Saw a thread on /g/ a while back talking about this. Nice replacement to java but we will see how well it goes.

cya oracle.

But seriously this is amazing news. Also has anyone tried out VS community edition? How does it stack up to something like Eclipse?

it's not often i get excited over a programming thing, but holy shit the hype

no more java

Still will be used heavily for Android. But C# is now in a position to take over as a primary teaching language in universites and schools for example. Javas big strength was multiplatform, now C#/VB have it as well.

I'm a first year student taking Intro to Java right now. Happy that c# can now progress to multi-platform but kind of frustrated that I won't see much use out of Java. At least I'm still learning fundamentals. :P

This is good news for developers. Microsoft is filling the gaping void left by Oracle in their routine mismanagement of Java.

Like it or not though, Java isn't going anywhere for awhile. It still occupies a market share many times larger than C#.

I theorize this is so they can make minecraft better by remaking it in C#, and still keep an open source modding community.

edit: I was confused

Having spent most of my time programming in Java, I finally have no good excuse to stay with it, and I'm pretty glad.

To be honest, programming is less about specific languages and more about knowing the fundamentals so you can more easily pick up new languages.

Glad we have another option for programming though. Wonder what it means for my next semester... we're supposed to use 4 different languages next semester including Java. Most likely they'll keep it how it was originally supposed to be, but it would be interesting if they replaced Java with or just added C#.

How different is C# to C++? Can C++ also be replaced by C#?

I'm pretty sure this means absolutely nothing. .NET is barely a recognized programming language : see (http://langpop.com/). If you were learning java before, keep learning. If you were learning .Net, learn Java.

C# and C++ are designed for very different tasks. The former is a much safer, high-level language with niceties such as garbage collecting memory management and compiling to an intermediate language (similar to Java bytecode) that runs on top of the .Net framework. C++ on the other hand is a low-level platform-agnostic language that gains its speed from not having any of of the cozy features that high-level languages have, and it also compiles directly to assembly. Attempts to replace C++ within specific speed-dependent domains have been made (such as Rust for network/game applications), but none are mature enough to do so.

Dude, C# is a commonly used language and is superior in function to java in almost every conceivable manner.

WOOOOOOOOOOO

Java browser plugins*

\o/

This is quite good and interesting, been used to java and now that .net is open source. By all means this should help it to grow even further, a smart move by microsoft.

What benefits will result from this?

I'm not a .NET dev but from what I understand:

C# and the .NET Framework are very popular for game development but only have first-class support on Windows. There is an independent open-source implementation of .NET called Mono that is widely used to get .NET projects running on non-Windows platforms... but such a project will always be incomplete/buggy.

But now that Ballmer's gone:
- Mono (and similar projects) can use & redistribute pieces of .NET instead of having to reimplement all of it.
- Mac & Linux are getting first-class support for some .NET components.

Brownymaster implied in his post that this could be huge for cross-platform game development. Hypothetically, we'll be seeing more games on Mac/Linux in the future. I think this mostly applies to indie games though... this is probably irrelevant for triple A games.

There's still a ton of companies with special snowflake backend software made in Java, so I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon but this is pretty great news.

Last time I seriously focused on C# was back when .NET 2.0 just came out, I was making shitty pong clones using GDI/System.Drawing. Looked at it again today and it's like a completely new language. Good times.

Its barely recognized because its downsides included not being multi-platform. C# was developed by Microsoft as a response to Java. C# is more feature complete than Java. Some of the things C# has had for years, despite being a newer language, are just now being added to Java, like lambda expressions.

Java is so high on that list because its the go-to high level language for developing multi-platform programs. This makes it the perfect language to teach in schools to students with different operating systems. It also certainly helps to be the language necessary to learn for developing Android apps. Objective-C is also pretty high on that list, but I doubt anyone here has ever heard of that unless they developed iPhone apps. I haven't even mentioned that Microsoft's Visual Studio is a much more comprehensive IDE than Eclipse, which many consider the best all-around IDE for Java.

In the short run, you're right, it probably won't mean much. For people like me that enjoy writing in C#, but always thought if I developed a program that became public I wouldn't be able to share it with Linux and Mac users, it means I don't have to write Java programs anymore unless a professional job demands it or if I'm writing an Android app.

And I'd like to live in the world where PHP is not most popular programming language :D

and here I am considering picking up programming for the first time in computational data science (R or MatLab)
/cry, sorry about personal shpiel

this all sounds like good news though, does this mean anything for TF2?

can't wait to track ip addresses with a GUI interface using visual basic in linux

Deterministic finalization when?