By the time you read this, I will be dead. No, not really – but I will be very tired. At the time of this writing, we have just confirmed what will undoubtedly go down in SYS-CON history as our most overwhelming presence at any trade show ever: Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2003.

Many of you now reading this will have encountered our publication for the first time at the PDC, when you found our October issue neatly tucked into your conference bag. Welcome back! I trust that you will find this issue equally interesting and exciting.

Microsoft vs Linux
Before telling you about all the great features we have in store for you once again this month, I would like to take a moment to add my own two cents' worth to the Microsoft-versus-Linux controversy. I mention this because I have been hearing ad nauseam from Microsoft lately about how Linux is supposedly an imminent threat to everything from my job to my personal safety.

Frankly, I don't buy it. Anyone who actually uses Linux for more than a few hours – and who isn't either a Microsoftie with an intense case of paranoia or a hyper-techie with an irrational grudge against Microsoft – will be forced to quickly come to the same conclusion. The open source "volunteer" model for creating software has created an operating system (Linux) that is about as capable of competing with Windows as passenger jets produced by Communist regimes are capable of competing with Boeing... Anyone up for a flight on Aeroflot? No, I thought not.

Consider user-friendliness. The doomsayers of Redmond would have you believing that by this time next year, your grandmother might very well be sending you her holiday e-mails from a Red Hat desktop running an open source Office clone. Now I don't know about you, but my own grandmother would probably turn off her computer in horror if it ever produced the bizarre litany of arcane text messages that Linux streams across the screen during boot-up (see Exhibit A).

Exhibit A:

Now even assuming that she made it through that ordeal, the look and feel of the Linux desktop is just nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be seriously considered for consumer applications today. I'm sure it looks good to those accustomed to the look and feel of previous incarnations of X (the Windows GUI interface to Unix). But to those of us familiar with Windows, Mac OS, and other commercial operating systems, it has a distinctly amateurish feel.

"But," say the Linux apologists, "Linux's real value today is in the world of mission-critical, enterprise-server applications." Well, I don't buy that one either – but more about that next month.

This Month in .NETDJ
Our focus this month is on distributed .NET. To some of you, this will mean Web services – both the "vanilla" SOAP-over-HTTP variety and the newfangled Web Services Enhancements 2.0 variety. To the rest of you, this will mean .NET Remoting – that beloved successor to DCOM that allows .NET developers to interact with components in different application domains just as easily as with components local to our own application. Whichever side of the Remoting fence you are on, you're sure to find material of interest in this issue of our magazine.

As always – any comments, questions, or concerns about the magazine? You know where to reach me: derek@sys-con.com!

Author Bio
Derek Ferguson is editor-in-chief of .NET Developer's Journal and author of the book Mobile .NET (Apress). He is also chief technology evangelist for Expand Beyond Corporation (www.xb.com), a worldwide leader in mobile software for enterprise management. derek@sys-con.com