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I’m a senior .NET developer, who has been using .NET since .NET framwork 1.1. At that moment, VB6 and Com+ was still popular. I did see how the .NET market got booming and how it becomes a small part of the programming market in China.
The Booming Period of .NET in China
.NET has been getting popular since about 2008. At that moment, .NET Framework 3.5 is just released. Big companies in China have started using .NET to develop websites and applications. These companies include Baidu, JD, Tencent, and Ctrip, which are the giant IT companies in China.
Creating open-source .NET projects is also getting popular at that moment. My own project NPOI was also created in 2008. Although there was no Github at that moment, codeplex.com was popular in the .NET cycle. It’s an open source website hosted by Microsoft.
Cnblogs.com is a Chinese blog host website, full of .NETers at that moment. I usually call it the base of .NET developers in China. Developers write posts about .NET on cnblogs and there is always new discoveries each day. Developers created a nickname “园子” (Garden of developers) for this website, which shows the popularity and trust of this website.
Microsoft also created a few good technical concepts for .NET: WCF, WPF, and WF. Every .NETer is eager to learn these concepts. These names were really useful for developers to get a good .NET offer if you put them on your resume.
To give a time range of this booming period, I think it’s from 2008 to 2015 although there is no obvious end time of this period. Although Java looks to be popular all the time in China, .NET has the ability to compete with Java in this booming period.
How getting rid of .NET becomes a technical trend in China
Since e-commerce companies such as Alibaba and JD had great success in business in China, the layout of the technical market is changing. These giants output a lot of developers who don’t use .NET to the market. Since the big success of these companies, usually the developers from these companies are promoted to decision-making position of other companies (no matter if it’s small or big).
For example, a middle developer from Alibaba can move to a small company and become the CTO of that company. Moreover, these output developers are aggressive in the technical architecture revolution. They just wanna clone technical architecture from big giants, no matter if…
