bank, so we put the business logic in a script file. This allows users to change the business logic, doing away with the need of having multiple versions of the same product. We decided to have some script files written in VBScript for this purpose. However, the MS Scripting engine can run other scripting languages (JavaScript, JSP).

QA.NET will make use of this feature. The script file calls the API, the business process flow is in VBScript—now you can mix and match other scripting languages,” adds Xavier.

Alerts are another new feature in .NET. “If a customer gives a standing instruction, you would like to be informed if a cheque bounces or has been deposited. Earlier, an e-mail would be sent when the core banking system informed the application of the need to do so. E-mail is not the best way to communicate, particularly if a customer is on the move. The other way is to send a SMS. We decided to use .NET alerts—the service provider knows how to reach the customer. Our application takes to the service provider’s server using .NET APIs. Tomorrow, if a new medium becomes popular, say wireless PDAs, we don’t have to worry,” Xavier further adds.

On the downside, converting applications from VB to VB.NET is no joke. “You need a tool that will let you convert code. Microsoft has provided a tool but we had difficulties using it, there were a lot of problems getting it up and running in the first place. There are still areas where a manual job is required. When you have a massive product it’s a serious issue to consider. You need to go through the whole file, as one small file can bring down the product,” said Xavier.

Similarly, while porting ASP code to ASP.NET, “To make use of the new features of ASP.NET, changes are required. There is no tool for automating this process, complete manual conversion has to be done. To what extent do you want to change your code on the front-end? That’s the question development heads will need to answer,” says Xavier.

In massive projects with millions of lines of code this kind of porting becomes very difficult. QA, for instance, has 750,000 lines of code.

In terms of scalability, .NET still lags J2EE. “There are ways to achieve persistence, but you lose out on scalability in .NET—not in EJB. This is especially true of horizontal Web farms. If a persistent objects on machine A needs to be replicated on other machines, it is possible at some cost. However, programming needs to be done and this could lead to the introduction of bugs. The ability to replicate persistent objects should be part of underlying infrastructure,” believes Xavier.

The question remains—how many people will use other languages (other than VB, VC and C#) in VS.NET?

Microsoft intends to bring IIS (its Web server) into the kernel in Windows.NET. Already IIS can choke the CPU even when it runs as a service, and the most common solution is to reboot the server. It has become commonplace for Microsoft to put everything in the middleware or kernel. This does pay off in improved performance but comes at the cost of stability. Hardware is cheap and you can throw it at your application but if the application crashes it doesn’t matter that it was running 25 percent faster a moment before.

Will .NET succeed?
Gartner believes that both .NET and J2EE will get roughly 40 percent of the developer community behind them in the next few years. There is no doubt that .NET will succeed. However, there is a big question mark regarding its use in the development of mission-critical applications. While .NET is reportedly faster than J2EE, J2EE scores on stability.