Richard,

I think I have to agree, I used to program in C and PHP at lot. I always found C fun although slow to program in - making sure you didn't have memory leaks was always a major part of the debugging job although this was partially offset by some of the Pointer stuff allowing you to do some pretty cool things quickly.

PHP was very quick to write in but it pales massively in comparison to the constructs in C# - well its not typed for one..

Microsoft have done a great job in creating a language with a nice syntax (I prefer it to Java) and a good selection of constructs - personally I think that one of the CLR's strongest things is combining meta data with the program itself - no more .h files and attributes to embed extra meta information makes life pretty good.

- James

I think I'd largely agree too, although like Richard I have to say occasionally I miss multiple inheritance. There are times when it would be extremely useful. I'm not saying it isn't possible to perpetrate grave evils with it, and in the wrong hands its clearly a bit of a programming WMD, however you can also do some very beautiful, clever and good things with it, and using some sort of delegation or visitor just feels a bit clunky by comparison.

I certainly prefer C# to Java in general, although the lack of checked exceptions still irks me a little, especially when the arguments in favour of no checked exceptions basically boil down to, "well you can't have them because we couldn't be arsed to have a superclass called Throwable and then distinguish between Exceptions and Errors the way Sun do." I'd also like namespace level access analagous to Java's package level access, although in .NET 2.0 friend assemblies address this issue quite satisfactorily. Probably my biggest gripe though is the FCL and WinForms: although it's considerably better organised, it has a long way to go before it comes close to the breadth and depth of functionality offered by the libraries that come bundled with Java. Also OSS support for .NET is much sparser. As an example, there's nothing really comparable to the Jakarta Commons project for .NET.

Having said all of that, I really do prefer C# as a language, and I'm not too anxious to go back to Java. Overall very well done to Microsoft, and keep up the great work!

In response to Barts:

"although the lack of checked exceptions still irks me a little, especially when the arguments in favour of no checked exceptions basically boil down to, "well you can't have them because we couldn't be arsed to have a superclass called Throwable and then distinguish between Exceptions and Errors the way Sun do.""

I think the reason for this was to allow more than one language to run on the CLR (something which I think is very nice as languages such as F# make for some very clear code in certain situations and C++/CLR has certainly not harmed .NET's take up - ie choose your own poison). However I can understand that coming from a checked exception background that its frustrating that you cannot tell the exceptions which might come out of a method but less frustrating than having "throws exception" everywhere as that tells us nothing.

- James

Agreed: "throws Exception" is very wrong indeed, and it always used to annoy the living daylights out of me that people did that. I spent about three weeks removing every instance of that from a very large application once, and replacing them all with more specific exception types which in many cases I was able to handle or wrap more appropriately in a domain specific exception. I also ended up rewriting virtually all the error messages to make them more comprehensible. Unsurprisingly it made the application an awful lot more stable.

OTOH, with .NET it's kind of like every method has an implicit "throws Exception" tacked on after its signature declaration. ;)

(Sorry I just couldn't resist.)