Friday, August 7, 2009

Primary?

I started writing the .Net languages when they were initially released on valentines day in 2002. So I've been a .Net guy since day 1. Before that, I was a VB6 programmer, and wrote web sites in Notepad before moving into Homesite, then eventually Dreamweaver.

Would you believe I actually got tapped to teach a VB6 class just a couple of years ago? 2006 or 2007, I think. That old thing will never die. It's still a cool platform I guess. But I went right into VB.Net when I switched jobs and went to work for a local IT consulting firm in 2002. The first project was picking up after another programmer who initially wrote the site in C#. Then I did a small winforms program in VB.Net, then more C#, then web sites in VB. Since then, I've placed over 1,000,000 lines of VB.Net code in production, and maybe 20,000 lines of C# into production. So VB.Net has totally been my primary language for the last 7 years.

Now it seems the workforce is being dominated by C# jobs. I was talking with a trainer yesterday who had cut out all of their VB classes for lack of demand. So apparently people who want to become new or better .Net programmers want to go C#. If you do a job search for VB.Net on any of the major job boards, you find C# jobs where they will consider a VB programmer that can be retrained.

This leads me to give serious consideration to changing my primary language. I'm the only developer at the company I currently work for, so I can write any project in any language I choose. I hate a case sensitive language, and that's why I only use C# when I am forced to now. But I'm sure with time I will get used to all the nuances of the language. I recently had to translate one of my favorite scripts into C# and it was only mildly frustrating. Do you, gentle reader, have an opinion here? What do you think the programming landscape is doing?

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