A recent ZDNet article misquoted Steve Ballmer as saying “.NET has stalled”. The quote was taken out of context during a question-and-answer in Sydney. The transcript reads:
“I think people were surprised at the level of work that we and IBM, and then we, IBM and Sun, did together on the web services, interoperability protocols. I think, you know, people said hey, this is all great, and then really, here in the last year or so, things have kind of stalled slightly.”
“We’re certainly in the process together, with IBM and with Sun, of trying to, let’s say, get renewed momentum along some of the standard protocol work that we’ve been doing as part of a variety of industry bodies.”
The “Stalled” reference was to the work with IBM and Sun, and not a statement about .NET. ZDNet was kind enough to correct the error, posting an updated version.
Let me go a step further, however. .NET has Momentum. Big momentum. Described as “The implementation of web services to connect people, information, systems and devices through innovative software solutions” that has adoption across Fortune n companies, a powerful (and outspoken) developer community, case studies and real data to see for yourself.
In fact, see it for yourself. The latest version, .NET Momentum v4 was released a few weeks back. It's a 180-megabyte PDF stuffed with real case studies from an amazingly wide range of business and public sectors worldwide. Keen to see .NET Momentum v1-v3?
Still skeptical? Check out the Express Versions of Visual Studio 2005 components and see for yourself. Discover how Microsoft has created world-class tools and samples to get you started.