Why C# became most popular, rather than other than in .NET?

I remember reading years ago that the C# designers only expected their new language to end up with around 30% of the overall .NET market.

Before .NET was invented, the dominant language for application development on the Microsoft stack was VB with C++ being used for the 'hard' stuff.

It was therefore expected that VB developers would move en masse to VB.NET and C++ developers would either use C# or Managed C++.

In the event, Managed C++ was so horrible that hardly anybody used it and VB.NET was such a big change from VB that it was almost as easy for VB developers to start again with C#.

Also, whereas C# was a nice clean language with no legacy bagage, the same could not be said for VB.NET which had to be given its own runtime library to support the old way of doing things.

So for these, and for the other reasons which Arunava has enumerated, we've therefore ended up with the present situation where C# is the dominant .NET language rather than VB.NET. Moreover, the situation is unlikely to improve for VB.NET developers as most internet articles nowadays are written for C# developers.

Although Managed C++ was replaced in 2005 with C++/CLI, this is still a difficult language compared to C# and so C++ remains very much a minority taste on the .NET platform except where substantial interop with unmanaged code is needed.

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Vulpes12y ago
I remember reading years ago that the C# designers only expected their new language to end up with around 30% of the overall .NET market.

Before .NET was invented, the dominant language for application development on the Microsoft stack was VB with C++ being used for the 'hard' stuff.

It was therefore expected that VB developers would move en masse to VB.NET and C++ developers would either use C# or Managed C++.

In the event, Managed C++ was so horrible that hardly anybody used it and VB.NET was such a big change from VB that it was almost as easy for VB developers to start again with C#.

Also, whereas C# was a nice clean language with no legacy bagage, the same could not be said for VB.NET which had to be given its own runtime library to support the old way of doing things.

So for these, and for the other reasons which Arunava has enumerated, we've therefore ended up with the present situation where C# is the dominant .NET language rather than VB.NET. Moreover, the situation is unlikely to improve for VB.NET developers as most internet articles nowadays are written for C# developers.

Although Managed C++ was replaced in 2005 with C++/CLI, this is still a difficult language compared to C# and so C++ remains very much a minority taste on the .NET platform except where substantial interop with unmanaged code is needed.
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Arunava Bhattacharjee12y ago
Because it is easy to understand. I studied Java in my college. When I switched to C# after joining a company it hardly took 15 days to get used to it. Both are to similar in the beginning. OOP concepts I meant and data type I used. The current support for LINQ made it extremely powerful. So many variation and very easy to understand.Syntactically also very simple.Very powerful,secure,easy to understand,easy to code.What else you need?
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