Why would those be written in .NET? Office has been around for years. It would be an engineering nightmare to port it to .NET, and in this stage of its life, not present much benefit. Notepad hasn't changed in like forever, so I see no reason why they would bother with that. How about Windows Media Player? Also a very complete application with a huge C++ foundation. Porting it would be a nightmare with little benefit. Internet Explorer? Same story. It's irrelevant anyway, since Microsoft's use of C# doesn't determine how good it is. For all we know it could be that some dude high up at Microsoft really loves C++ and doesn't want to change. It doesn't really matter.

C# is a young technology, so don't expect it to gain industry-wide acceptance overnight. But a very prevalent use is in web development. A lot of websites use ASP.NET. Something like 45% of Fortune 1000 companies use ASP.NET for their webpages, which means they are probably written in C# or VB.NET (the underlying mechanics of which are very similar to C#, and they compile to the same intermediate code).


Of course, but don't think for one minute that the common use of a language determines how good it is. And again, no one's saying other languages aren't useful or shouldn't be learned, only that C# is a very, very good choice for a general purpose language and a good point to start learning.

A lot of the Media Center in Vista is managed. Any of the really reworked parts of Vista are managed (gpedit, event viewer, mmc, some networking config stuff, and the new frameworks - workflow, presentation and communications).

They were working on making a lot more of the GUI in Vista managed but apparently they ran out of time. Vista had a couple of false starts.

It wasn't a particularly huge game, but Uplink was written in C#. The first major commercial XNA/C# is Schizoid, and it's going to be released on Xbox Live Arcade soon. Microsoft's C# game development libraries (MDX, XNA) have been in beta up until, like, 5 weeks ago.

Only parts of office are in .NET -- OOXML serialization, scripting. I don't remember if the GUI is in WPF or not.

Any program that uses a property grid (they're quite distinctive) uses .NET - it's because you don't have to write any code to get the property grid to link to the object, it detects all of the properties in a class automatically.

I think that just about covers it.

Oh common. You know very well C# isn't a special purpose language. You're acting as if C# has a few buzzwords and the rest is crap that no one chooses to talk about? If you really want to see what it's like, try it. Hell, just look up some tutorials! Just glance over them and you'll see how simple common tasks have become.

You're asking us what C# makes easier to do, but it's hard to answer since it makes everything easier to do.

My job is maintaining [url=www.1parkplace.com]1parkplace[/url]. The back end is entirely...no I take that back there are some legacy ASP pages but 85% of this site is in .NET/C#. There are about 50 source files totaling to some...85KLOC. If this were in PHP or Perl, I'd be unemployed right now because I would seriously not want to maintain anything of this scale in either of those languages. I don't know python or ruby so I didn't include those as I have no basis of understanding.

Honestly where I get "sticky" is just "ok. How do I do this? *goes to MSDN* or "Ok. How do I implement this?" Once I figure it out, it's all golden from there.

JonC, I really like the fact that you actually respond to questions. It's refreshing.

It's not my fault you asked a stupid question.

How it does that is through the use of reflection and reflection is four kinds of

Rumors are that IE8 could be entirely rewritten in .net with compliance.

But I'll believe it when I see it.

I once wrote this text game that needed to parse commands. And I couldn't be arsed to write a parser so I just used reflection to where any command I typed just executed the method of the same name of a class.

Sorry, I'm still laughing at you because of the whole, "you have no experience," "yes I do," "that's a fallacy!!!" thing.

I said you had no experience relevant to the subject at hand, which you have so keenly demonstrated as being true.

I also said "very smart" and "qualified" and you don't seem to be those. Experience as a Perl programmer doesn't mean you know the first thing about C#.

@ Stormtrooper and on topic:

Regardless of which platform/environment/language is "better", my advice for a non-programmer is to learn whatever is easiest to pick up without having to understand low-level theoretical concepts (which you can learn as you go along and gain experience - but which I doubt interest a beginner). Easiest to learn = a high-level language (even a scripting language) that has a well documented API with a wealth of examples and a solid community behind it.

I mean, why do you want to program a game engine? Because you have ideas for a game. You want to create things, you want to make things move around the screen. You don't want to debug memory leaking code.

Making games is boring. Diving through disassembly in a debugger looking for that tiny defect that brought the whole system to it's knees... that's fun.

Seriously.

There are a handful of languages I am learning:
Python
Ruby
C#
JavaScript

They are all good for different things and they are all useful enough in modern software development to justify learning.