Is Microsoft's .NET Ecosystem On the Decline?

Nerval's Lobster writes: In a posting that recently attracted some buzz online, .NET developer Justin Angel (a former program manager for Silverlight) argued that the .NET ecosystem is headed for collapse—and that could take interest in C# along with it. "Sure, you'll always be able to find a job working in C# (like you would with COBOL), but you'll miss out on customer reach and risk falling behind the technology curve," he wrote. But is C# really on the decline? According to Dice's data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice's ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline. Data from the TIOBE developer interest index mirrors that trend, he said, with "C# developer interest down approximately 60% down back to 2006-2008 levels." Is the .NET ecosystem really headed for long-term implosion, thanks in large part to developers devoting their energies to other platforms such as iOS and Android?

Comments

Re:Too soon to tell?

[Gr8Apes]

It was already in decline. Another 6 months with the "opened" up .NET for other platforms won't help a bit. You know why? Because Mono was already out there. It's not an expanded market, only attempting to eat the other fish in the "new" pond.

Re:Too soon to tell?

[Dadoo]

With the .NET platform now being available for cross platform development I can't see how there could be a decline in C#.

You'd have to be an idiot to use .NET for cross-platform development. In five or so years, Microsoft will discontinue cross-platform support, giving some BS excuse, like "no one was using it." What will the cross-platform developers do then, rewrite their code in a language that's really cross-platform? Doubt it.

As I've said here, before, this is just more Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.