I used to collect comic books (or, I read a heck of a lot of them and refused to throw them away, depending on how you look at it). That's impossible, you're saying. Programmers are serious people who don't have time for comic books, science fiction, role-playing games, and strange fascinations with a certain "Weird Al" Yankovic's cinematic magnum opus. But, surprising as it might seem, I did.

I remember a certain hard-drinking character from a Hercules Limited Series by Marvel comics who resembled a small ninja turtle, sans mask. Well, to borrow a term used by this unknown character (the meaning of which I can't remember), I've been working my scroggies off.

Given that my brain happens to be stuck deep in programming la la land (as opposed to where it normally sits, which is in a jar, labelled "Abby Normal"), I'm going to take a detour from my usual obsession with the state of the software industry and discuss some of the ways .NET is an improvement over Java. As I've noted before in Talkbacks, I've been programming Java in some form since JDK 1.0. Java development has a number of advantages over traditional environments which output machine language. .Net has the advantage of hindsight, however, and has improved on Java in a number of areas. Here are some that stand out from my most recent project (I could tell you what that project's all about, but then I'd have to eat you).

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