Indian developers get serious about .NET

After many pilots and lots of hype, the first bunch of projects by Indian software companies on the .NET platform are here. Whether it is Mastek’s London Congestion project or the Indian Railways website, real-world .NET applications are being made in India, says Prashant L Rao

There was a time not too long ago when the hype meter was going into the red zone and .NET was more talk than action. That’s all changed now with over 300 .NET projects having been executed by Indian software companies.

Hype gives way to projects

Daniel Ingitaraj claims that development on .NET is quicker and the cost of development is also lower

The projects vary but some are quite significant. A good example is London Congestion Charging (LCC). This project aims to reduce traffic congestion in London by setting a Congestion Charge—drivers wishing to enter the central London zone pay a £5 daily charge. The charges are enforced through a system of several hundred cameras. The charges are collected over phone, Web, fax/e-mail, post and retail counters. The numbers involved in this project are big. There are 75,000 payment transactions, 2,50,000 vehicles and 1.5 million images to manage and 4,000 penalty charge notices to serve every day.

Closer home, Indian Railways has automated the process of gathering information from station masters’ logs and collating it to serve up information regarding train arrivals and departures on the Railways website that runs on .NET. The data centre is at Delhi. This application includes Web services running on SQL Server. In the next phase, mobile alerts will be made available.

Talking of mobile alerts, the first implementation of .NET Alerts in the Asia-Pacific region was done by Satyam for Singapore Exchange (SGX). The solution uses .NET Alerts on .NET Passport and Windows XP Messenger Tabs and it lets SGX customers customise their financial information alerts, selecting the events they wish to be informed of and how the alerts are delivered. One thing in .NET’s favour is the speed of development and deployment—the SGX implementation took only five weeks.

Developers get on .NET train

The enthusiasm levels of Indian developers regarding .NET have risen. One indicator is the number of ISVs

(Independent Software Vendors) who have ported their products to Windows 2003 and got them tested and certified at Microsoft’s XML Centre in Bangalore (formerly known as the .NET centre). No less than 75 ISVs have taken the plunge. Another sign of things looking up for Microsoft is the increase in the number of folks registered on its ‘Beginners’ section on MSDN India (formerly known as experience .NET). That number has more than doubled from 5,000 a year back to 10,685 today. The total number of Indian developers targeting .NET as a platform is supposed to be 2,50,000, of a total pool of 5,50,000 developers.

Limitations remain

While .NET is finding acceptance in real-world projects what usually happens is that .NET is used for Web-centric projects while core applications remain on traditional platforms. For instance, the Indian Railways booking engine still runs on Oracle/Fortran while the website is on .NET. Most .NET projects so far have involved portals and support applications. The biggest factor limiting .NET from being used at the core is perhaps its tight linkage to Windows. Until Windows Server becomes an accepted platform for running core applications, .NET is going to be shut out of enterprise software’s equivalent of Formula One.

While .NET has gained credibility, it will take a while for it to be used to build mission-critical applications, about the same time it should take for the SQL Server/Windows Server combination to make its way to the heart of the enterprise. Meanwhile, .NET is taking over the slot occupied by ASP and Visual Basic—front-end applications that ‘webify’ existing legacy systems.

.NET today and tomorrow

Microsoft’s next development toolkit is going to be Visual Studio tools for Office 2003. This will let developers using Visual Studio write C# and VB.NET applications that directly tap into Office applications. The next big leap forward will have to wait till mid-2004, however. That’s when Yukon, the next-generation database engine for the next version of SQL Server will debut. Along with it will come Visual Studio ‘Whidbey’ that’ll let programmers hook into Yukon’s new features.

Further along the road lie Longhorn and its associated products. This is where Microsoft will release the successors to Windows XP and Windows 2003—Longhorn and Blackcomb respectively. Again, there will be a new version of Visual Studio called Orcas to coincide with Longhorn/Blackcomb’s release as well as the next avatar of Office, Office 12. The big thing at this stage will be the extent to which .NET becomes a part of Windows. Today, .NET operates through a layer of software called the CLR (Common Language Runtime) that sits atop Windows. In Longhorn, the .NET framework will become part of the OS, supplanting the Windows API that exists today. “CLR is going to be the native framework or API in Longhorn,” says Daniel Ingitaraj, senior marketing manager at Microsoft India. Integrating the framework into the OS will have two significant advantages. Firstly, by making the framework part of the Windows desktop OS, Microsoft will make it attractive for third parties to create .NET-based applications by doing away with the need for bundling a huge runtime along with a third-party application. Secondly, application performance should improve along with the tighter integration. In the long term, .NET is going to be the only way to develop business applications on Windows.

Key.NET projects executed by Indian software companies
Client	Project	Software Services provider
GAP	Rearchitecting the Commerce Server Retail storefront including catalogue management.	Infosys
Dell	A project using Web services to create an online shopping system with enhanced capabilities using C# and ASP.NET.	Infosys
DuPont	A Fabric Management System for manufacturing.SatyamMarks & SpencerCentralised store stock management that provides stock information across 11 stock holding locations.	Wipro
Sony	Sales and business planning application.WiproSchwan’sEnhanced and consolidated intranet services for more than 25,000 users in the largest branded frozen food company in the US. 300 concurrent users with response time below 10 seconds.	Cognizant
Eclipsys	Web-enabled a HIPPA compliant application for this healthcare ISV so that doctors and patients can view information over the Web.	Patni
VP Buildings	Automating the building design process to capture design parameters and send them over the Web and process orders.	Patni
Nasik Glassworks	The company makes bottles for Coke, Pepsi, Cadbury and Nestle. A manufacturing framework is being put in place to improve plant flow efficiency from 80 percent to 90 percent and reduce wastage from 6 percent to 3 percent.L&T InfotechCitigroupSystem for automatically processing cash dividend claims.	L&T Infotech

.NET Pros & Cons

Pros

ASP.NET brings a new level of ease of use to creating useful Web applications. .NET’s class libraries have been redone from scratch. Be it Web and GUI development or accessing databases, the libraries have been redesigned to be consistent with each other, saving developers considerable effort. As .NET makes use of the built-in application server that’s part and parcel of Windows Server it can work out to be less expensive than buying a separate app server for a J2EE implementation. “Development is quicker and the cost of development is lower,” says Ingitaraj. .NET supports Web services.

Cons

The huge runtime (20 MB-plus) is problem for third-party software developers. It’s not a problem in deployments over an intranet but downloading a 20 MB runtime isn’t going to help make applications popular with users. .NET is only available on Windows. That’s not helpful if your goal is cross-platform development. Developers rarely choose a language based on syntax. Despite that, .NET’s cross-language strategy is based on offering a choice of syntax. You can use any language you want but the end result will be the same in terms of performance. Developers choose a language based on parameters such as the size of the final executable, speed, cross-platform support and so forth. That’s not an option with .NET even though it supports umpteen languages.