I find it ironic that the first post I have seen for a while that suffers from Microsoft's non-standard extensions to ASCII is devoted to how Microsoft's new initiatives will drive Perl farther into the Win32 world...

My main fear with .NET is that Perl on .NET will be subtly incompatible with Perl everywhere else. I don't mind it so long as it remains portable.

The Microsoft world is not friendly to those who don't jump on Redmond's various bandwagons.

I do hope that if .NET can truly create the language independence that Microsoft thinks the world craves, many VB programmers will slowly come to realize that Perl is easier, more intuitive, and a heck of alot more fun than VB ever was or ever will be.

Massive conversion would be unlikely, in my opinion, given that Microsoft will never have control (i.e., make massive profits from or be able to appropriate) the Perl community and will continue to strongly promote VB amongst its devotees, but wouldn't it be wonderful :-)

All of the things they've "extended" to make propriarity were in an attempt to lock people into using just their platform. I belive that the .NET framework does this, not any language. From my initial impressions on what they're doing, they are no longer trying to make the development language or a client side scripting language their leverage. The implementation on .NET is just too different for things to be portable no matter what they are written in.

It looks like you're going to use Perl/C/C#/etc.. to manipulate and define your .NET environment in a sense. So it's not going to be at all portable since I don't think Microsoft is ever going port this platform to *NIX systems. It will still probably be Perl as we know it, but the actual code will have no use outside the .NET framework.

Anyway, that's my $0.02
Rich

Addition: I think it will be similar to how Perl is used in ASP and .wsh files. Example

You could use Win32::OLE or use objects that are pre-defined to ASP and WSH like so..(WSH version)

<job>
  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="PerlScript">
    $x = $WScript->CreateObject('Excel.Application');
    $x->Workbooks->Add;
    $x->{Visible} = 1;
  </SCRIPT>
</job>
[download]

So it's Perl, but Perl using methods that are specific to the environment. Though you could do it using Win32::OLE, I'd assume that anyone working with ASP and WSH would use the built-in functinoality.

Imagine running on a treadmill while trading stock on your handheld computer and having your cable box make you some toast and coffee! .NET will bring this to you!

Can anyone cut through the marketing blather and give me a nice, short, buzzword-free explanation of just what .NET really is?

---
I'm too sexy for my .sig.

Try gnat's article What Every Perl Programmer Needs to Know About .NET.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

Read this article from MS. It does a better job of explaining it.

Rich

So that is what Microsoft says it is.

Do you believe them?

Take for instance the item in there about building block experiences. Their login piece already has been described. They call it Hailstorm. Now to hear them talk about it, it is going to be the best thing since sliced bread.

However this is the company that does its best to wipe out everyone else by fair or foul means. It has repeatedly wound up in anti-trust court, generally for good reason. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I do not trust Microsoft.

In fact here are my thoughts on what Hailstorm is intended to accomplish. This is not a company that is known for doing a good job on keeping data secure or private. Its track record is, in fact, abysmal. I would be willing to lay money that if its strategy takes off that in a few years everyone will be complaining about its abuses of the power that it grabbed with .NET.

Besides which, Microsoft's claims to portability notwithstanding, their strategy has always been to make their own platform the first among equals. .NET will, promises notwithstanding, be a Microsoft first platform. Given how Microsoft has abused every other standard to achieve lock-in, what makes us think that they will do differently this time?

And when it comes to portability, well .NET is a new VM, and Perl on .NET will have new and different bugs from the current. Glancing at what ActiveState has to say, their initial idea of compiling Perl in the .NET runtime was too slow. (Perl is a VM, on a VM?) Instead they have a cryptic comment about a native implementation having to wait for progress on Perl 6.

Given the design of Perl 6 into a front and back end, I suspect that this means that they are intending to try to map Perl opcodes as much as possible onto .NET primitives and get their own .NET implementation. I am sure that such an implementation will turn out to have behaviour differences from the usual. This is on top of the usual bugginess that I expect from Microsoft products.

Oh well. At least ActiveState gets some money for this work. And Microsoft's hopes notwithstanding, my belief is that Microsoft is not in the same position that they used to be to force things down the throats of industry. Unless they do something interesting, fast, they will lose hope of locking down the embedded industry, and I think that networked devices (which are rapidly heading towards Linux) are going to be a lot bigger area of growth than PCs...

so here i am,

going to the site you suggest, because i would like to know more and i keep getting forwarded to a "smart" 404 page. So rather than that, i try going to http://www.microsoft.com/net to see if there are any links there that might get me where i want to go. Funny enough, check out the graphic in the upper-left hand corner. mircosoft.com.

Now, i find this strikingly amusing, since the name microsoft(tm) is so well known that every school child knows how to spell it. Except that someone did misspell it. On their home page. i'm still waiting for the page to load. Did it get hacked? No, doesn't look like. i know it's nitpicky, but with a company as large as Microsoft, they can't afford image loss, even over trivial matters. Or so i guess.

Anyway, thought that was amusing. As a note, it appears that information loads fine here.

jynx

update: Hmmm, that's not a graphic, it's text (my curiosity got the better of me and i looked at the source). The misspelling isn't as painful if it's only text (considering the thousands of lines of text they have to input manually)...