again.

news flash: man who makes living off particular Microsoft technology, describes that particular Microsoft technology as a "standard", despite the company's long history of corrupting, sabotaging and ignoring technology standards.

same man also says that other technologies are "fringe", and implies that they are inferior.

i think i've seen this somewhere before. certain terms spring to mind, like "conflict of interest", "sock puppet" and "bias".

is there an acronym, YAPW, as in "Yet Another Pathetic Wanker"? seems to fit.

Crap, I thought this was about cURL not some random half dead company.

I've lost interest, sorry author.

Um, I'd surprised if the developer community as a whole agreed with you that .Net isn't a standard.

Love them or hate them, Microsoft's .Net is a pretty widely adopted development framework with pretty rich documentation and good community support.

You may hate their ethic and even their software, but saying .Net isn't a standard is pretty far fetched even for a MS-basher.

Well said sir!

It would have been more correct to use Adobe's Flex as their competitor in the RIA realm rather than AIR. Flex competes directly with Silverlight and openLazlo, AIR is just the technology that allows you to run Adobe Flex applications outside the browser.

@ Steven Hewittt

proceed to www.google.com, and type in the following, exactly as you see here:

define: technical standard

then click on "search".

the definition of "standard" within the IT sphere is rather formal. it is likely that .NET is the dominant methodology within the monoculture wherein you operate; this does not make .NET a standard.

furthermore, "widely adopted", "rich documentation", and "good community support" do not a standard make. the .NET framework is part of Microsoft's walled garden (porting efforts have been rather feeble so far, and have received ambivalent support from the MotherShip). Windows is also not a standard: even MS marketing reps wouldn't call Vista a standard.

WiFi is a standard. TCP/IP is a standard. HTML is a standard.

.NET is NOT a standard.

MS bashing has nothing to do with it, i just don't like FUD.

Lest we forget, .NET is a framework...I am unaware of any official standards for frameworks. What would be the point? Certainly you don't believe that the MS employee was trying to imply that .NET conformed to some official TCP/IP-like specification certified by IEEE. His word choice was a bit ambiguous and a little ironic (as you pointed out), but in all fairness, plenty of people use the word "standard" when they mean "broadly used or accepted."

I hate most of the same things about Microsoft that other people do, but .NET is not on that list. It's my experience that .NET gives companies the most bang for their buck. Today at work I wasted close to two hours waiting for my java app to compile, maven to build the ear, jboss to deploy the ear, etc....Over and over. I could have done it in 1/10th the time using the .NET tools. It's a strong framework with great tools and MS would be very, very foolish not to capitalize on its .NET reputation as it tries to compete with the flex/flash/AIR behemoth.

And thank you for bringing up the fact that HTML is a standard, which I assume was to illustrate the point that the most nasty, disgusting, terrible, pseudo-specifications some half-assed mad scientist came up with as a college prank can become a "standard", while truly good products may thrive without ever being called such.