I was talking to Steve about this the other day and it caused a bit of Geek soul searching within me. Ever since I started writing SharpMT I get about one email a week complaining about the .NET Framework being required. The complaints range from that it’s needed at all to it being too big or that it uses too much memory. My usual reaction is “stop bitching about it and go click Windows Update to get it.” Why so short and snippy a response? That’s a bit longer in telling…

The .NET Framework is the future of Microsoft‘s development plans, at least from what I can see. It is the central hub of all things good and golden that Microsoft is planning for the next ten years or so, which is about the length of a millennium in digital years. It might have other names and it might become a smaller part of a bigger platform – i.e. WinFX – but it’s by far the most visible and thought out class library and framework this side of 1990. Having said that, what makes people think that whining about other developers using it will stop us from using it?

Let’s take a step back. Why do I require it at all? Well, I wrote SharpMT in C#. Why did I do that, if I had been using C++ and C for a decade? Besides wanting to learn the new language, C# let me code the first version of #MT in under a week. When I wanted a web control: *bam* it took four clicks. Wanted a sliding panel? *bam* another four clicks. It’s elegant and it’s easy and that’s that. It was my choice and I made a good one.

So why are people so entrenched against the .NET Framework, if it can accelerate development and make better applications? There’s varied arguments. The first is that because it wasn’t included in Windows 2000 there’s a 20MB file download that is required to get applications like mine to run. Actually, since there’s two versions of the .NET Framework, it might cause a 40MB download. That would be a huge concern except – *gasp* – people have broadband access now! [Even Mike has broadband now – he had to upgrade his Windows 95 Gateway to a brand new Windows XP-based Dell to get it, but if he can get DSL no one else has an excuse – even my parents have broadband and they can’t spell DSL when it comes to PC’s] And if not, go get a CD from Microsoft. Someone has them floating around, I’m sure. A $6 upgrade kit or something… stop bitching about the one time download because my applications would be five times their current size if I didn’t have the support of the .NET Framework in the first place – you’re downloading the same amount of bytes overall.

I’ve also heard people complain that it’s too large to install. This is where my own soul searching came from. Yes, 20MB is a large amount of data. What size hard drive are you running now, by the way? Me, I’ve got a 40GB in my notebook. Hm. Why is 0.05% of your vast storage volume such a huge demand? It’s not. See, old school Geeks are used to pinching every bit and byte of free space that they can. We’re greedy and hording control freaks that feel they have to constantly vigilant to protect our hard drives. We’re like this because in the old days we had to be like this! Remember fine tuning the Windows 3.1 swap file size because you only had a 10MB hard drive? Or only installing certain parts of the MSDN Library and hiding the CD from people because you would need it to search for function calls in VB? Hah. Long gone – modernize yourself and learn to install without fear! Install every piece of Office 2003, too, because if you short yourself the experience of using OneNote to save 50MB on a 80GB drive, you’re missing out. [Shut up Steve! I was wrong in calling it “post-it notes for the Tablet PC,” OK? There’s some neat stuff in that app!]

Then there’s the DigitHeads that think they know what they’re talking about and argue against the Framework because of memory usage. These are the worst people to listen to because they’re either still looking for a QEMM386 TSR module to free up space under 640K or they’re completely lacking in their technology knowledge. The former group is just dated: they’re used to working in DOS and haven’t yet realized that they’re performing tricks that are almost 20 years old. The latter group is the worst of the lot because they’re freakin’ morons. Yes, the .NET Framework gets loaded into memory and yes it will use some of it – all applications do this, so that’s strike one. Strike two comes when they say it uses too much memory; how much is too much? See the above argument about hard drive usage percentages and try again. Strike three is the best: it’s buggy or it mishandles memory. Bad code is buggy and mishandles memory. We’ve had buggy code long before .NET and we’ll have it long after it – will we have memory leaks though?

One of the nice things about C++ is that you control everything. One of the nice things about C# is that you don’t have to control everything. Create an object with C++ and you have to handle the clean up. Create an object with C# and the Framework eventually gets around to cleaning it up. C++ gives you a loaded gun to shoot yourself in the foot; C# points the gun at your marketing department. Can the garbage collection that’s in C#’s CLR be 100% effective in all situations? Articles abound talk about how to optimize your code for garbage collection; if the default doesn’t work for you there are ways to specialize your code! In theory, this could prevent memory leaks from everyone that’s built on the framework – at least the careless or stupid ones that come from bad coding.

I once had a Visual C++ programer work for me (during the version 6.0 days) that declared over three dozen objects with new and didn’t know you have to call delete to free the memory back up. The memory leaks went on for pages on end when you debugged it. No framework can actively prevent this particular problem but it can help to fix it, as the .NET Framework would – in some cases there’s nothing that can help bad programming.

Lastly, if you ever plan to go to Windows Server 2003 or Longhorn, the .NET Framework will be included and impossible to remove… so there’s one less thing to bitch about in the future. Unless of course you’re content to stay on Windows 98 and manage your 6GB hard drive with 64MB of RAM to your heart’s content, spending hours muttering about IRQ’s, the 384KB memory hole, and prophesying the rise or OS/2.

If you’re that guy, neither I nor the .NET Framework can help you anyway.