.NET Framework - Criticism

Criticism

More technical concerns and criticism relating to .NET include:

• The garbage-collector, which is integrated into the environment, can introduce unanticipated delays of execution over which the developer has little direct control, and it can cause runtime memory size to be larger than expected. "In large applications, the number of objects that the garbage collector needs to deal with can become very large, which means it can take a very long time to visit and rearrange all of them."
• Unobfuscated managed CIL bytecode can often be easier to reverse-engineer than native code. One concern is over possible loss of trade secrets and the bypassing of license control mechanisms. Since Visual Studio .NET (2002), Microsoft has included a tool to obfuscate code (Dotfuscator Community Edition).
• Newer versions of the framework (3.5 and up) are not pre-installed in versions of Windows below Windows 7 (although newer versions are available via Windows Update). For this reason, applications must lead users without the framework through a procedure to install it. Some developers have expressed concerns about the large size of the .NET Framework runtime installers for end-users. The size is around 54 MB for .NET 3.0, 197 MB for .NET 3.5, and 250 MB for .NET 3.5 SP1 (while using web installer the typical download for Windows XP is around 50 MB — for Windows Vista, 20 MB). The size issue is partially solved with .NET 4 installer (x86 + x64) being 54 MB and not embedding full runtime installation packages for previous versions. The .NET 3.5 SP1 full installation package includes the full runtime installation packages for .NET 2.0 SP2 as well as .NET 3.0 SP2 for multiple operating systems (Windows XP/Server 2003 and Windows Vista/Server 2008) and for multiple CPU architectures (x86, x86-64, and IA-64).
  • The first service pack for version 3.5 mitigates this concern by offering a lighter-weight client-only subset of the .NET Framework. Two significant limitations should be noted, though. Firstly, the client-only subset is only an option on an existing Windows XP SP2 system that currently has no other version of the .NET Framework installed. In all other scenarios, the client-only installer will install the full version of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Secondly, the client-only framework does not have a 64-bit option. However, the 4 release of the .NET Framework Client Profile will be available on all operating systems and all architectures (excluding Itanium) supported by the full .NET Framework.
• The .NET Framework currently does not provide support for calling Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) via managed code. However, Mono has provided support for SIMD Extensions as of version 2.2 within the Mono.Simd namespace; Mono's lead developer Miguel de Icaza has expressed hope that this SIMD support will be adopted by the CLR ECMA standard. Streaming SIMD Extensions have been available in x86 CPUs since the introduction of the Pentium III. Some other architectures such as ARM and MIPS also have SIMD extensions. In case the CPU lacks support for those extensions, the instructions are simulated in software.
• While the standards that make up .NET are inherently cross-platform, Microsoft's full implementation of .NET is only supported on Windows.