.NET reality check

.NET reality check. There's been some pushback recently, in the .NET blogging community, about Microsoft's habit of living in the future. For example:

It is abundantly frustrating to be keeping up with you guys right now. We out here in the real world do not use Longhorn, do not have access to Longhorn (not in a way we can trust for production), and we cannot even begin to test out these great new technologies until version 1.0 (or 2.0 for those that wish to stay sane). I know there's probably not a whole lot you can do, but this is a plea to you from someone “in the field”. My job is to work on the architecture team as well as implement solutions for a large-scale commercial website using .NET. I use this stuff all day every day, but I use the 1.1 release bits.

Here's my point, enough with the “this Whidbey, Longhorn, XAML is so cool you should stop whatever it is you are doing and use it”. Small problem, we can't. Please help us by remembering that we're still using the release bits, not the latest technology. [Michael Earls]

In the spirit of Michael's plea, I'm working on an upcoming article in which I'll compare what was promised for the .NET platform (er, framework), two and three years ago, with the current reality as it exists today. Examples of the kinds of issues I want to consider: [Jon's Radio]

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