What myths have you heard about regarding the .NET Framework?

Question

There are several "myths" about the .NET Framework - some are true, some aren't. I don't want do debate about those myth and what arguments there are to prove their right/wrong-status. I'm just curious about what myths you hear about the .NET Framework...

(e.g.: ".NET Software is nearly Opensource because everyone can read the IL-Code with a tool like Reflector" or "Managed languages like C# are always slower than unmanaged languages like C++")

Answer 1

Myth: Memory allocation is faster in managed code than in native code.

Answer 2

".NET is only available for Windows"

This is a completely untrue myth, for the open source version of .NET - mono - is available for many OS's.

Edit: Marc Gravell has pointed out another good point surrounding this myth: Silverlight. Micrososft are actively supporting the development of a small-scale CLR/ .NET framework that is truly cross-platform with Moonlight, and have themselves created a OS X version of Silverlight.

Answer 3

Myth: When you discover a memory leak in your managed application, the reason is that the garbage collector is not working right.

In most cases it is the program not releasing references to useless objects.

Answer 4

Myth: ASP.NET is slow

Answer 5

.net solves dll hell (well ok maybe but as anyone who has worked on a large scale project will tell you it introduces some annoying reference issues)

Also as its managed code you dont have to bother closing connections and destroying objects

Answer 6

@David Arno

That is wrong information.

Microsoft .Net IS NOT available for anything other than windows. Which renders its claim of platform independence into the dust.

While Mono shares a common thread of philosophy/paradigm with MS .Net framework, it being cross platform has nothing to do with MS. In my understanding Mono is a completely separate project.

Answer 7

I however understand and accept that .Net is the best and preferred way to develop apps if you are 120% sure that those apps will not be required to run on a platform other than MS.

If not then you are left with Mono as your option(assuming that you need to develop in a .Net like environment)

Answer 8

".NET rocks!"

Answer 9

.NET is slower than native code.

Answer 10

Perhaps a bit too specific to the internals, but here are some common myths:

• structs always live on the stack (counter: class fields, boxed values)
• struct variables always live on the stack (counter: captured variables)
• string is a value type (honestly, I still see this regularly)
• public fields are faster than properties (almost always inlined)
• the whole "pass by reference/value" vs "reference-type/value-type" confusion - probably more a cause of myth(s) than a myth itself
• that you don't have to worry about memory usage any more... (GC is good, but it can't make 4TB available to your XP machine, and it won't collect things you still have hooks into)

Answer 11

According to Microsoft, Generics are faster than casting (even in absence of boxing/unboxing).

Tony Northrup - co-author of MCTS 70-536: Application Development Foundation - states in the same book the following:

I haven’t been able to reproduce the performance benefits of generics; however, according to Microsoft, generics are faster than using casting. In practice, casting proved to be several times faster than using a generic. However, you probably won’t notice performance differences in your applications. (My tests over 100,000 iterations took only a few seconds.) So you should still use generics because they are type-safe.

Please note the argument is not about primitives. Microsoft states that Generics provide better performance than casting between reference types as well - but they do not. I tried that and using generics is slower than casting in this case (confirming Tony Northrup quote).