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:Is it actually on the decline?

[Gr8Apes]

People still develop for windows? Why? (yeah, I better duck, my karma is taking a beating today:)

Windows destkop and servers are still being deployed in the millions,

Windows servers in the millions, there's a reason for that. Last time I had real numbers to compare 2 large scale equivalent systems: UNIX: <100 servers, Windows: about 2400 servers. Same basic workload, different codebases and languages (Java / COBOL for *nix, C/C++ MS SQL for Windows). Oh, and the windows system was much less capable.

Seriously though, Windows servers are in decline, and have been for a while. They're a screaming security risk, perform poorly - *nix of any reasonably modern flavor smokes windows on the same hardware, unless, of course, you're attempting to run a windows program under an emulator or API framework under *nix.