all good info, but to be fair to my much despised java, 1.5 is finally adding generics (and foreach loopage). My "copied Java" statement is true at face value. C++, Java, and C# all follow the same basic syntax and paradigm. I'm glad to see casting made cleaner, and exceptions paired down. Casting in java is painful. Yet, it is a rip off -- I was present at several early Microsoft C# dog-and-pony shows, and the similarities were very clear. The reps couldn't even break out a "why this is better than Java" line ONCE -- and when CLR came up, the best they had was "some group in Poland is trying to make C#" work. They don't care -- they just embrace and extend as usual. However my chief beef with them, and this still remains, is they have zero interest in anything but Windows, and the Mono folks are doing their best to clone something they really don't like (Windows Forms), so we're looking at what....GTK for Mono as alternatives? Microshaft isn't going to let that fly. I suppose if you are on a Windows platform, it's probably better than Java (no doubt, hard to be worse) and it may make due if it's still as powerful as C at lower levels, but you still...ultimately...have a language that should have been compiled down to exe (no runtime) and should not be MS specific.

How is the API? You still bound to MSDN hell? That's another big issue with Microsoft. Inconsistant API's that actually make the inconsistancies (which are many) in Java look tame. Sometimes they take Unicode, sometimes they take UTF-8, always clashing on types... The Windows SDK and DDK are pure evil. How clean are sockets? memory mapped files? authentication? Have these been cleaned up at all from the DDK and SDK? Probably not.

And our poster is still looking for a good employer language. C# ain't there yet, except in the early adopter type of shops (which, IMHO, are the suicidal shops).

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