Question

Currently, i have basic C++ and PHP skills. But, i want to switch to C# and ASP ( for the web part ). Why ? you will ask. Because i have the opportunity to learn pretty easily C# ( including OOP-ed ) to a pretty advanced level. And because i read that ASP is very similar to C#, i’m thinking to learn it.

So, there are many stuff that can’t be done in C# ? What kind of stuff ? The same question for ASP.

Answer 1

Limitations of C# (and, by association, .NET):

• Not really a systems level language – not generally good for writing drivers etc. (Having said which, there are interesting projects like Cosmos.)
• Limited support of platforms other than Windows. Mono does a good job, but it’s still not at parity with .NET itself (compared with, say, Java which has simultaneous releases on multiple platforms).
• Only options for running as an unmanaged language are third-party ones – ngen will ‘pre-JIT’ your code, but it’s still running under the .NET framework. Really C# was designed to be running in a VM, with garbage collection.
• Some people don’t like the lack of deterministic destruction, which means the C++ RAII technique doesn’t work. (Instead, you rely on the GC for memory management and the IDisposable interface for non-memory resources. The using statement makes this easier, but it’s not a perfect solution.)
• The language is somewhat at the whim of Microsoft. If MS decided to abandon it, I think it wouldn’t progress any further and would quickly lose support for new development. Having said that, I don’t expect MS to abandon it any time soon.
• Until C# 4 comes out, it doesn’t have much support for late binding. You can do it with reflection, but it’s somewhat painful. Even with C# 4, it will still be a fundamentally static language, but with ways of working dynamically where it really helps.
• Currently there’s not much support for immutability. In particular, C# 3 introduced a few new features (automatic properties, collection initializers, object initializers) which make it easier to write mutable types – but no corresponding features are available for immutable types. Named and optional parameters in C# 4 should help on this front, but more support would be welcome. C# 3 made it easier to code in a functional style, but this really requires immutability.
• For desktop app development, you basically have a choice between WinForms and WPF (Windows Presentation foundation). The latter is newer and much better designed IMO, but in both cases you may well see a slight difference in ‘snappiness’ between a managed application and a well-written Win32 app. This is particularly true at start-up, while the framework is loading and lots of UI code is being JITted etc. Personally I don’t think it’s much of a barrier, but…