I was a very early adopter of C#, became a bit of an evangelist consultant and introduced it with .NET into several companies with this kind of tech stack. I h

I was a very early adopter of C#, became a bit of an evangelist consultant and introduced it with .NET into several companies with this kind of tech stack. I had also previously worked at HP’s rival beforehand. I’d developed a reputation (purely by chance) for migrating teams to .NET and that skill was in demand. When I would start with a new team the initial responses from developers were always the same. For VB6 and VBScript developers C# was a monumental paradigm shift. They hated the Java style brackets. They wanted their IF’s, ELSE IF’s and END IF’s. Subroutines and functions were backwards. Everything to them felt foreign and wrong. The truth was that many VB6 developers had come from background of VBA, working with Microsoft Access in corporate IT departments. Or they had come from classic ASP (VBScript) where you didn’t have to compile your code. Many fought to use VB.NET instead. It felt closer to what they were used to. However, I was convinced that C# was the future, and I’d impress this on the management teams that would hire me. Every piece of documentation Microsoft put out and every code sample they provided, pushed, promoted and prioritized C# over VB.NET and I was convinced that C# would eventually dominate VB.NET. I also believed that for the web, C# was closer to JavaScript and that had become the de facto browser scripting language, making the context switch easier for website developers. The more they used C#, the more they loved it. Sure I came across the odd stubborn senior that refused to accept the inevitable, but critical mass and their management usually helped them along the way. In the end, the speed, structure, peers and power of .NET compared to VB6 would eventually win them over. These days I still come across the odd old .NET Framework application written in VB.NET. Sometimes even on rare occasions a website written in classic ASP. However, they’re always legacy apps on their last legs, where there’s maybe one old programmer keeping it from falling apart and nobody else knows how to support it. Any developer with less than ten years experience probably hasn’t even seen VB.NET. At least, I’ve never seen a company start a new project in VB.NET in years. As far as I’m concerned VB.NET is a dead language now and I was proved right. I still work in the .NET community and have watched it grow and thrive into what it is today. I never could have imagined being able to read the source code of .NET back then, but today I can. I’d never have believed .NET would run on Linux, and as a preference over Windows as well! I’d never have believed it would become one of the fastest and most performative languages either, but here we are 20+ years later. Yes I danced with the devil that is Microsoft. I knew what I was getting into when I started, but it’s put food on the table for all these years and I don’t regret it at all. It’s been a wild ride.