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Comment by MichaelAza | Hacker News Reader

.NET, like practically all tolls by Microsoft, is good for one thing - Large scale enterprise development for Windows. It plays well with Office, Access, Sharepoint, Active Directory, IIS etc. and it's the best around at what it's doing. You can also do webdev or solve highly concurrent problems with .NET and it's great at that as well (I'm very fond of the Nancy framework and C#'s async/await are a godsend) but it's not inherently better at these than any other language. So no, .NET isn't dying nor do I feel it has lost momentum. It's not really doing anything crazy or new (ahem go ahem) but it's still as good as ever in what it was meant to do - general purpose programming language for Windows.

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".NET, like practically all tolls by Microsoft, is good for one thing - Large scale enterprise development for Windows."

It came so close to being Android. In 2000, Microsoft previewed .NET Compact Framework for Windows CE devices. At the time I had an iPaq connected via Bluetooth to an Ericsson 2.5G phone, and I writing C# apps for it. My immediate impression was "THIS is what mobile software should be like!"

Seven years later, with NETCF an optional oddity on Windows Mobile, Android showed you could do a mobile OS using a Java-like managed language system for both system middleware and applications. Windows Phone is a bit closer, but it still isn't that.

Android was willing to be more revolutionary, replacing much of the Linux userland with managed language code. That was a big gamble, but that is what it took to succeed. If Microsoft were to take the Win 8 kernel and .NET, or successor technologies, and unleash their engineers to make something really new, they would be a fearsome competitor.

Dragging Windows onto tablets is a waste of talent.

I agree. I've recently noticed a huge amount of .Net resources for the Microsoft Cloud based on Azure, Office 365, SharePoint Online etc. I expect there'll be lots of money made piggy backing LOB .Net applications off these services.

While I agree that the C# language is wonderful and some of the .NET framework is very well designed, I think most of the .NET 'Enterprise' SDK's and API's are terribly, horribly overengineered and complicated. SharePoint, Dynamics CRM come to mind. I wish this part of .NET would die, but I am not convinced it will go away anytime soon.

QFT. It will stay on the enterprise market for years to come. In fact, that's where I see MS going. Sort of the path CA has taken with mid/main frames.

MS has to come to the conclusion that it is not a consumer tend setter any longer. Consumers only use Windows because it came on their PC. And as more and more of the consumer market goes mobile, Windows becomes irrelevant. And (sadly for MS) they were too late to the mobile market so their devices (phone and tablet) are going nowhere. I got a friend who works at Best Buy who told me no one is buying the Windows phones. And few are buying the tablet. It's IOS and Android all the way.

MS should focus all it's eggs on enterprise. Plenty of cash to be made in that market.

Don't forget the desktop sector, which isn't entirely dead yet. Pretty much everything is better than MFC, and with Delphi going nowhere (for obvious reasons), a lot of people writing relatively small custom software apps transitioned to .NET, either with C# or VB. Don't think that will change that much with WinRT. (JavaScript seems mostly an angle to get some web developers to do small Metro apps)

I think MS have lost a lot of support on the desktop after deprecating Windows Forms (which is all a lot of enterprise apps need), followed by WPF/Silverlight's poor penetration leaving no hardware accelerated graphics for non-WPF (bit blitting excluded), and then the confusing messages around WinRT which at one point looked like they were deprecating WPF as well.

While the front end flashy stuff isn't there compared in .net compared to the better Javascript libraries (I love d3!) MS have really progressed the non-sexy .net improvements e.g. C# evolution, F#, WebAPI.

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