I am in a bit of a bind at the moment on whether to stick with .NET or make the JavaScript jump.
Over many years I have built a platform (including drag and drop designer, code editor, intellisense, CodeDOM/Roslyn etc - integrated debugging to come soon) on top of an Israeli-founded, Citrix (and Microsoft I believe) funded .NET WinForm on the web controls provider. I had a conference call with them (they are in Boston now) for an hour in late April. I showed them how my platform negated the need for their paid "Professional" edition and that for many use cases people could just use my platform with their free Express edition - this aspect is a side-effect of the platform rather than the main purpose. When their next release came out in early July they had stopped providing their free Express edition and promised an announcement. Anyway last week they announced they had zombified their existing company, formed a new company, transferred all staff to the new company, made their controls free for everyone whilst slapping on new licensing conditions to say you couldn't create a platform that generates systems and competes with them. Fortunately in June on Twitter I found a link to a Telerik beta program for a javascript to native iOS/Android open source toolkit they are developing (NativeScript). So I signed up. This allows me to create native iOS apps with out requiring a MacBook. They are releasing under Apache 2.0 and when I asked if they would pull the rug out from under any platform built on top of it they have emphatically said no. They are currently getting Angular and other JavaScript frameworks working with these controls. I have also made enquiries to Xamarin with regards OEM-ing their compiler and frameworks but have not received any response other than being added to the Xamarin Forms beta when it was live. One possibility is to migrate the WinForms on the web capability to be ASP.NET based but I am fearful that Xamarin might be restrictive in their licensing too for the native device side of things. So it seems a full-blown shift away from .NET to JavaScript is on the cards. Some tools like edgejs which allows interoperability between javascript and .NET might be useful at least during the transition. The issue is that regardless of what any other toolset or platform provides, the need for continuous enhancement of the underlying platform to create and maintain competitive advantage in the marketplace is making relatively closed-shop .NET control providers untenable. Andrew ---------------------------------------- From: "Stephen Price" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, 19 September 2014 12:14 PM To: "ozDotNet" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [OT] Quiet <tongue-in-cheek> So that sounds like dll hell will become framework/runtime hell? </tongue-in-cheek> Seriously though, the future of C# is strong from what I've seen. Xamarin supports C# for targeting IOS and Android. Unity supports C# as a scripting language for writing games. I am hopeful but my Silverlight burns are still healing. Actually, regarding Silverlight, as a plug in it's gone yeah (it's dead to me), but Xaml is alive and well. No one seems to be talking about that. Making a Difference Perth, Western Australia+61 (0) 428 028 [email protected] @lythixdesigns | @lyynxwww.lythixdesigns.comwww.linkedin.com/in/lyynx On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:04 AM, David Kean <[email protected]> wrote: We still very much focused on .NET. We've had our head down working on a bunch of things over the past 3 years; my two favorite things coming up that I believe will completely change .NET: .NET Native ASP.NET vNext (in particular "CoreCLR") There is something very common with both these; a thin componentized framework/runtime that ships with your app. Being componentized, we can release and version individual libraries without requiring us to update one giant framework. Similar to what we did with Roslyn (the rewritten C#/VB compilers), these changes set us up long term to make larger investments without the compatibility concern that comes with shipping a update to 1.8 billion machines. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Greg Harris Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2014 6:43 PM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: [OT] Quiet Hi All, Warning long Friday rant to follow. In summary the rumours of the demise of C#/.Net are very premature, but keep an eye on the patient, health may be slowly declining. <RANT> When I was first at Uni (79-81) the business programming subject taught us COBOL along with a few home truths about COBOL such as: 1) COBOL is the single most popular language by a large margin. 2) There are now better languages available, so COBOL will soon start reducing its market share. 3) This will take some time because of the huge investment in existing COBOL programs. 4) Do not expect many new projects to start that use COBOL in the next few years. In 20/20 vision hindsight, it is interesting to review this: Point 1: Correct. Point 2: The languages that were going to replace COBOL were Pascal/Modular, ADA, or maybe C (but just for highly technical low level code). Today, the only one of those languages to have any remaining traction is C. Analysis: The other languages ready to replace COBOL were not yet ready. Point 3: Correct, but it took a lot longer than expected. Point 4: Where (in my experience) it was probably about 1993, a full ten years later where COBOL stopped being used in new projects. This was because there were a lot of shops that had a large COBOL library and COBOL team, so the new projects took leverage off that base. Analysis: The installed base created a huge inertia and slowed the process down by at least 10 years. Today, if you look at what languages are most popular, there is no one language to lead them all like there was back in the 1970's / 80's, depending on the site you look at, the top few will include Java, PHP, C/C++/Objective-C, C#, VB/Basic/VB.Net, Python, Javascript, Ruby. The difference today is there is no clear single leader. Looking at https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language 1) Python is the language most in ascendancy. 2) Perl, Basic and C++ look to all be in clear decline. 3) Java is the head of the pack, staying consistently at the top, but not by a large margin. 4) It is hard to read the graph, but it looks like C# continues on reasonable growth. 5) But C# has just lost position 3 to Python. So what is my analysis of the future of C#/.Net? 1) The large volume of C#/.Net developers and code library will provide a large inertia, but nowhere near as large as what COBOL had. 2) C# is one of many C/Java derivative languages, the cost of porting your program/skills from C# to another language is a lot less than the cost of porting programs/skills from COBOL. 3) COBOL was owned by the community, C#/.Net is owned by Microsoft, so C#/.Net is at the mercy of Microsoft's wisdom (or lack of it). 4) Microsoft has shown a colossal lack of management skill when you look at the complete train wreck that was the mismanagement of Silverlight! 5) Microsoft is a large legacy company, even with poor management, it will not go away any day soon (look at the reducing dominance of IBM for a similar example of durability). 6) It is too early to say if Satya Nadella (new MS CEO) is going to make changes that will support the future of C#/.Net, but we can be sure that his primary focus will be the wellbeing of the company not the wellbeing of C#/.Net programmers! 7) Microsoft is closing its Research lab in Silicon Valley (http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-to-close-microsoft-research-lab-in-silicon-valley-7000033838/) they are clearly making bold management decisions, some of these bold decisions will affect the future of C#/.Net but it is too early to see how. Conclusion, if Microsoft do nothing to help C#/.Net it has only another 5 years life, but Microsoft are not going to do that as they too have a huge investment in C#/.Net which should give it at least another 5 years life. Anyone trying to look forward more than 5 years in this industry is being optimistic at best! So I would say that C#/.Net has a good prognosis for the foreseeable future, but keep an eye out for the unexpected, which could be positive or negative. </RANT> Regards Greg Harris On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:30 AM, David Connors <[email protected]> wrote: On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:01 AM, Bec Carter <[email protected]> wrote: Just the other day a friend of mine mentioned how at a meeting with the big guns at her office they were referring to C# as "legacy". Am I now the new VB6 equivalent? Noooooooooooooooooooo. Help. Probably a fair call. .NET has just been tinkered with for the better part of a decade. It is impossible to make sense out of Microsoft's client platform strategy any more ... and with the move to cloud they probably don't care anyway. David.
