Okay, I've been playing around with this one at school. No $$$ invested on my part, just a little time, which is okay since I'll probably have to face this bastard at some point if I go into software development, and not police work or firefighting. :P

C# (The language):

A helluva lot like Java. A whole HELL of a lot like Java. They even threw in the automatic document generation features. There are some syntactical differences, and I find C# easier to pull my mind around. To be honest, as a development language, I like C# better than Java. It seems to make slightly cleaner code, gives more overloading options, and just all in all seems very well thought out. Whaddya expect from the guy who made Delphi? OTOH, it would probably be quite easy to write a Java bytecode compiler for C# - due to the similarities between the two - without munging anything from the language.

.NET Framework (The API):

It's times like this when I really, Really, REALLY, REALLY wish that Microsoft was a better corporate citizen, and didn't have all that "let's take over the world" jingotism running around - because the .NET framework seems fairly well planned and thought out. Admittedly, this is all stuff they should have done years ago to avoid .DLL hell. And hey, it actually works pretty darn well as well, at least from my tenative pokings around the beast. Performs a darn sight better than Java does on equivalent hardware, but then again, they're running compiled binaries, AND they're targeted to only one platform, as opposed to the catch-all.

Incidentally, a large part of the .NET framework was written in C#, if that matters to anybody.

As far as gaping wide security holes, design flaws, and OS-shattering crashes, I haven't found any. Yet. I'm sure they're in there.

Which brings us to Part 3: Visual Studio .NET:

I'm not sure what to say here. Quite frankly, I'm a sucker for a good IDE, no matter how lazy a programmer it makes me. It's one of the nicest IDEs I've seen so far, although I wouldn't claim to know that many. (Forte for Java, Delphi 4, Visual Basic 4-6, Visual Studio 6 which was a real pisser, let me tell you!) Actually, I have to give them a "most improved" award - they've definitely cleaned up the mess that was Visual Studio. One of the things that bothered me the most about VS6 was the screen clutter - it was virtually impossible to do any kind of dialog editing without eating 50% of your screen with toolbars and status windows. VS.NET solves this by making them "self-hide" when not being used into small toolbars at the edges of the app window.

Which brings us to our first bug.

They've already got a host of them [link|http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http%3a%2f%2fsupport.microsoft.com/common/canned.aspx%3fR%3dd%26H%3dVisual%2bStudio%2b.NET%2bBugs%26LL%3dkbvsnetsearch%2band%2bkbbug%2band%2bnot%2bkbnetfssdk%26Sz%3d|here], but the first one I found was [link|http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q313899&GSSNB=1|this one.] Basically, if you set your Properties window and your Output window to auto hide, then run a debug version of an app, then come back and try to access the Properties window, yer hosed. I noticed it within about five minutes of fooling around with the app, and I can tell you that the bug wasn't in the final beta version of VS.NET from prior experience. Basically, it makes one of the nicest features of VS totally fscking useless.

Well, what did you expect?

Now, there are some other nice features that the editor includes. For example, when you design a form, all the generated code is included in your source file. So, if you add a button to the form, the code for generating the button, setting the properties, and adding it to the form are all inserted into your code file for you to screw around with if you really want to.

Also included is a "section collapse" feature. Basically, there is an easy mechanism to collapse all kinds of stuff into a condensed form (such as comments, classes, functions, bracket sets, etc.) so that you don't have to look at it if you don't want to. By default, they collapse the aformentioned generated code so that you won't scare the VB programmers. Mouse over it, and you either get the comment associated with the section, or the section itself, depending on how the section is defined.

They've also included a real-time "spellchecker" with VS. It notices code errors as you're entering stuff, and then hilights it in real time. Problem is, it starts checking before you complete a code line, so it does freak out a bit early sometimes. It never gets in the way of you coding, but the constant flashing little red scribbles can get annoying. I'm sure you can turn it off somewhere...

Anyways, it's a fairly nice-looking package. If Microsoft wasn't such a rat-bastard, I'd actually be interested in developing in it on a regular basis.

...I consciously kept from using the word "innovation" in that review because I was certain, without looking for it, that somebody had already done it. :)