gte525u

WSJ now http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110411-709790.html

There are third party tools like sharpdevelop which are generally better than the express tools.

I'm both a lisper and unix user. I've historically been an embedded developer, but I'm currently leading a team developing a (greenfield) .NET application for testing embedded systems.

Choice was pretty simple for the following reasons:

a) Mature VM/Languages (although there are alternatives)

b) Existing Team knowledge-base. This is a biggie. I have another former lisper on the team and I could drag the rest kicking and screaming to lisp or python, but, it's really not worth the effort of convincing management we'll be more productive in language X.

c) Vendor support. We're using a ~$10k interface card. They offer drivers for Windows or VxWorks. The drivers come as either a user-space C Library or a .NET wrapper. Any other language choice I have to either justify to management writing an FFI wrapper to the C library or write it and maintain it on my own time.

d) WPF is very code generator friendly. A majority of our application forms are generated using either XSLT or python.

e) Easy UIs for what has to be customized.

In short, I'm more productive in python or lisp. My team is more productive in C# and WPF. That being said, I'll try to add scripting in the next version using iron python, but, the core will stay in C#.

EDIT: typo in first paragraph.