A different kind of .NET Passport
ZDNet | at | by Mike
Melbourne-based Damien Watkins has been involved with the .NET phenomenon since 1998, when Microsoft approached a number of universities worldwide to provide feedback to the .NET framework. "People think of Microsoft as being desktop-centric, which it was 10-20 years ago," Watkins said. "I think .NET in some ways is Microsoft saying the future is the Internet and this is our way, or moving away from being desktop-focussed."
Academic adoption of .NET is high
According to Watkins, academics are generally adopting .NET as fast, or faster, than commercial developers but for different reasons. Academics, he said, like the design and the architecture. "It is a good platform for teaching the underlying principle of component-oriented distributed systems." Commercial developers, he added, like the amount of breadth and depth of functionality in the libraries. "I think commercial developers are all a bit shell-shocked by recent company crashes and so moving to a new platform is not on many of their agendas for a while."