6 ms·

Can someone comment on how .NET platform + tools compare? As someone who is not invested in either camp, between the two, .NET seems like a much better place t

Can someone comment on how .NET platform + tools compare? As someone who is not invested in either camp, between the two, .NET seems like a much better place to be invested in right now. Edit: Thanks a lot for the replies, I'm much better informed.

sc0rb 14y ago
I've been a professional Java developer for just over 2 years now. Let me give you a simple example. The three leading Ecommerce platforms (Oracle ATG, Hybris and IBM WebSphere) are all done in Java. There is huge demands for Java developers working on Web and Enterprise systems the world over. The average Salary for Java developers is pretty high in most places (london and Sydney) and the day rates you can charge as a contractor are very good. There also seems to be more open source and technical community in Java. I am glad that I went down the Java route. also, Most Java development jobs nowadays focus on the web and server side stuff, this is followed by mobile (such as android) and embedded (such as TIVO boxes).
- KumarAseem 14y ago
  Java isn't what it used to be. The products written in Java are slow, bad looking and less secure. The days of Java are anyways numbered.
  - sc0rb 14y ago
    That's an incredibly ignorant response and you have no idea what you're talking about. Java looks bad? You're probably talking about certain swing applications which are now very rare on the desktop. Java is slow? You clearly have no idea how fast the JVM can interpret and JIT java nowadays. Java is insecure? You're mainly talking about applets which are an ancient technology on their way out (slowly). In terms of actual JVM security. Every product has its security issues. You seem very ignorant, your java experience is probably from the past e.g. J2EE1.4 and old swing apps. Modern Java is an good language on a great platform. There's a reason why it runs some of the worlds biggest ecommerce sites and worlds fastest trading desks.
    - jbm 14y ago
      While I think the parent was overplaying it, I do find most of the Java applications on my mac are slow and irritating to run. Pycharm is an example of one of the apps I am talking about. It just feels like it struggles at times, eventhough I have a fairly new machine. Java was the first language I learned while going through college but I find the verbosity to be irritating.
      - sc0rb 14y ago
        Your experience is not necessarily because Java is slow. It could just be the applications you are running that are slow for reason that have nothing to do with the language. Swing is probably going to be slower (maybe?) than some native windowing framework. But Java as a language running on the JVM is certainly not slow. I've just been looking up pycharm and it seems that the slowness issues are to do with things like opening files and doing parsing. These things are likely to be slow for anything but the language they are written in.
      - matwood 14y ago
        Desktop java is dead. Actually desktop anything that's not web is going to end up dying. The server is where the languages will duke it out next and Java is fine there. C# is also fine on the server. The nice thing about Java is it easily runs on linux and has many OSS libraries to help quickly standup server applications.
        revscat 14y ago
        The best way I can think to phrase it is "in-browser VMs are dead". This covers Java, Flash, that one Microsoft had for a while, and anything else that uses the browser plug-in mechanism to load heavy frameworks.
    - Spooky23 14y ago
      Most people are exposed to Java via enterprise monstrosities. It depends on your POV. I've had to deal with an enterprise Java crapware app that was essentially a terminal emulator for an old mainframe... except that it required more than 4GB of memory on the desktop to work appropriately. The mainframe itself has 2GB of RAM.
  - revscat 14y ago
    I hate to say it, but you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
  - brown9-2 14y ago
    Most applications written in Java these days don't have UIs.
  - lawnchair_larry 14y ago
    Although you are taking heat for saying they are less secure, this is mostly true. Specifically, it is the JVM that has major security problems, not the apps themselves. This is not so much a fault in Java but in Oracle's implementation and their longstanding failure with security. Fun fact, several Windows versions have included a security mitigation technology called ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) that breaks a large majority of exploits and raises the bar significantly. Exploit developers and penetration testers love Java, because any machine that has it installed (most of them) breaks ASLR, re-enabling all of those exploits that Microsoft had otherwise mitigated.
  - slurry 14y ago
    > Java isn't what it used to be. The products written in Java are slow, bad looking and less secure. The days of Java are anyways numbered. Shorter: "I only know anything about client-side programming."
- kabdib 14y ago
  I went from writing client-server code in Java to writing similar things in .NET. After two months of C#, I remember thinking to myself, quite clearly, "Oh, thank God, the nightmare is over." Debuggers that worked. Native calling systems that actually interoperated well. A set of classes that weren't horribly overdesigned and under-implemented. Best of all, no culture that insisted on factories that made factories that made factories. Writing Java on phone platforms is fine. But the enterprisey stuff is death on roller skates. Hey, if you can stand it (my cousin does), then you might make a bunch of money. My cousin spends six months hacking Java for a bank, then six months vacationing. I prefer to do stuff that doesn't make me contemplate washing dishes for a living again. .NET has its warts, but it's not cancerous the way Java turned out to be in the hands of the architecture astronauts.
  - sc0rb 14y ago
    Interesting experience you have. I have spend most of my career doing Java6 JEE6 and modern Spring and it all feels quite modern. I did a lot of C# at University and it is a good language and platform but I don't think it's better than Java. New / modern Java is fine, it's old java that you want to avoid.
    - chaostheory 14y ago
      If you ever try any of the modern stuff (django, rails, play, grails, any node.js framework) in depth, j2ee / Spring and java just feels old and ancient. Spring has gotten better over the years, but there's still just too much work and too much unnecessary complexity and cruft with Spring. It's really telling when even Spring's creator jumped ship to work with TypeSafe and jvm7 has huge improvements designed for other languages. imo C# is an improved java, but C# open source ecosystem is just anemic compared to java.
      - DoubleCluster 14y ago
        I actually like old and ancient. That means all bugs have been fixed already. Systems become complex quickly enough and you need to use the most boring bricks imaginable if you want to build something sturdy.
TimGebhardt 14y ago
For the newest versions of Windows (Server 2012, Windows 8) .NET comes installed -- I forget if it's installed by default or installs as a Windows component. If it's the latter you install it from the same screens you install IIS or the SMTP server from. After you install it updates to the .NET framework show up in the "optional" windows updates. There are certainly standalone installers as well: http://www.microsoft.com/net/download http://www.microsoft.com/net/download But if you're producing client-side software that's dependent on the .NET framework then you most certainly will make your installer "bootstrap" the installation of the correct framework for your OS language and hardware.
edandersen 14y ago
You never have to worry about drive-by installers with .NET updates - security updates just come down with Windows Updates. .NET is seeing a small renaissance with ASP.NET MVC and what the Server teams are putting out, but Java is also gaining popularity again as a way of running Rails apps quickly and with Scala. Both platforms have enough legacy apps out there for a lifetime of maintenance work, if that's your sort of thing. Cleaning up after outsourcing companies is lucrative.
chaostheory 14y ago
In terms of just the languages themselves, .NET is very solid. C# is definitely a better version of Java, and the rest of the # languages in general are decent or good. However, the .NET open source ecosystem (while greatly improved from years back) still really really sucks. Historically, this is directly MS's fault (codeplex helped but it still will never be able to undo the damage MS did early on). I just think it's a waste of time having to reinvent wheels that pretty much every other major platform (Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc...) has plenty of. I always hate having to do extra work that I feel is entirely unnecessary, which happens a lot on .NET.
davesims 14y ago
I had about a decade in both, and really they're two very different worlds. From a code standpoint I'd much rather be in C#. It's one thing that MS has done really, really well over the last 10 years. They've taken a pretty aggressive stance towards adopting new features and although it's become fairly complex as of 4.0 and on, it really has some great features, some functional-inspired things like closures and collections api stuff that reminds me of Ruby in a lot of ways, and a great web framework in MVC that is honestly almost as fun to code for as any of the open source web frameworks out there. If you had to choose between one of the big J2EE stacks and MVC, no question, MVC is far, far better. The infrastructure is still a big 'ol MS GUI world, and I'd rather do <badPainfulThing> than spend a lot of time configuring and deploying IIS apps, but then TomCat and WAR files et. al. ain't exactly fun either. Java's JVM/bytecode infrastructure on the other hand has undergone a renaissance as a VM platform for a lot of very cool languages: Scala and Clojure being the two big examples there. But that's Really not the same thing as Java, obviously. And there's Android -- a completely different ecosystem, and somewhat truncated as a Java dialect, but still basically the Java language and able to employ most of the libs you're used to having: Guava, Guice and so on. No dynamic code gen, which stinks, but I know why they did it. So if you have Java under your belt and want to get into mobile stuff, that's a huge plus. So, as a general-purpose language skill, Java is still really, really important to know and will have legs for a long time to come. ASP MVC is a great framework, and if you can't work in something like Django or Rails or the like, it comes in nice 3rd or 4th place in terms of making for general coder happiness. C# is a far more progressive and interesting language than Java, but that's a philosophical difference between the gatekeepers of the two languages: Java intentionally moves slow for the sake of stability and continuity, C#'s minders have apparently embraced a little of the 'move fast break things' attitude of some parts of the open source world. I prefer the latter, but understand the rationale of the former. Me, I'm a Rails coder these days but also get to hop back into Java for Android dev and the rare foray into ASP work and they all have strengths and tradeoffs and they'll all be around a long time. The only thing I think I would avoid on principle, for my own sanity, is any enterprisey J2EE framework. That truly does feel like a massive leap backwards.
- untog 14y ago
  Agreed with this. I used to code C# for a living but have moved on- however, I'm now playing around with MonoTouch in my spare time and I'm loving using C# again. MonoDevelop is a poor man's Visual Studio, but it's a lot less demanding and runs on OSX. Backend frameworks like Nancy.fx are really great for being even simpler versions of MVC, too.
darklajid 14y ago
You got a lot of replies already, but let me join the crowd. Disclaimer: Was a Java guy, working with C# exclusively now by day (F# and Clojure - not Clojure-Clr - are my pet languages at night). In my opinion the languages (specifically Java vs. C# now, ignoring other languages for now) started out really, really close when C# was new. C# gained a lot of nice features, while Java was - euphemistically - 'stable'. Thinks that made my day and made every sporadic try to get back to Java (or work on Android) a chore: .Net events, properties (later automatic properties), usable generics, delegates, yield based generators/enumerators and the reason they were added: LINQ. Type inference aka 'var'. Basically every release brought half a dozen interesting features (and new technology, WCF/WPF/Silverlight/Workflow), while Java was sleeping as far as I could tell. I understand the latest release of Java now came closer again, but C# is still quite ahead in my opinion. Tooling: Visual Studio. Now, I'm not a total fan and some releases are better (2008, 2012) than others (2003, 2005, 2010), but it's a decent tool for most all your developing needs and ranges from free to 'includes the kitchen sink and costs $$$'. It supports three languages out of the box (F# is very interesting and a fully supported language!). I like IntelliJ and sympathize with the Eclipse project, but for me the VS experience is more streamlined, simple and nicer in general. Libraries: If it's _really_ popular in the Java world, you'll find a port (think nhibernate, log4net) or something equivalent. I wouldn't want to go back (C# -> Java), but I DO have the jdk around for Clojure (and I'm still watching Scala from a distance).
- chaostheory 14y ago
  > Tooling: Visual Studio. It's a decent tool but I think the alternatives for other platforms are either equal or better. imo MS is typically playing catchup in this area now. > Libraries: If it's _really_ popular in the Java world, you'll find a port (think nhibernate, log4net) or something equivalent. This is what truly makes .NET a no go for me. There's just too few non-paid and open library equivalents compared to almost any other platform. Not mention the libraries in other platforms tend to have more features. The .NET open source community is still pretty small and weak, and I just don't see that changing (even with CodePlex it hasn't really had any drastic changes).
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago
edwinnathaniel 14y ago
I used to intern at MS and have used .NET platform for a while (on and off, including not too long ago doing a bit of ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and Sharepoint for one-week project). I've used VS.NET 2005, 2008, and 2010. I've also used Java for a while, the whole Spring MVC, JEE6, Eclipse, IntelliJ. If you're willing to live in Windows OS platform, you should go with .NET, no question asked. Forget about tooling and everything else. If you want more flexibility, more choices, etc, Java is your choice. (There's also Python, Ruby, and the rest but let's scope it to Java). .NET culture is heavily influenced by the culture of Microsoft which means: 1) Less Open Source, More mISV (more "pay" products) 2) Windows/GUI, less command-line (has changed a bit but still not there) 3) Fire and Motion http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html #3 is important because MS makes money from tooling as well. When I was there, the internal chatter was "tool will be out of date every 2-3 years". Please make your own conclusion. Some people said Java had this period of "sleeping" which was true. But during that time frame, we've seen TONS of open source projects that are very mature, battle-tested, and probably everlasting. We've also learned a better way to write Java code (HN made such a big deal of Factories yet HN never acknowledge the best breed of Java code out there, it's a typical of a community like this anyway). Thus that "sleeping" period is being used efficiently to stabilize things. When it comes to tooling, Java beats .NET by miles. Java deployment packaging (JAR for library and WAR for web-app) is one of the best out there and it's been stable for many many years. (http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/java-is-not-python-either.html http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/java-is-not-python-either.html) Java build and dependency management tool is also far ahead of what the .NET has. Maven is far beyond NuGET and MSBuild (shrudder). Integrating Java build with popular Continuous Integration server like Jenkins, TeamCity is waaaay easier than .NET. Eclipse foster a good community of open source and free tools/plugins which put VS.NET to shame BUT BUT BUT experience may vary when using Eclipse. Eclipse is like black magic and moody: if somehow you're in the position that your Eclipse is stable, it's one of the best IDE out there. Eclipse has its own built-in "app-store" that makes installing plugins sooo much easier, seamlessly, and faster. m2clipse, a Maven plugin for Eclipse can perform the following steps: 1) Download dependencies 2) Download the dependencies javadoc (auto-complete will show the code documentation) 3) Download the dependencies source code (#1 only download the compiled code) if you ever wanted to "navigate to the implementation of a method" It does this seamlessly without you breaking a sweat. Tools like FindBugs and CheckStyle helped to improve your code hygine/style and EclEmma can tell your Code Coverage. All of these are free. Java has rich and mature tools and libraries: 1) Sonar => http://www.sonarsource.org/ http://www.sonarsource.org/ 2) Jenkins => http://jenkins-ci.org/ http://jenkins-ci.org/ To put it simply, the Java community has a very strong Software Engineering discipline and continue to find better ways to develop whereas the .NET/C# community is either following Java lead or serving its own master: Microsoft. I'm glad I'm out the .NET world because it was soo much limiting and "capping" your day-to-day productivity.

sc0rb 14y ago

I've been a professional Java developer for just over 2 years now. Let me give you a simple example. The three leading Ecommerce platforms (Oracle ATG, Hybris and IBM WebSphere) are all done in Java. There is huge demands for Java developers working on Web and Enterprise systems the world over. The average Salary for Java developers is pretty high in most places (london and Sydney) and the day rates you can charge as a contractor are very good. There also seems to be more open source and technical community in Java. I am glad that I went down the Java route. also, Most Java development jobs nowadays focus on the web and server side stuff, this is followed by mobile (such as android) and embedded (such as TIVO boxes).

KumarAseem 14y ago
Java isn't what it used to be. The products written in Java are slow, bad looking and less secure. The days of Java are anyways numbered.
- sc0rb 14y ago
  That's an incredibly ignorant response and you have no idea what you're talking about. Java looks bad? You're probably talking about certain swing applications which are now very rare on the desktop. Java is slow? You clearly have no idea how fast the JVM can interpret and JIT java nowadays. Java is insecure? You're mainly talking about applets which are an ancient technology on their way out (slowly). In terms of actual JVM security. Every product has its security issues. You seem very ignorant, your java experience is probably from the past e.g. J2EE1.4 and old swing apps. Modern Java is an good language on a great platform. There's a reason why it runs some of the worlds biggest ecommerce sites and worlds fastest trading desks.
  - jbm 14y ago
    While I think the parent was overplaying it, I do find most of the Java applications on my mac are slow and irritating to run. Pycharm is an example of one of the apps I am talking about. It just feels like it struggles at times, eventhough I have a fairly new machine. Java was the first language I learned while going through college but I find the verbosity to be irritating.
    - sc0rb 14y ago
      Your experience is not necessarily because Java is slow. It could just be the applications you are running that are slow for reason that have nothing to do with the language. Swing is probably going to be slower (maybe?) than some native windowing framework. But Java as a language running on the JVM is certainly not slow. I've just been looking up pycharm and it seems that the slowness issues are to do with things like opening files and doing parsing. These things are likely to be slow for anything but the language they are written in.
    - matwood 14y ago
      Desktop java is dead. Actually desktop anything that's not web is going to end up dying. The server is where the languages will duke it out next and Java is fine there. C# is also fine on the server. The nice thing about Java is it easily runs on linux and has many OSS libraries to help quickly standup server applications.
      - revscat 14y ago
        The best way I can think to phrase it is "in-browser VMs are dead". This covers Java, Flash, that one Microsoft had for a while, and anything else that uses the browser plug-in mechanism to load heavy frameworks.
  - Spooky23 14y ago
    Most people are exposed to Java via enterprise monstrosities. It depends on your POV. I've had to deal with an enterprise Java crapware app that was essentially a terminal emulator for an old mainframe... except that it required more than 4GB of memory on the desktop to work appropriately. The mainframe itself has 2GB of RAM.
- revscat 14y ago
  I hate to say it, but you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Most applications written in Java these days don't have UIs.
- lawnchair_larry 14y ago
  Although you are taking heat for saying they are less secure, this is mostly true. Specifically, it is the JVM that has major security problems, not the apps themselves. This is not so much a fault in Java but in Oracle's implementation and their longstanding failure with security. Fun fact, several Windows versions have included a security mitigation technology called ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) that breaks a large majority of exploits and raises the bar significantly. Exploit developers and penetration testers love Java, because any machine that has it installed (most of them) breaks ASLR, re-enabling all of those exploits that Microsoft had otherwise mitigated.
- slurry 14y ago
  > Java isn't what it used to be. The products written in Java are slow, bad looking and less secure. The days of Java are anyways numbered. Shorter: "I only know anything about client-side programming."
kabdib 14y ago
I went from writing client-server code in Java to writing similar things in .NET. After two months of C#, I remember thinking to myself, quite clearly, "Oh, thank God, the nightmare is over." Debuggers that worked. Native calling systems that actually interoperated well. A set of classes that weren't horribly overdesigned and under-implemented. Best of all, no culture that insisted on factories that made factories that made factories. Writing Java on phone platforms is fine. But the enterprisey stuff is death on roller skates. Hey, if you can stand it (my cousin does), then you might make a bunch of money. My cousin spends six months hacking Java for a bank, then six months vacationing. I prefer to do stuff that doesn't make me contemplate washing dishes for a living again. .NET has its warts, but it's not cancerous the way Java turned out to be in the hands of the architecture astronauts.
- sc0rb 14y ago
  Interesting experience you have. I have spend most of my career doing Java6 JEE6 and modern Spring and it all feels quite modern. I did a lot of C# at University and it is a good language and platform but I don't think it's better than Java. New / modern Java is fine, it's old java that you want to avoid.
  - chaostheory 14y ago
    If you ever try any of the modern stuff (django, rails, play, grails, any node.js framework) in depth, j2ee / Spring and java just feels old and ancient. Spring has gotten better over the years, but there's still just too much work and too much unnecessary complexity and cruft with Spring. It's really telling when even Spring's creator jumped ship to work with TypeSafe and jvm7 has huge improvements designed for other languages. imo C# is an improved java, but C# open source ecosystem is just anemic compared to java.
    - DoubleCluster 14y ago
      I actually like old and ancient. That means all bugs have been fixed already. Systems become complex quickly enough and you need to use the most boring bricks imaginable if you want to build something sturdy.

TimGebhardt 14y ago

For the newest versions of Windows (Server 2012, Windows 8) .NET comes installed -- I forget if it's installed by default or installs as a Windows component. If it's the latter you install it from the same screens you install IIS or the SMTP server from. After you install it updates to the .NET framework show up in the "optional" windows updates. There are certainly standalone installers as well: http://www.microsoft.com/net/download http://www.microsoft.com/net/download But if you're producing client-side software that's dependent on the .NET framework then you most certainly will make your installer "bootstrap" the installation of the correct framework for your OS language and hardware.

edandersen 14y ago

You never have to worry about drive-by installers with .NET updates - security updates just come down with Windows Updates. .NET is seeing a small renaissance with ASP.NET MVC and what the Server teams are putting out, but Java is also gaining popularity again as a way of running Rails apps quickly and with Scala. Both platforms have enough legacy apps out there for a lifetime of maintenance work, if that's your sort of thing. Cleaning up after outsourcing companies is lucrative.

chaostheory 14y ago

In terms of just the languages themselves, .NET is very solid. C# is definitely a better version of Java, and the rest of the # languages in general are decent or good. However, the .NET open source ecosystem (while greatly improved from years back) still really really sucks. Historically, this is directly MS's fault (codeplex helped but it still will never be able to undo the damage MS did early on). I just think it's a waste of time having to reinvent wheels that pretty much every other major platform (Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc...) has plenty of. I always hate having to do extra work that I feel is entirely unnecessary, which happens a lot on .NET.

davesims 14y ago

I had about a decade in both, and really they're two very different worlds. From a code standpoint I'd much rather be in C#. It's one thing that MS has done really, really well over the last 10 years. They've taken a pretty aggressive stance towards adopting new features and although it's become fairly complex as of 4.0 and on, it really has some great features, some functional-inspired things like closures and collections api stuff that reminds me of Ruby in a lot of ways, and a great web framework in MVC that is honestly almost as fun to code for as any of the open source web frameworks out there. If you had to choose between one of the big J2EE stacks and MVC, no question, MVC is far, far better. The infrastructure is still a big 'ol MS GUI world, and I'd rather do <badPainfulThing> than spend a lot of time configuring and deploying IIS apps, but then TomCat and WAR files et. al. ain't exactly fun either. Java's JVM/bytecode infrastructure on the other hand has undergone a renaissance as a VM platform for a lot of very cool languages: Scala and Clojure being the two big examples there. But that's Really not the same thing as Java, obviously. And there's Android -- a completely different ecosystem, and somewhat truncated as a Java dialect, but still basically the Java language and able to employ most of the libs you're used to having: Guava, Guice and so on. No dynamic code gen, which stinks, but I know why they did it. So if you have Java under your belt and want to get into mobile stuff, that's a huge plus. So, as a general-purpose language skill, Java is still really, really important to know and will have legs for a long time to come. ASP MVC is a great framework, and if you can't work in something like Django or Rails or the like, it comes in nice 3rd or 4th place in terms of making for general coder happiness. C# is a far more progressive and interesting language than Java, but that's a philosophical difference between the gatekeepers of the two languages: Java intentionally moves slow for the sake of stability and continuity, C#'s minders have apparently embraced a little of the 'move fast break things' attitude of some parts of the open source world. I prefer the latter, but understand the rationale of the former. Me, I'm a Rails coder these days but also get to hop back into Java for Android dev and the rare foray into ASP work and they all have strengths and tradeoffs and they'll all be around a long time. The only thing I think I would avoid on principle, for my own sanity, is any enterprisey J2EE framework. That truly does feel like a massive leap backwards.

untog 14y ago
Agreed with this. I used to code C# for a living but have moved on- however, I'm now playing around with MonoTouch in my spare time and I'm loving using C# again. MonoDevelop is a poor man's Visual Studio, but it's a lot less demanding and runs on OSX. Backend frameworks like Nancy.fx are really great for being even simpler versions of MVC, too.

darklajid 14y ago

You got a lot of replies already, but let me join the crowd. Disclaimer: Was a Java guy, working with C# exclusively now by day (F# and Clojure - not Clojure-Clr - are my pet languages at night). In my opinion the languages (specifically Java vs. C# now, ignoring other languages for now) started out really, really close when C# was new. C# gained a lot of nice features, while Java was - euphemistically - 'stable'. Thinks that made my day and made every sporadic try to get back to Java (or work on Android) a chore: .Net events, properties (later automatic properties), usable generics, delegates, yield based generators/enumerators and the reason they were added: LINQ. Type inference aka 'var'. Basically every release brought half a dozen interesting features (and new technology, WCF/WPF/Silverlight/Workflow), while Java was sleeping as far as I could tell. I understand the latest release of Java now came closer again, but C# is still quite ahead in my opinion. Tooling: Visual Studio. Now, I'm not a total fan and some releases are better (2008, 2012) than others (2003, 2005, 2010), but it's a decent tool for most all your developing needs and ranges from free to 'includes the kitchen sink and costs $$$'. It supports three languages out of the box (F# is very interesting and a fully supported language!). I like IntelliJ and sympathize with the Eclipse project, but for me the VS experience is more streamlined, simple and nicer in general. Libraries: If it's _really_ popular in the Java world, you'll find a port (think nhibernate, log4net) or something equivalent. I wouldn't want to go back (C# -> Java), but I DO have the jdk around for Clojure (and I'm still watching Scala from a distance).

chaostheory 14y ago
> Tooling: Visual Studio. It's a decent tool but I think the alternatives for other platforms are either equal or better. imo MS is typically playing catchup in this area now. > Libraries: If it's _really_ popular in the Java world, you'll find a port (think nhibernate, log4net) or something equivalent. This is what truly makes .NET a no go for me. There's just too few non-paid and open library equivalents compared to almost any other platform. Not mention the libraries in other platforms tend to have more features. The .NET open source community is still pretty small and weak, and I just don't see that changing (even with CodePlex it hasn't really had any drastic changes).
edwinnathaniel 14y ago

edwinnathaniel 14y ago

I used to intern at MS and have used .NET platform for a while (on and off, including not too long ago doing a bit of ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and Sharepoint for one-week project). I've used VS.NET 2005, 2008, and 2010. I've also used Java for a while, the whole Spring MVC, JEE6, Eclipse, IntelliJ. If you're willing to live in Windows OS platform, you should go with .NET, no question asked. Forget about tooling and everything else. If you want more flexibility, more choices, etc, Java is your choice. (There's also Python, Ruby, and the rest but let's scope it to Java). .NET culture is heavily influenced by the culture of Microsoft which means: 1) Less Open Source, More mISV (more "pay" products) 2) Windows/GUI, less command-line (has changed a bit but still not there) 3) Fire and Motion http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html #3 is important because MS makes money from tooling as well. When I was there, the internal chatter was "tool will be out of date every 2-3 years". Please make your own conclusion. Some people said Java had this period of "sleeping" which was true. But during that time frame, we've seen TONS of open source projects that are very mature, battle-tested, and probably everlasting. We've also learned a better way to write Java code (HN made such a big deal of Factories yet HN never acknowledge the best breed of Java code out there, it's a typical of a community like this anyway). Thus that "sleeping" period is being used efficiently to stabilize things. When it comes to tooling, Java beats .NET by miles. Java deployment packaging (JAR for library and WAR for web-app) is one of the best out there and it's been stable for many many years. (http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/java-is-not-python-either.html http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/java-is-not-python-either.html) Java build and dependency management tool is also far ahead of what the .NET has. Maven is far beyond NuGET and MSBuild (shrudder). Integrating Java build with popular Continuous Integration server like Jenkins, TeamCity is waaaay easier than .NET. Eclipse foster a good community of open source and free tools/plugins which put VS.NET to shame BUT BUT BUT experience may vary when using Eclipse. Eclipse is like black magic and moody: if somehow you're in the position that your Eclipse is stable, it's one of the best IDE out there. Eclipse has its own built-in "app-store" that makes installing plugins sooo much easier, seamlessly, and faster. m2clipse, a Maven plugin for Eclipse can perform the following steps: 1) Download dependencies 2) Download the dependencies javadoc (auto-complete will show the code documentation) 3) Download the dependencies source code (#1 only download the compiled code) if you ever wanted to "navigate to the implementation of a method" It does this seamlessly without you breaking a sweat. Tools like FindBugs and CheckStyle helped to improve your code hygine/style and EclEmma can tell your Code Coverage. All of these are free. Java has rich and mature tools and libraries: 1) Sonar => http://www.sonarsource.org/ http://www.sonarsource.org/ 2) Jenkins => http://jenkins-ci.org/ http://jenkins-ci.org/ To put it simply, the Java community has a very strong Software Engineering discipline and continue to find better ways to develop whereas the .NET/C# community is either following Java lead or serving its own master: Microsoft. I'm glad I'm out the .NET world because it was soo much limiting and "capping" your day-to-day productivity.