Jon Box, the mobility editor of .NET Developer's Journal recently responded to Calvin Austin's JDJ article entitled "C#: Is the Party Over?" in his blog. In his blog entry today at JonBox.DotNetDevelopersJournal.com Jon wrote:

Calvin Austin is a "section editor" for JDJ, the sister publication to DNDJ. Today, he also is an engineer at SpikeSource, and in a past lifetime worked at Sun.

Recently, Calvin wrote an editorial titled "C#: Is the Party Over?". After reading this, I am shocked!  It is full of inaccurate statements about .NET and C#.  It is also indicative of someone who is just ignorantly bashing the enemy - like Democrats and Republicans, like Hatfield's and McCoy's. The point is at some point this all becomes just noise - and if a valid message happens to come out from the ranting it will probably be ignored. Let's take a look at the Calvin's noise and consider this a "no-spin" zone.

"The .NET platform has been under constant development, often too fast for many corporate users to adopt. There has been a 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0, each which could be counted as a significant version in their own right." Calvin, 1.1 was not a major release - notice that the number incremented on the right side of the decimal.  It did have some great additions thought. And c'mon, Java and .NET both have been under constant development.

.NET v1.1 has been around for a couple of years now. And there has not been a 2.0 yet.  So, I'm not sure how you can imply that there a bunch of releases happening.

"C# is not singled out for any special attention on Visual Studio's Web pages." On MSDN's home page, a link to the C# Developer Center is there. On the Visual Studio page, there is another link to the C# Developers Center  On the Visual Studio 2005 site, there are as many links about C# as there are on VB - including the free Visual C# 2005 Express Edition. So, I'm not sure how he can claim this.

"Given that C# hasn't necessarily been the instant success that many thought it would have been, it hasn't been for lack of trying." Wow, I'm not sure how this conclusion came about.  If Calvin would have looked at the numbers of people who in early stages moved to .NET, he would have noticed that the majority went to C# including a segment of VB developers. Now, I like the VB.NET programming experience better - but I guarantee you that the VB.NET community does not think that C# has not been a success.

"The C#, C++, and C compilers are now free, although not obviously as optimized as the professional edition." The compilers are in the framework and have always been free. The framework has always been free. And where do you get this notion of different optimizations?

"Deploying a .NET service leaves a company a small choice of application servers and OS versions." Using .NET does not force someone to a certain platform.  Using Microsoft's implementation of the CLI (what we call the CLR) does require the Windows platform. And there are some of us who prefer to build our solutions on the Windows platform.

"The market has now moved to an open source J2EE application server model..." Really? Forrester reported in May 2005 that .NET adoption surpassed Java last year.

"While developers had to get budget approval for MSDN licenses, their Java colleagues were able to deploy a system for free." Yes, MSDN subscriptions are NOT free.  However, the .NET framework is free. And Microsoft has the Express products - which are free.  But, again, the productivity gains with Visual Studio and the Windows platform are more than worth the price of a MSDN subscription, in my opinion.

"The .NET platform uses many Windows services that until Mono started didn't even exist on Linux." I'm surprised that Calvin would say that Windows has more features than Linux does.  However, let's talk about a different point.  People confuse that anyone can implement a .NET CLI on any platform and extend it anyway they want.  The CLI is the core foundation of .NET - it is not the CLR, which is Microsoft's implementation of the CLI and built to take advantage of the Windows platform. Don't blame the rest of us for Mono's group deciding to duplicate the CLR when they should have targeted just the CLI.

"C# is still not the de facto choice for Web site or enterprise development and other languages such as Python and PHP, which are bringing in a new generation of developers who don't have a need to migrate Visual C++ applications."  Really?  Port80 recently announced that Microsoft platforms serve more Fortune 1000 websites and application servers than any other technology. Java platforms were in second place though, at 12.2% - whereas the Microsoft platforms came in at 43.6%. The study does not indicate which .NET language is used, but it's not about the language ultimately - the power is in the framework and platform.

"C# isn't going anywhere soon but its best days may be behind it." Based on all of the above nonsense, I'm not sure how Calvin can make this conclusion. He might need to consider checking out the Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap, which has a section on C#. Calvin might also check out Ander Hejlsburg's interview in the .NET Developers Journal (published by Calvin's publisher) that talks about future considerations for C#. Finally, check out the very recent interview on Channel 9 where Anders talks about working on C# v3.

I also see that Dino Chiesa, PM in the .NET Group, has a formal response to Calvin (AUG 16, includes podcast and text). Dino takes the high road in looking at Calvin's observations.  And instead of telling him "you are wrong", he says things like "we would have given you this information if you had asked". And who says that Microsoft does not play nicely?

It's a shame that Calvin has to be part of the mis-information out there today. Furthermore, it is obvious that JDJ is not reviewing this material before they publish it. JDJ is a good magazine overall, but it is obvious that all of us should only pontificate on topics that we know.