During the past 7 years, all .net developers somehow had to face the problems of users with no .net framework installed. We all faced it, we all dealt with it, and we all hate it!

.Net framework itself is a COM component actually, and COM is a technology that has roots in OLE which goes back to 1995. Even though some parts of the .net framework require other software to be installed in the OS, not all parts have this requirement. So in theory, the whole framework can be redistributed as a native dll. In practice, MS wants us to install the runtime.

There are companies like RemoteSoft and Xenocode who sell products that package necessary parts of the framework along with the actual software written in C#, VB.NET ,etc, compile the whole thing to native code and deploy it as a single package. This is great! This is what we all want. A single file just like in the old days.

Unfortunately, MS does not give us a tool for this. Well, we have NGen of course, but it solves a part of the problem, the whole thing still requires a separate tool, and these tools are expensive. VmWare now has thinapp, which used to be thininstall, and their prices and licencing is also way out of my reach. If I wanted to develop a small widget that’ll just sit in the taskbar, why should I force users to download a 23 MB runtime for it? Why should not I be able to use C# for all my work, without being afraid of deployment blues.

Since there are companies who does this, this is doable. I guess there are also legal problems if I wanted to do this, becouse I’d be distributing parts of framework in some form, which probably requires permission from MS.

This is one neat feature that I’d love to see. Come on MS, give my linker!!!

I’ve build a mobile web site a while ago, which provided xhtml based access to an e-commerce site. I’ve done the development with vs.net 2005, and when I migrated to vs.net 2008, I decided to move that project into new vs.net.

Guess what,  mobile web form designer features are gone. They’ve been gone from vs.net 2005 with sp1 for vs.net 2005, but designer support simply does not exist for vs.net 2008

I guess the general approach to mobile web development is to consider it as a moving target, which will eventually merge with the not-mobile web. New mobile devices and new mobile browsers, especially IPhone and Safari on it is quite capable, it can even run a tricky google web toolkit site I’ve build a while ago. Apperantly MS is just passing the effort for mobile web development, and waiting for the devices to catch up. Meanwhile, there are existing projects, like mine,  which have to maintained. I am not happy about keeping the whole vs.net 2005 ide just because of a single project. Vs.net 2008 sp1 does not seem to change much either. Come on MS, give my designer back.

I’ve just started porting a Google Web Toolkit project (a small one) to JSF, and this time, I have to admit that none of the choices I’ve tested on Eclipse is a match for Netbeans 6.1. Once you get the basics, JSF development is not about visual designers etc, but current solutions on Eclipse platform are way unintuitive compared to usual unintuitive state of Eclipse tools 🙂

I’m not happy about switching tools but I’m really not comfortable with Eclipse based ones. The list includes MyEclipse, Oracle’s solution (ex BEA), and a few others. Let’s see how Eclipse will perform in this field in the future.

I’d love to see Instantiations develop a JSF designer.