Recently I’ve read some interesting, and kind of disturbing, blogs (Sam Gentile’s post, Clemens Vasters’ post) about how .NET developers just don’t think in terms of “enterprise” enough, and because of this, they don’t get the bigger picture of distributed computing. If this is true, this is not a good sign. I would have thought that with how far the internet has come and how far it’s going to go, almost everyone would be building applications from the ground up based on designs steeped in distributed computing. In fact, one observation I’ve made of late is the term “enterprise” being used too readily by people who have no business even knowing what it means. Just because a developer works for a large, enterprise-type company does not make one an “enterprise developer” or “enterprise architect”.
So how did this happen? This is of course a generalization, but my theory (and that’s all it is) is that it’s the typical scenario where developers aren’t looking past the bridge of their nose when building applications. They don’t take into account the overall architecture, infrastructure, or security considerations. They’ve been handed some specs, if they got specs at all, and began pecking on the keyboard. And more often than not, it’s developers who are also designing the application, which could be part of the problem. No clear separation of duties. Of course this can be caused by all types of factors, not the least of which is organizations with limited resources.
My point is that if as a whole there is a real lack of experience with distributed computing in .NET, it might be because as a whole, applications are not designed up front in a distributed manner.
Print | posted on Thursday, February 12, 2004 8:34 PM