Let me tell you the story of a little humungously oversized OS called Windows. Now, this OS, had its share of ups and downs, crashes and patches, and it’s survived for almost 25 years now. Somewhere along the line, Microsoft decided to branch out, make some more software, stuff like Office, which made the erstwhile comparatively less used Windows into the next big thing in enterprises everywhere. Productivity boomed, people made cowloads of cash, and everything was going well.

Then, greedy little M$, with its board of dollar-hungry executived and roadmap strategists decided that this wasn’t enough. That they needed ways to make expand their markets even further. This posed a problem. Microsoft only employed X number of employees, who could only develop Y number of products. Expanding their market meant expanding their product portfolio for the Windows platform. Then some genius came up with the idea – ‘Hey, why don’t we make the stupid drones (read users/customers) develop their own software! That way we can have a wider range of software for Windows, and we don’t have to pay anyone to make them for us!’. The boss must’ve thought it over, patted him on the back, given him a pay raise and soon after was released .Net Framework 1.0.

Ideally, what the boss should’ve done, is said – ‘Charlie, you blithering idiot, this is never going to work out well.’

Can’t change what’s happened in the past, can I. Me, with my itsy-bitsy little blog can only rant on about the current world. So the .Net Framework, was essentially a bunch of tools, which would allow people with IQs lower than even blithering-idiot-Charlie’s, to develop applications. And proper, GUI apps, apps that connected with databases, stuff that worked well. Sort of…

OK, so now, every Tom, Phallus and Harry, with even an iota of programming sense was making software (including me). Some of it was pretty useless, some of it was brilliant. But one thing was for certain. The .Net Framework certainly allowed for very functional applications, but definitely not for very efficient ones.

Case in point: What’s caused me to write this rant is basically Vidyamandir’s utterly useless ‘Admission Test Preparation’ application. This ‘thing’ (for I don’t want to call it an application), was put together by 100percentile.com, on top of the .Net Framework. The downside is that it consumes ~23MB of RAM, where it certainly doesn’t look like it needs that much. Minimizing and maximizing the window takes significantly longer than, let’s say Firefox, or even iTunes (which is another piece of bloatware)!

And that’s not the end of the story. It is astonishingly easy to create a virus using a programming language like Visual Basic, which is very closely linked to the .Net Framework. I personally admit to have created a very simple and neat virus, which quite cleanly deletes everything in your Windows folder, if run. I also admit to having tested it and report that it was 100% successful in creating general carnage. This principle could be easily extended to the entire hard drive. And a registry entry added to the system startup can eliminate the need for user interaction altogether. My point here is that, not only is the .Net Framework very inefficient in using system resources, but it can also pose a very dangerous system security risk.

P.S. There is no need to feel uncomfortable by any attachments I might send any of you by mail, because, rest assured, that virus was just a proof-of-concept. Although I did take sadistic pleasure by the error messages I got while trying to restart the PC…muhahahahaha…