"Brian" wrote in message
...
"Sean Hederman" wrote in message
[Snip]
You may be right, but it does look like MS is doing a good job of keeping
the frameworks versioning tight so far, so I'd say that this comment is a
bit premature.

As is yours, because it hasn't been through enough versions or major
upgrades yet to give real headaches. Microsoft's track record with other
products suggests that major upgrades always break something that used to
work. Of more concern, however, is the situation when the beast is, say,
5-10 years old and developers have to target an unpredictable
heterogeneous
population of framework versions and need to make their app work with all
of
them. It's a problem that Access developers struggle with (hence the OP's
comments), and I don't expect it to be any different with the dotnet
framework.

But one of the design goals of the .NET framework is to help resolve this
exact issue.

[Snip]
You attack a straw man. It was the OP who introduced the term
"freestanding" to describe a dotnet app, not me. I was merely pointing
out
the error in his interpretation.

In any case, there are lots of genuine binary programs on my computer.
Freestanding they may not be in an absolute sense, but, being real
binaries,
they are of a quite different nature to a dotnet app (or, indeed, an
Access
app or a VB6 app).

Actually most VB6 apps are genuine binary programs. The default compilation
option is native image not pcode. Anyway what's so holy about binary
programs? .NET winds up JITting the IL to binary, so once that's done once,
you effectively do have a binary app. I suggest you write some C++ code and
some C# code and compare the two final binaries. You'll find that the
machine instructions are very similar.

[Snip]
As to your assertion about people nicking your code, have you ever tried
to
work out what's happenning in a large undocumented, uncommented piece of
source code? Not fun, and certainly not easy.


I've done it lots. Quite enjoy it, actually.

Good for you, I hate it. I like my code nicely commented and with good
semantic naming.