On Monday, Nick had a great post about how some popular Java open source projects, "frameworks", are now creaping into the .NET "Open Source Scene". Jeff also, had a good input about the "get it out the door" .NET mindset. Then Kent posted about how MS got developers hooked into the "just glue it attitude."

Here are my two cents on the issue...Having been heavily exposed to both .NET and Java (J2EE), I say that yes if you want a shot time-to-market development, then .NET is the answer for your solution. However, if you want a robust framework that will ship 6 months late cause your architects are debating whether to use the Business Delegate rather than pseudo-Proxy/Adapter mix, then J2EE is your answer. The importance here is to merge the great features both of these technologies have to offer and make the best possible product with either one of them....period!

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While at my previous employer, I sat through meetings, upon meetings that aimed to the improvement of our developers...in laymen's terms, how can we make our coders crank out more code in less time. To my surprise, all of the upper level managers separted our developers into two pools, the java guys and everyone-else. The everyone-else pool was made up of our VB developers that worked on non-misson critical applications because they are using VB...but were soon moving to VB.NET cause that's the next version of VB. They thought of them as the programmer's in-training rather than another asset! Why is that? Well, like Kent said it's an effect of the "just glue it' attitude. In their eyes, it doesn't take that much know-how to grab component A from a toolbox, drop it into a form and write some code behind it to make do stuff. But when it comes to mission-critical applications, you have to in-trust on a Java developer, cause they have to think about their code rather than "getting it for free".
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I love the fact that now I can use NAnt to build my .NET projects rather than using nmake. It works out great for me, cause before I was using Ant to build my Java projects, so all I have to do is replace all of the instances of <JAVAC /> with <CSC />. To me all this porting from Java to .NET is great cause it shows individuals that .NET is something more than just another way of dropping components into a form. That maybe this time around, our developers will have to think more critically before writing any .NET code to produce a better end product rather than just "glueing it" together.

You have to remember that the reason why frameworks/languages are created is to add/build functionality to an existing framework/language. If it was missing from the initial design, then we can add it later cause we have the flexibility to do so. Thus in turn, it makes our jobs easier the second time around.