There's a big difference between the c# language team and visual studio. The c# language has left java for dust, they are doing a bloody brilliant job but on the other hand were essentially playing catch up with python and ruby until 4.0. The dynamic CLR stuff has really changed the game.

VS, on the otherhand, has stagnated, between 2005 and 2010, apart from integration with the new hotnesses like Silverlight, MVC and LINQ, I can't really point out any improvements. While I must admit I love MVC over ASP.Net (keer-spit), even now you feel the meddlers interfering and making it do unnecessary magic.

Its javascript integration is still shockingly bad. It doesn't even highlight brackets or braces and the auto-indenting is erratic. Javascript is so key to web programming these days and yet for the first time I find myself juggling VS with Notepad++ because that free open-source program is actually a lot better.

"Its javascript integration is still shockingly bad."

Sooooo very shockingly bad. =(

C# programmers are always bragging about how generics are so much better than Java's. But when I've looked at the common day usage cases they're really about the same. I know about the type erasure issue but unless you're doing some crazy reflection stuff it never comes up. I'm not trying to start a religious war here but what is it that in practice makes C# generics so much better than Java's?

The lack of erasure means that you can use generics to do sophisticated type magic, sort of like in C++ templates - specifically using reflection. You don't usually want to do this too much, but doing it in one or two places can simplify code tremendously. This also allows you to eliminate boxing and reflection overhead in a lot of places by letting you use generics to bind to reflected types/members at runtime, which is really important if you're trying to build a performant app in C# that's got extensibility support.

For example, I use this to create strongly-typed bindings to individual fields/properties of class instances at runtime, which lets me pass around objects of types like 'BoundMember<int>', and generically store into them - essentially the same as 'ref int', except it can outlive function scope. This is really useful when doing asynchronous programming, and it lets you kill duplication when building things like configuration dialogs.

Hmm, sounds like what I said with "unless you're doing some crazy reflection stuff ", and it sounds like a solution that reduces the readability and maintainability. But maybe I'd need to see a good example to appreciate it.

Easiest example: You can do "instanceof T" with generic T in C#. You can't in Java.

Take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_C_Sharp_and_Java#...

Good examples there of the differences.