A
Journey through the Microsoft way |
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Author
: Thomas Kurian Ambattu |
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| This
articles is a journey through the Microsoft technologies
starting from the traditional windows programming to the
latest .NET technology. This article won’t be giving
you any technical skills still I wrote it because atleast
some of you may be curious to know about the Microsoft
Technologies and its evolution. |
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In
traditional windows programming the programmers used something
called as API for developing applications. To be more
clear Windows provide API s for developing applications
for windows. API or Application Programming Interface
are nothing but basically functions written in C language.
But programming with API is tedious and very difficult.
A simple example would be to display a normal window you
will have to write many lines of code. So due to this
difficulty Microsoft and others started developing Visual
tools to help programmers to develop windows application
in a much easier way. This finally brought Borland C++
Builder, Visual C++ and related IDE s to the market. These
IDEs made development of windows application easier.
Companies also started developing “Wrapper Classes”
which will wrap the API s and will expose the functionality
in an object oriented way. The best example for wrapper
classes is the MFC (MICROSOFT FOUNDATION CLASS) developed
by Microsoft which is used in Visual C++. |
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| By
realizing the necessity for a medium for application to
communicate to each other Microsoft came up with OLE (Object
Linking and Embedding). Although OLE was useful and served
many purposes OLE had many limitations. This made Microsoft
to come up with something called as COM (Component Object
Model). COM was much capable than OLE. This new technology
introduced a new concept called Active-X controls. Active-X
controls were very helpful for programmers. Coding Active-X
controls in Visual C++ is little difficult but in Visual
basic was very easy. |
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| The
penetration and Influence of Internet launched new requirements
and questions before Microsoft coz C/C++ was not suited
for web development. To meet the requirement to some extend
Microsoft tried to expand MFC by introducing new classes
in MFC like CSocket, CASyncSocket, and several HTTP based
classes. Although these classes was of great help this
also had limitations like the developers had to take care
of many issues like network details and sort of things.
Although RPC (Remote Procedure Call) was very helpful
it was very limited in its scope because for an object
orient programmers it didn’t make much help, as
RPC did not allow passing objects as parameters. To meet
the changing demand Microsoft then upgraded COM to COM+
and for the distributed computing requirement of the industry
they introduced DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model).
All these were good technologies but they needed significant
learning curve and expertise. So Microsoft finally decided
to come up with something innovative. Finally Microsoft
launched their revolutionary product called the .NET. |
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NET is the latest platform from Microsoft for
the development of windows application.To develop an application
in .NET you need a language which is .NET complaint. Microsoft
provides and IDE Visual Studio that has .NET complaint
languages that helps you to develops windows application
in .NET. The members of the Visual Studio .NET family
are Visual C#.NET,Visual Basic.NET,Visual C++.NET,Visual
J#.NET.All these languages are .NET complaint. |
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