Non-partisan software developer

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Java Swing vs. C#

Currently I am developing on the .NET platform using C#. We've had a TON of problems with Windows forms and how immature and hacked together the API is. Bascially it's an object wrapper around the win32 api and not even all the widgets are the best win32 api widgets. Example the toolbar provided in Windows Forms is weak. It supports 8-bit color images so when you put a 24-bit color icon / bmp you get a downleveled image that looks like crud.

At any rate we've got a lot of Java programmers on staff and a lot of the tools we are looking at are direct ports of successful Java projects. We use NAnt, Spring.NET, etc... I've done enough Java to know a lot of it's strong points but my desktop / rich-client experience w/Java is limited. Most of what I've done was pretty server side / distributed system.

So there is a lot of talk about Swing / Java Web Start etc... I'm warming up to the idea. I'm a little concerned with these types of comments from someone like Slava.

http://www.jroller.com/page/slava/20050206

and then the comments from here:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2005/03/why_dont_you_sh.html

Which leads me to the question -- are there any Java developers that have switched to C# or vice versa. And if so why was the switch made and what problems has it solved. I am talking about rich-client applications so keep that in mind.