Re: Comparison of Java, C# for development on Windows and future for them

You mention that your development environment is Windows, but not what the target platforms / environments are. What I mean is - what SORT out application(s) are you going to be developing?

If it's largely client-side stuff (Windows-based GUIs, etc) then you're probably better off focusing on C#, since it's heavily orientated towards implementing client-side applications (MS advocates will disagree and say it can do absolutely anything, but they'd be wrong IMHO).

If it's more enterprise-level stuff (i.e. servers, web services, etc) then Java has the market and is most suitable for this sort of project.

One other point - Java is generally slower than C/C++, but only by a small fraction usually, and is sometimes actually quicker for certain situations! But the important issue is not speed of execution but ease of development / time to market, i.e. Java is considerably easier to optimise than C/C++, and certainly faster to write and less error-prone. From what I've seen so far this is also the case for Java and C#. I haven't yet seen any Java-C# speed comparisons (or at least any unbiased ones).

Hope this helps a little.

• sarge