Just over a year ago, I would have said yes, in the enterprise and huge companies, it is there and will fight Java for 50–50 market share.
I'm age
Then Microsoft did something, they not just open sourced their language, they gave it away, no strings attached, and made it better. This is unheard of.
Let me tell you a short story, I will honestly try to keep it short.
About a year ago a former co-worked called me, you want to a cool job ? What is it ? Writing dot net code, Microsoft SQL server, IIS web server and Angular ?
I know Angular, I don’t know ANY dot net, you remember, I have not done any windows work for decades.
Yeah, but I know you can handle it, I would really like it if you at least talked to us.
And I did. Funny thing that often happens in job interviews you really don’t care for the outcome, you tend to come out great. This was such an interview.
I looked at the product, and did my check list. This product was a product of the company, not just something, check. This was actually helping a lot of people, check. It looked cool and I accepted, with the notice that I did not know C# and had never ever touched
C# and dot net were not hard at all, I kind of knew this. Then we migrated to dot net core 2, which was a hassle as a lot of libraries we used were not available, but we managed well without them.
The pros are the system is very fast, C# and in my opinion LINQ is awesome. I wrote a list massage function. You know, you have 2 data sources, you need one list to use data from the other one, happens a lot. So I wrote it, 80 lines. It was about to be accepted in code review but my coworker asked me, would it not be better to use LINQ here ? I admitted that I did not know LINQ at all, but I would look into it if he thought it was worth it. He was sure there would be a shorter version in LINQ. A couple of hours later, about 5 lines of code, I moved 80 lines of code down to about 5, and LINQ is just so awesome.
I had experience as a code, zero with C# and ASP and all that. Now almost 10 months into this, C# is my go to language. I love this stuff. I run some private projects on Linux and in Kubernetes with ease. Visual studio has such an awesome debugger tools that print statements to debug are history.
So in short, yes. This stuff is pretty awesome. C# is very simple language, you will learn the basic things in less than a weekend. The dot net framework, asp and all that takes a lot longer, and before you say that you made an API project that returns JSON in a day, yes, yes you can do that easily, but have you looked at all the responses you can have ? There are hundreds if not thousands of operation you can have on controllers, logins, authentication and authorization, twitter login, github, facebook and whatever else, all built it. These things take time.
I had just used Macs since 2003, now in 2018 I pretty much only do Windows and everything and I really enjoy programming in this. So is there a future ? I would say that whatever Microsoft is doing, they are doing everything right, everything perfectly and just keep doing what they do. Yes, oh my, yes, there is future there for everyone.
Now I can even do apps for Windows, OS X, iOS and Android sharing over 80% of my code, how awesome is that