On C# and .NET

At my current job I've been using C# and VB.NET for development, which are two technologies that I had never used and really shied away from as they are "corporate" technologies. I always figured that C# was just like Java and since I hated Java when I was in university I would have the same reaction when trying out C# for the first time.

Turns out I was wrong. In a nutshell, I would describe C# as "Java done right". The extra features that come with C# are little things that make the language as a whole more pleasant to use, and doesn't make me want to cry when it takes forever to do something simple - as I usually felt when working with Java.

Here's a few of the things I like:
Type Inference - some people will probably hate my code. I use var everywhere. My code looks like Javascript! It's especially useful in foreach loops over dictionaries (aka hashes, I'm so used to using Ruby that I tend to overuse this class):

foreach (var pair in myHash){
  ...
}

This way if my hash has some complicated type I don't need to put KeyValuePair whenever I want to iterate over the collection.

Functional Abstraction - this one is also known as anonymous functions. Check this one out:

CSV.Open("mycsv.csv", "r", row => {
  .. do something to row
});

This is valid C# code! And it works great! It isn't exactly the same as blocks in Ruby (break/next/redo/return don't work the same) but it accomplishes a lot of what I use blocks for.

Events - this is the observer pattern built into the language. I won't go too much into this as you can just learn about it from the Wikipedia page. This is actually something that would be useful in Ruby (probably not that hard to implement as a gem) and is implement in Rails.

There are a number of things that I don't really like - the system is closed and very much owned by Microsoft. While they have their community promise thing going that means they say they won't sue the Mono guys for reimplementing their platform, you never know when they might try to exercise their muscle.

A quick note on Mono: it's great. The executables it produces are binary compatible with Windows, so you can pull the Java-style compile-once-run-everywhere thing - build an executable with Mono in Ubuntu, and it will execute under Windows - provided you're not using any specific libraries. Compile a .dll on Windows with Visual Studio and you can use it just fine in Mono under Ubuntu. I'm impressed.