.NET vs Java

...Certainly, .NET has learned from the five years' lead time the Java community has had: the power of a runtime and bytecode, the usefulness of a large and well-built library upon which to build further, the power of compiled-on-demand Web pages, the usefulness of an openly-extensible build tool, even the "one language" vs. "many languages" debate, all could be said to have been influenced strongly by decisions and experience in the Java community. But Java still has much more it can teach the .NET community: mocking, unit-testing, lightweight containers, dependency-injection, and the perils of O/R-M are just part of the list of things that the Java community has close to a half-decade's experience in, compared to .NET's none....

Amen. I have been making this same point for years. Some people in the .NET/Microsoft community think all this stuff is whacked because its not part of a MSDN article but these things are part of parcel of great software architecture and development and the .NET community is way behind here. When I do my SOA talk around the country and talk about Software Architecture, I ask the audience if they have one of the bibles, Evan's Domain-Driven Design and almost no hands go up! Repositories, DI, OR/M, gosh I must do the database-driven stored proc thing all the time because Microsoft tells me to. I am really hoping that key books like Jimmy Nilsson's Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET, starts to solve this issue that Martin Fowler calls "Many people in the Microsoft community have not been as good as others in propagating good design for enterprise applications...this book is a valuable step." Her's hoping (again).