My company favours Java over .NET. Java is seen as a scalable enterprise platform, whereas .NET is seen as a toy platform, only good for rapid prototyping.
I think that .NET is great platform! It is everything that Java is, and more. The base class library is great, with many time-saving and convenient features which ensure that development is (and remains) fun. But in spite of it’s brilliance, there is one area where .NET falls way behind Java…
The .NET open-source community is somewhat anaemic when compared with the Java community. There are some great .NET open-source projects, a lot of them ports of Java open-source projects, and I have a great deal of respect for the contributors. But it’s often the case that a really cool open-source project becomes commercial after it becomes successful.
It seems that I have to pay for so many products just to give me a complete dev environment. Eclipse is a free IDE with refactoring and testing tools integrated. If I want similar functionality in .NET I have to purchase Visual Studio, then purchase ReSharper, and then purchase VisualSVN. Now I have paid roughly £500 to get a development environment roughly equivalent to the basic install of Eclipse. Oh, did I mention that Eclipse is FREE?
If I want extra features, I will most likely have to pay for them!!
So back to the original point of this post… The high cost of entry makes .NET an unattractive choice for development, when compared to Java (and the huge wealth of open-source code out there).
Microsoft’s new found support of the open-source world is great for all .NET developers! I hope they continue to move forward, promoting good programming practices as they go. ALT.NET is also a source of inspiration. I hope that more .NET developers will be happy to give their spare time away to the community.
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