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C# has come a long way since it emerged from Microsoft's mythical "Project Cool" back in 2000. It is the primary language of Microsoft .NET, and has pulled ahead of Visual Basic among professional Windows programmers. At last week's Tech-Ed conference in Barcelona, C#'s lead architect Anders Hejlsberg drew large audiences for …

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  1. Mark Lynch

    Missing Question Mark?

    Didn't you forget the question mark in the title? I read this expecting C# pulling ahead of Java, but instead I read it to find we still have the same proprietry language as always. For that reason alone it will never pull ahead.

    Also from the Visual Basic programmers I know, it is still way more popular that C#. Certainly in terms of day to day usage. Possibly when people are considering what language to start new clean, no dependencies projects, they may opt for C# but I'd say the large bulk of Win32 programming is still done in Visual Basic.

    And for them to say Java is borrowing from them is hilarious given that their starting point basically was Java. Everyone in Software borrows but what MS does is more like theft.

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  2. Tim Anderson

    C# vs VB

    > Didn't you forget the question mark in the title?

    The title is intended to refer to Anders Hejlsberg's *claim*, but I see your point.

    > Also from the Visual Basic programmers I know, it is

    > still way more popular that C#.

    The piece refers to professional programmers; it's hard to measure such things but C# is consistently and significantly ahead of VB in advertised job vacancies, which is one indicator.

    Tim

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  3. Nikolaus Heger

    Open Source it and we have a competitor

    The query language built into the language itself sounds excellent. I also share the criticism that Java is too much concerned with backwards JVM compatibility to really improve the language - generics syntax is to horrible that I think it makes things worse rather than better.

    The sole reason I am not going to even consider c# for anything is that it is owned by MS, standardization or not, it's all worthless as long as MS owns it.

    We must expect the company to do the sensible thing, protect its shareholders interest, and change the language or even just the interpretation or whatever they like on a whim.

    This would be bad even if MS didn't have a long history of meddling with the API to benefit themselves and/or hurt competitors. But... it does.

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  4. foxyshadis

    Backwards compat

    God, Microsoft cares more about backward compatibility than any other software company around. I still have win16 programs that run in vista, as well as many made for NT 3.5 and win95. They quit breaking APIs every other version in favor of integrating/bundling everything they could into the OS over a decade ago. The compiler isn't 100% backwards compatible, but they never are from any company/group.

    As long as something's made for .net 2.0, it'll continue to work in 2.0 using the 2.0 framework for as long as the framework's around, much like mfc. mfc apps haven't all suddenly stopped working in the last few years because microsoft adopted .net, or tried to cut off wine, have they?

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