Most of you have heard that Microsoft is trying to finish up its long-awaited update to Windows XP, called Vista later this year. What you might not have heard about is that under the covers, Vista is very different and there are so many changes that many independent software developers are having to learn a lot of new tricks to make sure their products run properly on Vista.

But this isn’t a column about Vista. I’d like to turn the attention to something that doesn’t get a lot of press, what is going on with .Net framework, and how that will influence what happens with Vista. The extra time that Microsoft is taking on Vista could turn out to be a blessing in disguise for these ISVs using this developer’s toolkit. (For those of you that don’t know, the period in front of things is pronounced “dot net.”)

.Net framework is one of those things that mostly operates under the covers. It takes up about 50 MB of space on your hard disk, which doesn’t seem like a lot of room these days. But there is a lot going on in that 50 MB.

Microsoft uses this framework to provide a variety of services that should have been in the underlying Windows operating system but somehow weren’t there initially. And as you can imagine, they will be included as part of Vista from the get-go. Most of the ISVs that are doing things with .Net have to do with developing Web-facing applications, or database access, or a combination of both.

What does .Net do for a developer? Lots of things. It creates a unified security model for its applications, so a developer doesn’t have to worry about debugging each and every program and can just call the security routines at one place from .Net’s common programming libraries. It also simplifies patching a developer’s programs, because .Net handles more of the security vulnerabilities and one update from .Net is a lot easier than dealing with patching multiple programs and then testing for whether they are working.

This is all well and good, and a testimonial to Microsoft’s ability to energize the developer community behind .Net. There are hundreds of applications, if not thousands. People can program for .Net in one of dozens different programming languages, and there are hundreds of .Net programming books available in the marketplace. (A search on Amazon for .Net framework got more than 1600 hits. A search for J2EE Framework got about 1200, just to put things in perspective.)

.Net framework is now used in Symantec’s Norton Ghost version 10, which is the motivation for this screed.

Norton Ghost is what is called a “drive imaging” product, meaning that it takes a snapshot of the computer’s hard disk and puts all the information in a single file. If something should go awry with the PC, you can repave things with a few simple commands and a few minutes of time.

Now why would a utility product be interested in using .Net? The older Ghost versions didn’t have much of an interface — they had to take control over the machine in order to make their copies of the disk, and they did this by rebooting with a more primitive OS — in this case, the dear DR DOS. Many of you might remember that this was the product that eventually helped to hone SCO’s legal challenges.

The Ghost 10 version runs in ordinary Windows, so you don’t have that messy rebooting going on. Thanks to .Net framework, the developers didn’t have to write their own user interface and could still use the underlying engine for the drive imaging. “By using Winforms classes in .NET, many of the innovations in Vista’s new shell show up automatically,” said a Symantec representative.” Doing the same thing in C++ is possible but would mean we’d lag behind Vista’s release date. Absorbing UI innovations automatically through the .NET framework also makes our product’s UI more likely to be similar to others that the user may encounter.”

Second is security. “A number of security features in XP and Vista are carefully enforced by the .NET framework,” he said. “Although the same effect can be achieved in raw C++, the possibility of errors and opportunities for exploits is much greater. Using .NET gives us better security.” Third is easier testing, since Symantec can use its automated test tools more widely if Ghost is a true Windows application.

“We believe the switch to .NET at most levels in a codebase is a ‘when’, not an ‘if’, for all ISVs,” he said.

I used to run Ghost all the time on various machines in my lab, but Symantec using .Net framework is going to make me to give up on Ghost. While it does make Ghost easier to run, it takes more time to boot up a recovery disk and run from scratch. It is also made more complex, with more opportunities to not work on older hardware.

I don’t think that this is progress. Symantec is turning a good product into a real pain in the neck because of another innovation, that of product activation. Now, I am not a big fan of activation. Given how many times I reinstall various things as part of my testing, activation just gets in my way and often gives me fits as I try to match up the right keys. Symantec, though, has taken activation to a new frustrating level.

I got a new Dell PC a couple of weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it came with a copy of Ghost already on it, and a second drive partition too. For those of you that haven’t yet used these products, it is helpful to split your hard disk into at least two pieces, and save the drive image on the D: portion along with your data files, just in case you have to re-image the C: portion.

All well and good, until I realized that I had a “try or die” version. At the same time, my inbox received an offer to purchase Ghost v10 and get all sorts of rebates, making the purchase almost free. So rather than deal with buying an electronic copy and making a bunch of CDs, I thought, why not buy the boxed version and this way I have the printed documentation, the boot CD (you need the actual Ghost CD to boot a non-working PC), and get all the rebates too?

What a mistake that was. Here’s the problem: even though I have the EXACTLY SAME SOFTWARE on the CD that I have on the hard disk, they have different activation mechanisms and if you buy the physical CD it comes with a different activation key. The only solution is to uninstall the software, and then reinstall it from the physical CD. So much for those rebates, and now I lost about an hour trying to figure this all out.

I asked Symantec why they have two activation methods, and they didn’t really give me a satisfactory answer. While I think they made the right call on .Net framework, let’s simplify the activation process. A utility product like Ghost shouldn’t be this hard to run.