It focuses mainly on the transition to ARM-based netbooks, but could generally be the primary reason MS wants application programmers to migrate to .NET rather than traditional native code, to take .NET to the same portability as Java and therefore aiding a future Windows transition to non-x86 hardware.

What is it about software written in the 1980s, and evolved through the years, that makes it inferior to software written in the 2000s? Does the functionality of VistA make the physician less effective or less efficient?

Take a look at http://worldvista.org sometime, and also at the hardhats list at http://groups.google.com/group/hardhats

Regards
– Bhaskar

MUMPS is the most widely used language for implementing health care applications including the EHR system behind the most successful health care delivery network in the US (check out Phil Longman’s “The Best Care Anywhere). GT.M (http://fis-gtm.com), an implementation of MUMPS, is the legal system of record for tens of millions of bank accounts around the world, including the largest real-time core system in daily production use at any bank anywhere in the world. The x86 Linux implementation can be downloaded as FOSS from Source Forge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fis-gtm) and is routinely in the top 1-2% of projects by activity.

With so much success behind it, MUMPS surely has a foot in the grave already!

– Bhaskar

After 7 years of .NET I am going back to C++ which is evolving with best engineering minds on the planet.. this CLR stuff is by now for kids only.

Tied in and locked-in into Windows and SQL, enough to bring down the few and odd systems they run on the Web, stock exchanges.. all just runtime and .NET bloat really, and nothing to boast about.

Firstly-XAML is a MS convention. Mumps certainly does support XML, both native in Cache or with third party extensions. XAML is used to define UI elements. Again, we have that with XML. Read further down if you REALLY want XAML support.

And I love market speak such as “Service Oriented Strategy”. Okay, I’ll write my MUMPS apps as services, no problem.

LINQ and WCF, huh? MUMPS/Cache does SQL/ODBC/JDBC/SOAP/XML is OOP and callable from C/.NET/C++/JAVA and can also embed calls from these languages. XAML in .NET anyone?. Again, in other implementations you may or may not need third party, typically OSF, extensions.

Performance. Check out Krung Thai Bank. How about ViSTA. Or any one of the number of EMR and Financial applications processing millions of transactions of data a year. They aren’t being run on MSSQL!!!

Please do not dismiss a strong, mature language such as MUMPS because you know nothing about it. Just as I will not dismiss MS’s entry, as soon as they change the name.

once release the software, span of few months (not less than 3 months) releases the patches or service packs. This means people to know the quality of software.