As the Web is becoming more and more important over the years and web development languages keep on winning in popularity, the question arises: is it still a good idea to learn C#?
In my personal opinion, it definitely is! Let us take a look at the 10 reasons why you should learn C# in 2019.
Because it's Cool
No wait... I know, I know, this sounds a bit ‘fanboy’ to begin with, but it is not that far from the truth. The programming language was called ‘Cool’ when it was being developed, but for trademark reasons, it was changed last minute to C#.
Developed by Microsoft as part of their .NET initiative, the language is backed by one of the companies that can be considered to have had a big, if not the biggest, influence on daily life and the growth of home computing.
On this day 4th in the top 5 of biggest companies in the world, you can be sure that Microsoft is not going anywhere and their technology and applications will not become obsolete in quite some years to come.
Community
How important is it to have a community behind a programming language where you can find answers to all the problems you encounter on the way? This question almost answers itself, it’s vital if you want to be productive and do not want to mess around for hours trying to find a solution.
Over the years the community around .NET has grown to be quite large, with people at different skill levels. Sites such as https://www.codeproject.com and https://www.stackoverflow.com provide an easy way to search for problems related to your own or post your own question where the big C# community can help you to find a solution.
Easy to learn
Developed to be easy to use and learn, C# does not expect you to do the more complex stuff like for example memory management. As a higher level language, most of the code is understandable by just reading it and it uses simple English words like ‘do, for, if, case,...’. Most C# code is clean, clutter-free and logical.
Learning resources
On the Web, you can find plenty of resources to start to learn C#. To give a few examples: Check out this free video course for complete beginners in the Microsoft Virtual Academy. Or this excellent tutorial from Microsoft.
If you have a grasp of the basics and want to delve deeper into the language, or want a good book that learns you everything from scratch, check out these 8 Essential book recommendations to learn C#
Type-safe code
Type-safe means that the compiler will check if the data type on which you are doing an operation is of the correct type. If this is something other then the expected type (for a simple example, a function expect a decimal, but you pass a variable with a text value), your code will not compile and you will see an error.
While this in a way limits you, it provides you with a structure that is easy to read and follow, and prevents type errors.
Tools
I know this is quite a subjective opinion, but In my personal opinion, Visual Studio is one of the best IDE software on the market. It provides you with all the tools necessary and there is a huge library of extensions to make your job easier.
I did not come across any other tool where the intellisense and debugging options are at the same level. Of course, I have to admit that it dates back a couple of years to when I was not developing in .NET that I used other tools, but even back then, Visual Studio had my preference.
It even has a free community edition which provides you with all functionality that you can find in the professional edition, the only difference is the licensing.
The drawback? Because it’s a full development environment and not a text editor it can be quite demanding of your system.
Versatile
So what can you do with C#?
Well first of all: desktop applications. You can easily create applications that you can run in Windows or even apps that you can sell in the Window store.
If web development is more up your alley, you can build a site powered by ASP.NET. The latest iteration, ASP.NET Core is open source and can be developed and run on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It can be deployed both on a server and even in the cloud.
Want to build games? Take a look at the Unity game engine! This game engine for 2D and 3D games uses C# as coding language. Just to name a few games which were made with Unity: Pokemon Go, Cuphead, Subnautica, Hearthstone and many others.
For app development you can use the Visual Studio tools for Xamarin. With this, you can use your C# knowledge to build apps for both iOS and Android. Even better, you can reuse common code and just need to build separate UIs.
Full Stack
The applications you build need to get data somewhere from a database, but how will you handle the data retrieval on the server? Why with C# of course!
You can build WCF services to retrieve your data from the database or use the more lightweight Web API solution, which easily lets you expose your data to different clients.
Career opportunities
Just scroll up a bit and take a look at the Versatile bullet in this post. C# can, and is, used in many ways on both the front-end and the back-end. As long as Windows is used in companies on desktops and servers, you will be able to make a decent living out of .NET development.
Even if you need to learn another programming language in the future, your knowledge of C# will make it a breeze to switch.
Great for desktop applications
It makes somehow sense that a desktop application for Windows is the easiest to develop in the programming language developed and supported by Microsoft.
Easy access to the file system, access to system devices, copy to and from the clipboard,... are all examples of things quite easy to do in C# that can be difficult to handle in other languages.
What are some of the reasons that you are interested to learn C#? Do you already develop in C# and you like certain features? Let me know in the comments!