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Comment by ChikkaChiChi | Hacker News Reader

How many startups out there are kicking off some new product and basing their launch exclusively on Microsoft technologies? Even in recent memory, the only one I can think of would be StackExchange.

I _really_ like C#. But other than limited Mono support, you're forced into using or relying on your users to conform to Microsoft standards.

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If only Microsoft really loved C#...

Microsoft really loves C#. What love have you seen C# not getting lately?

The Metro APIs are all based on the old Win32 APIs & COM. Sure .NET is supported, but it's certainly not the dominant language nor was it a nice clean break as they could've done. Plus they've killed XNA and told people to switch their games from C# to C++ (especially on WP8).

WinRT is actually kind of neat: they've taken what were before .NET-only APIs (like WPF), wrapped them in some sort of reference counting technology, and made these APIs callable from C++ code in a fairly easy ways. Reference counting does seem like its displacing garbage collection a bit, but that was true for iOS also. C# interoperates transparently.

I'm a MS researcher but I don't speak for Microsoft. That being said, I'm a big fan of SharpDX and MonoGame for my personal projects. They work well enough that I have avoided going native. Ya, I'm still a bit miffed that this isn't supported out of the box, but in practice its easy to work around.

So why downvoted? Microsoft is not really supporting C#. No more Silverlight for that matter, and they are "born again natives" - ahem C++. Not that I would complain about it, it's just that they change their moods as if they had two party political system over there....

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