Dot NET's scalability test

ComputerWorld: http://www.computerworld.com/itresou..._KEY11,00.html

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The Question Is, Does .Net Scale?

By CAROL SLIWA (April 15, 2002)

Scalability is a frequently raised concern with Microsoft-based applications. So Nationwide Building Society, a retail financial institution with 700 U.K. branch offices, was keen to determine whether .Net could handle a large-scale, mission-critical application. The firm decided to port an existing mortgage application that had taken 40 man-years to build, said Dave Green, a software architect at the Swindon, England-based company.
The port took an additional man-year of effort, but Nationwide was able to eliminate 200,000 lines of proprietary C++ middle-tier infrastructure code in favor of 10,000 lines of Visual Basic .Net, because the .Net framework supplied functionality that was equivalent to what his firm had built, Green said.

"The application now runs more reliably than the original," Green said, noting that he found the .Net framework to be "rock solid." The Visual Studio .Net tool, however, is "perhaps less mature," he said.

"It doesn't deal very well with large numbers of interdependent assemblies, which are the executable files in .Net," Green said. "This will only be a problem for people with large projects, because they're going to have lots of assemblies calling each other, and it's difficult to keep the versions of the assemblies consistent. But it's not a particularly hard problem to overcome."

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