C# is dead (again). Long live C#

Only yesterday, Verity Stob had the continuation of her (??) long Delphi saga, with a nice dig at C# at the end.:

For C# hath become a lonely path. And the Beast hath shut its gates against us, and hath broken our Silverlight into a million smithereens, and feedeth us alive to Herb Sutter and STL and the rest of the slavering C++ 11 crowd.

Except, it's not dead. Still.

  • Silverlight never really got off the ground - except where it did (cough Netflix - tho mostly, it didn't)
  • WPF never got off the ground - except try to get a job in London's finance sector without it. Most of the front office stuff is WPF (or, oddly, Flash)
  • WinRT is looking like a flop - except if you are the likes of Marker Metro or the various other places who appear to have more work than they know what to do with.
  • No one uses ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC - except Microsoft, StackOverflow and a host of other huge sites. Not as many as some other languages, sure, but have you seen what Facebook has had to do to PHP to get it to work for them? Or twitter porting most of their backend to the JVM?
  • XNA games got be-headed, only to grow another one (or 2) in the form of MonoGame.
  • BizTalk has a bit of .NET in it (ie, around 90%?). Sharepoint is all .NET. The only bits which aren't at Microsoft appears to be Windows, and Office, who appear to be the ones who are confusing everyone with a new - but totally incompatible - framework.
  • Not to mention the many of millions of lines of .NET code out there running business, government departments, stores, media companies like NBC and BBC, casinos, and pretty much everything in between. (thanks for the reminder, @kiwipom)

Update: Dave Addey pointed out on Twitter that most of the top games for 2012 are done in Unity3D. Which is based on Mono for the scripting.

And then there is Xamarin, who just released Xamarin.Mac, which uses some of the magic of MonoTouch to let C# developers write native Mac apps.

Now we have Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, WP7/8, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard, S390 and a host of other platforms and products, all of which have a common framework: the .NET/mono framework.

Can't say I saw THAT coming 7 or 8 years ago, when the .NET hype was at it's peak.

So with or without Microsoft (or specifically the Windows and Office divisions, 'cos DevDiv (developer tools), Server (BizTalk, SQL Server) and Azure are still rocking along), C# and it's surrounding frameworks are looking anything but dead. There is a strong OpenSource community around various projects (eg ServiceStack) and Microsoft itself is opening up large chunks of the framework, which 5 years ago would have been unheard of.

Like I said last year:

Feels good to be a Gangsta C# developer.


This article is translated to Serbo-Croatian language by Anja Skrba from Webhostinggeeks.com.

Nic Wise

Nic Wise

Auckland, NZ