Hacker News Reader

Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who has worked enterprise in the eastern half of the U.S. knows better than to be worried by this. There are so many mission-critical business applications written in C#, and even VB.net, that the idea of .NET jobs going away in the next 15 years, even if MS were to abandon the product today, is nil.

Where I live I would guess that at least 90% of job postings for programmers are .NET.

View on HN

How many of these mission critical business systems are written with WPF or Silverlight for the native front-end? I don't know the numbers, but my guess is that the bulk would still be Winforms.

I think a lot of people who develop desktop front ends for .NET (and want to develop on new projects) would have put effort into learning Silverlight and/or WPF and are afraid that the effort is going to be wasted, as they need to learn another technology.

What exactly does learning Silverlight entail that differs from learning any other .NET environment? XAML is just an xml markup. I only used it on a WP7 app and it took me a couple of hours to get the gist of how it works.

Not much really, especially if you limit the XAML to basic layouts. If you do everything in C#, it's not too much different from something like, say, WinForms. Which is why people like it.

But most .NET apps that I see have stuck to the best practice of splitting the presentation layer from your other layers. Re-coding just the UI into HTML5 could very well become a standard, especially if it enables apps to easily move to more phones, tablets, or whatever else gets invented in the coming years.

So it is probably true that .NET jobs will not go away. But that 90% mark on job postings could very well shrink significantly.

It's sort of like COBOL. =)

Yes, Javascript is sortof like COBOL

This is what the VB6 guys used to say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com