Microsoft has made a release candidate for Visual Studio 2010 available for download, and the rumour is that the final build should be ready in time for the official launch on April 12th. Should you care?

I'd argue that Microsoft's platform is in decline, despite good financial results recently on the back of the success of Windows 7. Windows-only development is increasingly unattractive in a world where Macs, iPhones and Linux devices such as Android and some netbooks jostle for attention alongside the once all-conquering Windows PC. Microsoft does internet too, of course, and even cross-platform for the desktop if you count what is coming in Silverlight 4.0; but even after the launch of Windows Azure this month, the company is not the first to come to mind when you think cloud.

That said, Visual Studio 2010 is a mighty impressive release. It is not just a new IDE, but also includes .NET Framework 4.0, the first complete update since version 2.0 in 2005. Versions 3.0 and 3.5 used the same underlying runtime as 2.0. The Chief Architect is Rico Mariani, Microsoft's .NET performance expert, which has no doubt helped in the tricky transition to Windows Presentation Foundation for the Visual Studio editor and shell; and much of the product is under the oversight of VP Scott Guthrie, one person who still knows how to communicate with developers, and whose presentation on Silverlight 4.0 rescued last year's Professional Developer's Conference from tedium.

Leaving aside the people involved, there is a ton of interesting stuff to explore, including the new F# language, IntelliTrace debugging that lets you step backwards through code, standard UML diagramming, source code management and issue tracking through Team Foundation no matter how small your team, greatly improved libraries and tools for concurrent programming, and if you have the Ultimate edition and the patience to set it up, an extraordinary thing called Lab Management which integrates virtual machines into the automated build and test cycle so that you can verify clean installs into complex multi-machine environments on every build, and use snapshots to analyse bugs at the moment they occur. This is also the first release to be designed with ASP.NET MVC in mind, and to have a full visual designer for Silverlight. Microsoft has also done some good work with Windows Workflow Foundation, in conjunction with a new runtime for the IIS web server called Windows AppFabric, making it easier to build and deploy applications that depend on long-running state management.

There are some disappointments. One is that Visual Studio is out of synch with Silverlight 4.0, so despite developer attention having largely shifted to the 4.0 release, Visual Studio 2010 will ship with Silverlight 3.0 support. There will be an add-on in due course that will put that right. Another is that Windows Azure development is not as smoothly integrated as I had hoped. SharePoint development, while much improved, remains an arduous process that tends to take over your development machine; and there is not much new in mobile development as yet. I am sure there will be plenty of other problems and frustrations; so much here is new that it is nearly inevitable.

These issue have not stopped me from enjoying my work so far with the beta and now the RC. If you have any interest in Microsoft's platform, I suggest you take a look.

 

Historically, the web development choice between the Microsoft platform and open source has been a fork in the road with many consequences. Choose Microsoft, and you generally use Visual Studio, Internet Information Server, ASP.NET, C# or Visual Basic, and SQL Server for the database manager. Choose open source, and you most likely target LAMP in one of its guises, the most common being Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, and work in Eclipse or almost anything other than Visual Studio.

Recently the boundaries have been blurring a little. Apache actually runs nicely on Windows, and I've used it happily to host a Subversion repository, while on the other side Microsoft has been making an effort to support PHP in IIS 7.0. But what about running ASP.NET on Linux, is that a silly idea?

I've been following the efforts of the Mono project in this area for some time, though it's been a while since I've tried it out. Mono was originally focused more on desktop than web applications, and I've used it mostly in that context. When laterooms.com tried Mono in early 2006 it quickly gave up, citing problems with Mono's Boehm garbage collector; see the developer's comments to my blog post at the time.

Still, that was three years ago. I had another look a couple of weeks ago, and I've been impressed. In particular, the ability to develop in Visual Studio and deploy to Linux is interesting. I'm working on a small project, and getting this working is remarkably simple. I used Visual Studio 2008, but set the project to target .NET Framework 2.0, as Mono lags behind Microsoft in implementing the latest .NET APIs, and using MySQL rather than SQL Server, since this is available on my Linux web server. Using MySQL with .NET is straightforward thanks to the official ADO.Net provider, which specifically supports Mono as well as Microsoft .NET.

On the web server, running Debian 5.0 Linux (Lenny), I installed the libapache2-mod-mono and mono-apache-server2 packages using Aptitude. Next, I configured Apache to use Mono on a particular web site, with a few lines of manual configuration, as explained here, and imported the MySQL database from the Windows development machine to the Linux web server.

Back in Visual Studio, I compiled the web site, uploaded it, and it worked first try. Performance is good as well.

I realise that a number of caveats apply. It's worth reading this page, the current Mono todo list, which notes some of the important areas where Mono is lacking and includes the comment:

Mono is known to be not as performant as the .NET Framework.

Note that Mono still uses the Boehm garbage collector, though an alternative is in development. Further, Mono does not implement the entire .NET Framework. Mono is a brave choice; Windows and IIS the sensible option for .NET applications.

It still seems to me significant that you can easily deploy to Linux and Apache using Mono. Not all applications are mission-critical, and not all applications need to scale as well as Laterooms.com. Mono has a number of attractions. First, it is open source, so in the event of problems you can always obtain and amend the source code. Second, running on Apache and Linux is a considerable saving in license costs. Third, you can get official developer support from Novell.

Why would you use C# and ASP.NET rather than PHP or Java? The main reason would be because you know and like the language, the platform, and/or the Visual Studio IDE. In an interesting report on the state of the computer book market, O'Reilly notes that C# is now the largest programming language for all book sales. Thanks to Mono, you can use C# but still deploy to an open source platform.

It also seems to me that Microsoft's official support for Moonlight, the Mono implementation of Silverlight, is important. Microsoft now needs Mono, in order to tick the cross-platform box and compete with Flash, giving more assurance to its long-term future.

Mono's growth over nearly a decade has been slow but steady. Perhaps now is the moment that it creeps into the mainstream.

Are you using Mono, for web or desktop development? I'd be interested in your comments.

Over the weekend Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, Coporate VP of the .NET developer division, announced that the open source jQuery Javascript library will be integrated into Visual Studio, the main Windows development tool. Further, Microsoft will treat jQuery as a supported product within technical support contracts, and will use jQuery to build new controls for ASP.NET, its web platform.

This is a breakthrough both for Microsoft and for open source. In the past, Microsoft has preferred to reinvent the wheel rather than adopting existing open source code. For example, when the company delivered Visual Studio Team System, it did not use existing open source products like NUnit for unit testing, or Subversion for source code management, or Nant and CruiseControl for build management, but shipped all-new equivalents. That strategy may have backfired. At the recent Remix08 conference in Brighton, I noticed that when a developer asked about Team System during a panel discussion, he was immediately advised by several other delegates to stick with the open source products.

I don't mean to suggest that Microsoft has only just discovered open source. After all, the company has its own open source community focused on interoperability, and publishes source code to some of this products under various shared source licenses. On the developer side, Microsoft sponsors significant open-source products like IronPython and IronRuby. But the jQuery case is particularly interesting, because Microsoft already has its own Javascript library called ASP.NET AJAX.
 
Is Microsoft now abandoning its own library? At Remix08, I asked Guthrie this very question. "We are definitely still investing in ASP.NET AJAX, there's lots of features coming out," he told me. "But there's a proportion of developers coming from other platforms where having support for other AJAX frameworks makes it more likely they'll use Visual Studio, which is good for us, and there's some proportion of developers on .NET that would prefer to use other frameworks in addition. People tend to be pragmatic. jQuery is great for CSS selectors and for the animation engine, but doesn't have a type system like Prototype or ASP.NET AJAX. We see a lot of developers wanting to use the ASP.NET AJAX class and type system, and then use CSS selectors and animation from jQuery."

In his announcement, Guthrie explains how jQuery support came about. Developers were asking for features to be added to ASP.NET AJAX, when they were already in jQuery. "As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it." That sounds like common sense to most of us, but getting to this point has been a considerable journey for Microsoft.

The move is not without risks. If jQuery is good enough, then what about PHP, an open source alternative to ASP.NET? What about using Linux instead of Windows, or OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office? The company can hardly suggest that open source stuff is never any good, when it is integrating open source code into its own products. Instead, Microsoft has to compete on real-world issues like quality, productivity, reliability and support, which can only be good for its customers.