Hey Calvin,

I read your "Core and Internals Viewpoint" (C#: Is The Party Over?) the other day, in the print edition of the August 2005 JDJ.

There are a couple of inaccuracies in the article maybe worth correcting or clarifying:

• GotDotNet is GotDotNet.com, not GotDotNet.org. I think the gotdotnet.org domain name may yet be unassigned.

• GDN is not an underground site as you describe. A WHOIS query points to Microsoft as the registrant. It is a *community* site, though, as you point out.

• You said that “there has been a …  .NET 2.0”. .NET v2.0 is not officially available yet, though beta software has been available for some time.

• You wrote that the “Visual Studio product has required its own aggressive update schedule.” Visual Studio has been updated in synch with the underlying .NET Framework. The schedule was:  .NET 1.0 and VS.NET 2002 in February 2002, .NET v1.1 and VS.NET 2003 in May 2003. .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 will be released in November 2005.  So far that is one release, and one official update in 3+ years. There is an official major release coming in 3 months or so. It hardly seems “aggressive”.

• You wrote that “The C#, C++, and C compilers are now free…” The compilers are free, as you said. The C# compiler has *always* been “free” with the .NET SDK, since the release of .NET 1.0 in February 2002. The free C++/C compiler was made available in April 2004, as part of the Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003. Just for clarity, the VB and J# compilers are also included in the free SDK.

• You also wrote that the free compilers are “obviously not as optimized as the professional edition.” This is inaccurate. There is no “professional edition” of the compilers. There is a “professional edition” as well as other editions of the Visual Studio integrated graphical development environment, but they all use the same compiler, the same that ships in the free SDKs. 

• You ask the question “why didn’t C# make the grade?”  but you fail to provide any data supporting the premise. What was the grade, anyway?  How are you judging?

• You make an odd comparison of costs for MSDN developer-seat licenses, and deployment costs for Java. The fact is, there are both free and commercial developer tool options for both .NET and Java. And for clarification, with .NET, there is no extra deployment-time license cost.  If you have a valid Windows license, you can run applications built on the .NET Framework. 

• Finally, you close with a statement that the best days for C# may be behind us. In fact, numerous parties have published data showing that the adoption of C# and .NET by developers and corporations continues to rise. I refer you to Forrester, Gartner, and IDC, among others. Microsoft also conducts surveys of developers worldwide and finds data in agreement with the independently-provided data. We could have given you this information if you had asked.

Best Regards,

Dino Chiesa