> All this in turn MIGHT give Microsoft a chance at becoming relevant again in the developer space (and please don't say "a lot of people use Microsoft" because I'm one of those people and I know a lot of those people and they're all looking at their future with worried eyes)
If you read the blog post of this very submission, it cites C# as #4 and climbing on the TIOBE language index. I know and work with a bunch of .NET developers, also, and I can't name one that's looking at the future with worried eyes.
In what way are they irrelevant in the developer space?
In my particular case, I tend to shy away from Microsoft development because the stack isn't really free, top to bottom and it seemed like MS was following trends instead of leading them (MVC was an obvious response and I see a lot of Railisms in it).
Well free stacks aren't really free either but we could argue that point until we're blue in the face.
The issue with Microsoft right now is they seem to want to throw away everything they've created over the last decade and embrace the web in a desperate attempt to bring new developers in.
For example, if you watch the Build sessions you see a lot of focus on C++ where as Microsoft used to treat C# like it's preferred language. That's got a lot of people thinking Microsoft's looking to sideline C# in the same way they did VB 10 years ago.
Visual Basic was obviously more popular that C# at that time (being C# hadn't existed before that). So the Tiobe index doesn't mean much (and honestly I'm always dubious of Tiobe in that I don't think PHP is more popular than Ruby and Python combined in modern development)
3 years ago Microsoft was telling developers to use ASP.NET Web Forms, WPF, and Silverlight. Today all that is essentially looked on as bad practice. So yes, there are people in the MS Developer community who are nervous.
I did watch many of the BUILD sessions, but never saw any indications that C# was going away or even being de-emphasized. I think you may be misunderstanding. Could you give examples of what you mean?
Microsoft isn't really "throwing everything away", they're shifting product strategies in a rather confusing and convoluted way. However, the latest stuff their pitching is C# and stuff from Silverlight (even though it's "dead") -- it's largely the same technologies. A Silverlight or WPF programmer will find a relatively painless transition to WP7 (which is essentially WPF/Silverlight) or W8 Metro apps.
I think your idea that C# is being de-emphasized or going away is a very, very incorrect statement contrary to reality.
Correct me if I'm wrong since I'm no longer .NET regular (but was in the past around 2005-2007 ish).
Lately the development in .NET revolves mostly around Sharepoint (customizing), cloud deployment, and probably Dynamics AX/GP/CRM.
The era of Microsoft shops building independent products seem to slowly/gradually being phased out by the web-app shops (the SaaS type). Lately the trend for MS shops are largely around "toolkits" companies such as Telerik, DevForce, and Infragistics or the "webparts" (SharePoint) companies like Bamboo Solutions. That's pretty much it...
There might be a bunch of "worried" .NET developers that don't want to work on Sharepoint customizations. But I'm pretty sure there are plenty consultants that won't mind doing that kind of works.
But again, this is just my personal point of view.
If you read the blog post of this very submission, it cites C# as #4 and climbing on the TIOBE language index. I know and work with a bunch of .NET developers, also, and I can't name one that's looking at the future with worried eyes.
In what way are they irrelevant in the developer space?
In my particular case, I tend to shy away from Microsoft development because the stack isn't really free, top to bottom and it seemed like MS was following trends instead of leading them (MVC was an obvious response and I see a lot of Railisms in it).