> Everything is managed managed managed! We have left internal (Office) and external (lots and lots of folks) customers in the dust by only building decent managed tools. That's my opinion.
Good! Well, good for internal I mean. If managed/WPF/etc are the future of Windows, then MS needs to start eating their own dog food and using those techs for their apps. It drives me utterly nuts to think of all the neat tools that show up in Windows that other MS divisions flat out ignore.
DevDiv makes about $1 billion for MS. Office on the other hand makes about $18 billion. So in terms of politics Office gets to decide what tools they use for the most part. Office sees it as a risk in terms of profit and hitting ship dates on time to switch to the latest stuff DevDiv is spitting out.
Rumor has it WPF is going the way of Windows Forms. It will be supported but no new features. With that in mind, think of all the UI frameworks MS has had wrapping up Win32: MFC, ATL/WTL, WinForms, WPF. Nothing seems to stick. Office just writes their own stuff that they KNOW they can depend on it being there. Duplication sure. But DevDiv is notorious for releasing things and deprecating the past "great" technology within a few years.
There is another reason they ignore the new tools: managed is slow for the client. For the server world managed is great and has won. Nobody in their right mind would write native web apps. They write the stuff that needs to be native (db, webserver) then glue the app together with python, ruby, C#, or Java (I know, a vast oversimplification of webapps).
Clients don't have the advantage of the webapps. We don't have a lot of computer to do things in parallel. Every millisecond counts to make the app appear as responsive as possible.
Why does managed suck for the client? JITing is slow and the code it generates isn't nearly as good as a compiler. NGENing is possible but still slow because of garbage collection and marshaling data between native and managed code. Little things like that add up and slow down responsiveness a lot on the UI side of things and that is what the user notices and complains about.
Good! Well, good for internal I mean. If managed/WPF/etc are the future of Windows, then MS needs to start eating their own dog food and using those techs for their apps. It drives me utterly nuts to think of all the neat tools that show up in Windows that other MS divisions flat out ignore.