|
Cross-Pollinate Your Developers, but Manage Language Entropy
One of .NET’s big marketing aspects is its cross-language development and debugging support. This capability opens up more opportunities to use your existing talent pool for new types of projects. For example, Active Server Pages (ASP) Web developers have a particular way of writing their code. They use certain libraries and COM objects, and they generally code differently from C++ or VB COM component developers. With ASP.NET, your Web developers can use different lan-guages for the underlying code, opening the way for non-Web developers to cross the fence and provide code for Web applications. And your current Web developers can use ob-ject- oriented programming in ASP.NET and the same frame-work libraries as your component developers. This makes it easier for them to contribute to other types of application development as well.
However, the advantages of cross-language development are limited for most companies. The thought of having one application composed of a hodge-podge of different lan-guages in each code module should make configuration-management people wake up in a cold sweat. You still need a coherent policy on what types of modules should be developed in which languages, and you need to maintain that coherency throughout the scope of at least an application’s subsystems. But every policy is only a starting point you can deviate from, so your new ability to support an assortment of different lan-guages if you choose, or are forced to, is a good thing to keep in mind in the world of .NET.
—Brian Noyes
|