> Microsoft have announced that they will be porting WinForms and WPF over to .NET Core so that they no longer need the heavyweight .NET Framework. However, this DOES NOT make WinForms/WPF cross-platform. They will still be restricted to Windows but will allow you the benefits of .NET Core, such as allowing side-by-side versioning.
They've come back full circle to forking Java for Windows only usage. .NET is the closest competitor to Java as it gets in terms of similar ideas, a VM, a bytecode for your VM, a C-like language to be compiled to said bytecode, and so on. .NET IMHO is the only serious alternative to Java and a damn good one at that, and I would dare say vice versa though I will always prefer .NET personally, I wouldn't mind Java at least.