Microsoft really pisses me off. Yea, I’m sure there’s only 10,000 blogs that begin with that sentence, but here’s my explanation. First of all, let’s figure out if we agree on something. Web content is the worst user experience in the world.
If you disagree, then let me just make these comments to try to convince you, but if you still disagree, then I guess quit reading. Web content is generally stateless unless you use some plugin like flash or silverlight. Web content looks different depending on which browser you’re in and requires complex layout via css and javascript to get things to work well on more than just one browser. Web content has to be ‘posted back’ meaning you download the data AND the presentation every time you do any changes on the page (sometimes less with ajax, but again that adds more complexity to development).
If you’re still with me, then you agree that web content is a horrible user experience and in general just a bad way to present your UI. (or you’re just curious what I’m going to say). Either way, the dialog I was having with myself today was “why don’t we have .net winforms or wpf applications that work on every platform, after all, that _IS_ the point of the .net clr right? platform independence.”
One reason came to mind out of several, Microsoft is greedy. Let’s face it, why would Microsoft go out of their way to develop .net CLRs for openBSD, macs, solaris, etc (forgive me I’m not a unix nerd so I don’t know the cool names for this stuff). There's no money in it for them (directly)
So the answer then becomes, Java. Unfortunately, you still start running into the same problems that you had with the web. It doesn’t look the same on this machine as the other, it runs slow, my user experience is different.
I challenge Microsoft to step up to the plate and make wpf/winforms for gnome, elf, mac (whatever you call all that stuff) and give us a truly platform independent CLR that has a stateful user interface.
Plus WCF/WSE/WebServices that runs in a CLR on unix machines would be nice too.