Shaun first launched DotNetNuke on December 24, 2002. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the first inquiry about a C# version came in on about December 25. And they have continued to come in on a fairly regular basis igniting all sorts of “language wars” which continue to this day. Scott Wiltamuth is the Microsoft Product Unit Manager for Visual Studio Languages and recently described the co-evolution of VB and C# from his point of view.
2004 seemed to be the year of the great DotNetNuke C# debates on the ASP.Net forums, our own Bruce Hopkins finally pinned a response which we transposed to our own forum to preserve it. Basically, although we’re as interested in C# as the next developer, DotNetNuke originated in VB.Net and there’s never been a compelling enough reason to change that. However, there is no shortage of fodder for comparison on both sides of the ongoing debate. For example:
- A 2007 Forrester Research poll indicated that 59% of .Net developers use only VB.Net
- Scott Wiltamuth (cited above) indicates “the most reliable numbers we have… show roughly equal adoption” for VB.Net and C#.
- A 2008 telerik survey suggested that C# (63%) had surpassed VB.Net (34%) as the primary programming language
- And Scott Hanselman cracked me up with equating rooting for VB like rooting for the Red Sox.
I dare you to google net vb vs c# and see what kind of interesting reading you can find *grin*.
There still is not a compelling reason to change or a clear picture of advantage. Heck, there’s not even a clear consensus on what constitutes advantage. What we do know is that a lot of people have been interested in this for a long time and we now have a community member who is quite serious about helping us keep up with a C# version! And we also have a DotNetNuke Corp engineer working alongside them to keep up the momentum. Thank you Ben for your commitment and to our own Keivan Beigi for working alongside him!
One thing to note is that these package are NOT currently tested. This is where I stick in the obligatory legalese:
Use at your own risk! At present this is strictly a project for developer interest. Although the contributors are professional and conscientious, there is no official testing or validation applied to this code base or packages. We highly discourage any attempt at production usage based on this risk.
Right now, there are published packages of the C# source for version 5.4.1 and 5.4.2. The team is working on adding this packaging to our automated build process so that new packages can be created quickly once the conversion has been done. A normal turnaround should be just a few days after each regular release.
If you’d like to discuss the C# project, I’ve pinned a thread in the development forum for that purpose. I hope you’ll let us know what you think!