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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?
Perhaps, but that begs the "why not just go with Java?" question, since it supports both Android and every desktop OS (and lets face it NOTHING runs on both iOS and everything else, that's a pipe dream, unless you want to do QT stuff, which is great, but begs ANOTHER question, "why not just use QT/C++?").
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Microsoft sealed the fate of .Net by not choosing it as the basis for Windows 8.x and the metro UI. That indicated that Microsoft no longer sees .Net as the next gen framework for Windows, .Net has, of course, done its job. Which was to kill Java. Which, for desktop applications, it has.
As a Windows developer, it leaves me with somewhat of a dilemma. Which framework is the way forward on the Windows platform? It's not MFC, nor Silverlight. Is it .Net? Is it Metro?
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Justin Angel's post is quite insightful on the matter. He is simply reckoning that .net is probably past its prime: there are much less jobs for .net than for Java/Swift/HTML5+JS, open source developers are leaving .net, the ecosystem as whole is shrinking and fragmenting. He lists a number of reasons for this decline, but he doesn't say in a year there will be no more .net, just that it is going down.
Java dwarfs .NET, no matter what the MS shills claim. Whether or not Java is superior to C# is rather besides the point, rather how it was fairly irrelevant how superior any number of languages were to C in the 70s through the 90s (or by some definitions even now). It's simply a matter that Java was for a long time the only major cross platform application ecosystem, so the big enterprise outfits used it, and it's become rather like COBOL.
Microsoft flunkies love to get into these pissing matches with dominant technologies, and try to rejig the question so their products and technologies have the appearances of being on top (just look at how the shills try to act like Surface has any relevance at all).
If I was looking at getting back into coding (which I'm not, I've happily left that world behind), I'd sharpen up my Java skills, as I'm more likely to find sustainable employment there than with whatever Microsoft is trying to fool me into using now.
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Well, you have your opinion, I've written millions of lines of Java code now, and I have my opinion. I don't really hate C#/.NET, there's just no reason to go with them when Java is already there and does the job quite well thank you!
As for Xamarin, we shall see. Xamarin.iOS is sort of a bastard, your application has to be compiled down to static machine code to meet Apple's requirements. So it isn't really any more '.NET' than GNU's Java compiler is, which can also produce executables (and presumably can target iOS though I don't know of anyone bothering to do that). Of course Java on Android is also 'weird', but at least its still bytecode, even if it isn't java-compliant bytecode.
Honestly I don't know how much of a difference any of this makes. If I were building a TRUE 'run it anywhere' codebase I'd use C++ and QT, it really does run ANYWHERE, including windows, OS-X, iOS, Android, and basically just about any other OS that has any sort of GUI.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
just no reason to go with them when Java is already there and does the job quite well thank you
Wow. Just wow. "I know X, so there's no reason the world needs not-X". All Turing-equivalent languages can do the same job, but Java does that job with about 3x the boilerplate of C# (otherwise they're fairly similar, as Java has finally caught up with every other real language in adding list comprehensions). The lack of proper generics/templates in Java is still a daily pain in my ass, however, as is the simple inability to do List<int>
I understand a preference for the familiar, but when 2 languages are as similar as C# and Java, and one is just better implemented, it seems weird to form an emotional attachment to the other. (Unless this is all really MS-hatred, in which case fine, Win95 killed my pappy, whatever.)
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It depends on your situation but, right now, C# is the only language that you can use to write programs for Windows Desktop (including Win32/.NET/Modern), Web, Mac Desktop, Android, and iOS.
And with all of the OWIN stuff you'll be able to run pristine .NET apps on OS X and Linux.
And you'll be able to host all of this code in one source-controlled Visual Studio project.
It may not be a reason to switch a shop entirely, but there is definitely a unique value-proposition.
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