Udo's Techblog

I'm not going to comment on Microsoft cancelling the PDC (ehem, they're calling it a rescheduling, sorry) - except, yes, I am: if I was a microsoft exec, now would exactly be the time to strengthen contacts with developers. They've got tons of new stuff out and judging from how things look like, they really need more buzz for it, starting with Vista and the new presentation technologies. But, hey, that's probably why I'm not a highly paid executive ;)

I didn't want to point out is not how strange it is that the whole C9 crowd is so down on Scoble, either.

No, the nugget here is this:

The person who told me this (who works at Microsoft) told me .NET still takes too long to startup and load into memory and because Windows is now being compared to OSX they can’t afford to ship components that would slow down Windows.

I love managed code. I think we should write as much as possible in managed code, never mind for what OS. Managed code is secure, allows for better cross-application integration and, sure, it's more productive to write. That doesn't mean I don't know how slow it is. Subjectively, Java performs a lot worse, but that's probably just because I'm transferring my hate of the Class Library to other aspects of the platform.

The thing is, everybody knows this. But for some reason, nobody is allowed to speak about it publicly. Because if you do, you get several of these:

This is absurd. My own .NET apps start within 5 seconds if .NET hasn’t been loaded yet, and start instantaneously if it has been. And this has zero to do with waking from sleep mode. From where do you obtain your tech knowledge?

It's interesting, culturally. Maybe it's a taboo or something. Actually, it reminds me of the Firefox people who still insist that FF's system resource cancer is not, technically, a memory leak.