Forum

[mrbrklyn]

more commentary

New Feature: C# Sucks
January 21st, 2009
Goto comments Leave a comment

I’ve recently been dragged kicking and screaming into the world of ASP.Net. Our managers have decided to migrate from a LAMP environment to a Microsoft environment. They tried this once already and failed miserably, but maybe the second time around will actually work. Personally, I think they’re glossing over the actual resources necessary to overhaul and migrate our entire setup, but that’s beside the point.

I’ve actually worked with ASP.Net before, using Visual Basic (about two years ago, and for a period of maybe two months). I liked the ideas behind the ASP.Net framework, but VB just felt like a toy language to me. I think that can probably be chalked up to learning QBasic as a kid — an experience that surely traumatized me for life.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), the packages we’re looking at buying are largely based on C#, so we’ve decided to focus on that as our language of choice. I was actually really excited to learn C#. It seemed like it would address a lot of the things that annoyed me with PHP, and it’d be a much more enjoyable way to transition into the world of ASP.Net.

I may have been wrong about that.

As I learn the language, I’m running across some things that strike me as ridiculous, excessive, confusing, or just plain annoying. Taking inspiration from jwz’s whining about Java, I’m going to write down my complaints about the language as I learn it.

Maybe someone can explain to me why these things don’t actually suck, or perhaps they can show me how to do things in a less suck-filled manner. But mostly I’m just happy to have an excuse to ***** and moan about something.