The Guardian reports that details of criminal trials have been published online in a new archive. Court transcripts aren’t there, but dates and addresses are, so this is more likely useful as a genealogical resource than anything else. Still, another interesting database…

An Indian site called Techno 360 has published what are apparently leaked screenshots of Google’s Chrome OS. Well, maybe – the site is sceptical as to their provenance due to the sleek look of them, and Google’s famed indifference to visual polish.

However I’m not so sure. With the recent upgrades to Gmail and others, it’s possible – just possible – that Google has splashed a few pennies on some designers to polish things up a bit. Well, you never know…

The Washington Post has noticed the Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant that gets installed as a Firefox plugin. But what – if anything – does it actually do?

My theory? It’s kind of an ActiveX-dotNet-for-Firefox that doesn’t actually work. Anyone got any better ideas?

Now where was I, before the hard drive in my PC failed?

Oh yes – I was rambling on about why Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo!, and their seeming acceptance of PHP as a server scripting technology, and this set me thinking about the future of .Net.<!–more–>

.Net has long been touted by Microsoft as the successor to the Win32 API. Indeed, it was supposed to be the underlying API of Windows Longhorn, until Ballmer weighed in and hurried the project along. The resulting product – Windows Vista – ended up dropping most of the Longhorn features and ending up with a subset of them. Out went the new file system, and particularly out went the .Net framework, in favour of a revised Win32 API.

In itself, this is really no surprise, as those with long memories will remember that Ballmer was pretty much in charge of the Windows 95 launch, and it was his job to ensure it was a success. So it’s probably fair to say that traditionally speaking, Ballmer has been close to the Windows development team, and really has been closely involved with at least the marketing of the Win32 API; it’s worthwhile remembering that there are commercial products that implement the Win32 API on other operating systems – and then there’s Wine, which implements it on free and open source operating systems.

Now, one of the components of the .Net framework was a reworking of the services that the Win32 API and other associated APIs provides into a heirarchical object-oriented set of classes.  While these classes are fairly easy to follow, and in a lot of cases provide excellent wrappers around the APIs themselves, they are not the beginning and end of .Net – without getting into the technical details (as they’re not really appropriate to this bit of theorising) they essentially provide a similar set of services to other virtual-machine platforms such as Java or Inferno.

So in one sense, Microsoft have a competitor to other similar products such as Java.  However .Net is also used in their web application platform, ASP.Net (early development versions of which were written in Java, incidentally).  It’s also used in Microsoft’s open source OS Singularity (which I’ll cover a bit more in the future), and in fact forms the only API Singularity presents to its user-land programs.

And all was going swimmingly for the .Net team – .Net was set to replace Win32 in Longhorn, for example – until disaster struck.  In fact, it struck in Titanic form, as Longhorn hit an iceberg of delays, and Ballmer commissioned the good ship Vista.

Vista at first appeared as though it would be the “last hurrah” of the Win32 API, and that despite the sinking of Longhorn, .Net was still Microsoft’s API of choice.

And then came the NetBook market.  Small, cute devices such as the Asus eee PC, the One Laptop Per Child Project, the MSI Wind and countless others.  None of which had the horsepower required to run Vista, or even to run .Net apps on top of XP.  Which was fine, as the early netbooks ran their own cut-down Linux distributions.

Cue panic at Redmond.  So they extended the life of XP – which was just about to be retired from mainstream support, having been taken out of the retail channel – and even started giving it away to NetBook makers for a vastly reduced rate (I’m sure I’ve even read somewhere that some manufacturers get it for free), and started looking for a version of Windows netbook makers could run.

Enter Windows 7, with its newly reorganised MinWin kernel will run on NetBooks – come hell or high water – making it almost certainly the first time that a new generation of  MS operating system has required lower minimum specifications than its predecessor.

All this does not bode well for .Net.  The venerable Win32 API – seemingly dead and buried – has risen like a zombie, demanding .Net’s brains for dinner.  But will it get them?

C# 4.0 will now include support for a large area of the COM/OLE world – variants, apparently to aid interoperability.  But is this a preparation to start using C# as a fully compiled language – a replacement for C and C++ in the Microsoft development toolchain – and to begin the end of life of the .Net framework altogether?  Watch this space – it’s never easy second-guessing Microsoft, even on a good day…

I’ve been on Yahoo! Answers recently, and noticed that almost every other question seems to be about the Large Hadron Collider, and “will it destroy the world”.

Well, as far as I can tell, there are four possible answers to that question: (more…)