Java Swing vs. C#

Currently I am developing on the .NET platform using C#. We've had a TON of problems with Windows forms and how immature and hacked together the API is. Bascially it's an object wrapper around the win32 api and not even all the widgets are the best win32 api widgets. Example the toolbar provided in Windows Forms is weak. It supports 8-bit color images so when you put a 24-bit color icon / bmp you get a downleveled image that looks like crud.

At any rate we've got a lot of Java programmers on staff and a lot of the tools we are looking at are direct ports of successful Java projects. We use NAnt, Spring.NET, etc... I've done enough Java to know a lot of it's strong points but my desktop / rich-client experience w/Java is limited. Most of what I've done was pretty server side / distributed system.

So there is a lot of talk about Swing / Java Web Start etc... I'm warming up to the idea. I'm a little concerned with these types of comments from someone like Slava.

http://www.jroller.com/page/slava/20050206

and then the comments from here:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2005/03/why_dont_you_sh.html

Which leads me to the question -- are there any Java developers that have switched to C# or vice versa. And if so why was the switch made and what problems has it solved. I am talking about rich-client applications so keep that in mind.

Longhorn 5048

I just installed Longhorn 5048 build from WinHec 2005. Holy crap... it's crap! I never did get the PDC 2003 builds to check it out, but the screen shots looked awesome and it had a lot of new features (sidebar, glass effects, etc....) but 5048 was WINDOWS XP but uglier.

Right now I am running Windows XP with the Tablet pc theme and it's pretty smooth looking. It makes Longhorn 5048 look like 3 years ago.

I ran into a couple of weird things. I added a user and then switched the logon method to show the welcome screen. I logged off and got a the Windows XP welcome screen. Huh? They also used a Windows 3.1 hour-glass icon during the install process... wow!

I cannot believe how unpolished this build is. Why show this crap off at Win HEC, maybe it's more stable just for hardware engineers to produce the drivers and not meant to dazzle but wow it sucked. It lasted about 15 minutes on my machine and then I removed it.

Microsoft is seriously going to loose the desktop if they don't get their stuff together. BTW I am a developer and have been doing C# for the last 3 years so you can't call me a MS hater. I really liked Windows XP when it came out and loved C# / .NET and still do mostly except I've been doing Windows Forms development lately and found how crappy that part of the .NET Framework is.

DANGIT! You're pretty much ruining my life!

kyle gray (http://corbin.blogspot.com) stole my preferred blog address. Oh well I've lived with a goofy last name my entire life I guess a goofy blog address isn't too bad! Humm... I wonder if he'd give it back, he doesn't seem to be harnessing the power of his blog right now.

I am going to try out this blogging idea because everyone else is having such a killer time doing it. I will probably post mostly geeky stuff here but who knows I may get in a word or two about something else...