manos

the worst ones are also closed-source commercial packages, so it pays to do research prior to purchasing anything. The community has been warming to open source - in my opinion this is largely due to the efforts of Miguel de Icaza and everyone working on the Mono Project. (As an aside, if you don't like asp but you do like C#, you should consider checking out and contributing to Manos de Mono, a Mono based web framework which is still in its infancy - https://github.com/jacksonh/manos .) Microsoft is, and always will be a for-profit company that makes money from selling its software. It has a vested interest in creating platform lock-in, but developers don't have to stick to the Microsoft way of doing things if they choose not to, thanks to the strength of Mono today. Either way, Microsoft is pretty up-front about what the cost of doing business is with them; and they have proven to be pretty consistent with their pricing. Politics and profits aside, C# is an enjoyable language to use. I haven't spent time with F# yet, but I understand it's quite enjoyable as well. The C# team has done an excellent job of paying attention to programming trends and adopting techniques from other languages. The transition from 1.1 to 2.0 was kind of clunky, but since then they've shown a great deal of good taste in what they've implemented as well as how it's been implemented. Of course, the downside is that C# is a large and complex language. I think the most recent "C# in Nutshell" book is well over a thousand pages. I have production code deployed in Python, PHP and Clojure, but I'm currently migrating back to .Net for my personal projects. C# developers get an excellent cross-platform deployment story thanks to Mono (MonoTouch, MonoDroid, MonoMac). Honestly, I think Mono runs on pretty much everything from PC, Mac & Linux to WP7, iPhone and Android; as well as game consoles, embedded hardware, etc. Additionally, many of the new to .Net technologies coming out of Microsoft right now such as F#, C# 5's async framework, MVC3 and Entity Framework 4 are very compelling. Microsoft is kind of a dorky company, but in my opinion they are producing pretty good software right now.

t terribly impressed with it for the web, although MVC makes it much better than it used to be (blah, webforms). There's an interesting project that was posted here recently called "Manos de Mono" that offers some variety in the web space [1] It's also turned out to be a pretty decent mobile development language. You can develop iPhone and Android apps using Mono [2][3], as well as cross-platform games [4][5]. You can use Mono in client-side applications, but I'm not sure how well it works or everything that's involved with using it that way. One of the nice things about Mono is that it lets you write C# on Unix and Unix-like platforms. For those of us that use C# during the day, it's liberating to be able to use the same language on our Macs at home, or deployed on Linux servers next to our other software. [1] http://github.com/jacksonh/manos [2] http://monotouch.net/ [3] http://monodroid.net/ [4] http://code.google.com/p/monoxna/ [5] http://unity3d.com/