Quote Originally Posted by esposito View Post
Why are they supporting the Mono project, then? Aren't they afraid of the fact that people may switch from Windows to Linux?
They most certainly are. Bill G had a name for that project that is more colorful than can be posted here. However, they made the business calculation that ignoring Linux could cause them to be left behind, so they wanted to be generating revenue (and a bit of directional control) related to Linux.

You are obviously right: in this forum most developers have already switched to .NET. I have one question, though: is there any reason why a developer who produces desktop (non-Web based) software should prefer .NET to another programming language that can do the same job without needing the Framework?
While the best answer is certainly the one given by NSA, I would add that the framework is not an issue for a whole bunch of people. If you absolutely don't care about it, as I don't for my personal projects, then .NET is all benefit. Only if you care about the framework is it in any way a negative.

There are also a lot of people who decide not to switch to .NET because they don't want their software to depend on a huge virtual machine.
That's kind of funny. VB6 requires a virtual machine that made VB6 programs too large to fit on floppy disks (at least on a single one) which were the common media back in its day. Early on, the VB virtual machine was an impediment, and now you consider it trivial, and quite rightly. With streaming media, the .NET framework is already trivial in size to many people.
Abandoning customers for purely commercial reasons can backfire: the first thing I did when I realised that MS had discontinued VB6 was look for an alternative language that was not produced by them.
This is very true. MS took a look at the current market, and the trends that they saw coming, and changed strategy. That certainly left some people hung out to dry, and as a business move it may have been a bad one, but if they get crushed by Google trying to make computers online only, then who will really care? They felt that the web would be king and acted accordingly. If the model of online only apps takes such market share that the Windows OS is discarded, where will your VB6 apps be then? That was the future that MS foresaw. It may or may not happen, but they felt it likely enough that they turned the ship, and in doing so, you were cast aside.

So, I'll rephrase my question: is there any valid reason why a developer of desktop software who is his own boss should prefer .NET to VB6 or Delphi?
On my own, my apps are HIGHLY multithreaded. VB6 handles multithreading not at all. How does Delphi do?