In the last post, we mentioned that there were a few mistakes in Chinese .NET community. In this post, let’s take a look at the industries and subdivided technical fields that .NET is good at. Only by understanding these, the .NET community will not blindly expand its territory, but concentrate on becoming bigger and stronger in its advantageous areas.
Which industries is .NET good at in China?
I used to summarize the list called <Company list who are using .NET in China> and I conclude based on this list that .NET is good at medical care, finance and manufacturing industries in China.
Among them, medical care and finance are almost not affected by the economic cycle, because people will get sick, and the medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries have urgent needs; financial companies are more likely to engage in arbitrage transactions during periods of economic turmoil, although occasionally some financial giants will die. This is a huge advantage for .NET employment. You can work for this kind of companies until retirement.
Manufacturing is a huge system. .NET’s main manufacturing area includes food and beverages, automobiles, daily chemical industries, and chips. The automobile industry is developing rapidly, especially new energy. New energy automobile manufacturers represented by Tesla use .NET to develop ERP and MES systems. Tesla Shanghai recruits excellent .NET developers all the time.
Many manufacturing factories use .NET to manage automated production lines, mainly to communicate with Siemens PLCs. Siemens had in-depth cooperation with Microsoft in the early days (many years ago). And most of Siemens’ SDKs used Microsoft technology such as COM+ technology, and later there were libraries based on various communication protocols (such as S7, modbus, etc.). Basically, Siemens has a leading position in the industrial control area. So many manufacturers follows Siemens. This has also led to the use of Microsoft technology in industrial control. The field is booming and .NET is almost irreplaceable.
Which Technical Segments are .NET good at in China?
In the last post, I mentioned that there is no programming language that can conquer all technical segments, and .NET is no exception. But the slogan put forward by .NET in the past twenty years has always been that it can do anything. Although this seems to be the biggest advantage of .NET on the surface. In fact, it’s the biggest shortcoming of .NET. This makes .NET not proficient in any area.
The major technical segments that .NET is good at are web based business systems and backend systems, desktop-based system and device control.
However, in the past five years, the desktop development field has been eroded by Electron and Qt. Even if Microsoft successively launched WPF and Maui to save the desktop development market, it is still difficult to convince the market to continue to use .NET for desktop development. Even Microsoft’s own vscode chooses to use Electron as the core rendering engine. This is very subtle. Of course, the desktop development market is huge, and .NET is still the main desktop development language, which will not shake .NET’s position in the industry. After all, Windows’ market share is 70% of the desktop market.
However, some Microsoft MVPs always wanna promote .NET for the big data and mobile development. I’m afraid they are totally wrong. Big data is still dominated by Java and python, and .NET never survive in this area. For mobile development, although Mono was indeed a standout 10 years ago and was considered an emerging force of .NET in the mobile field, programmers who have used Mono basically know how many limitations and pain points there are. If this thing was easy to use, .NET would have already taken off in the field of mobile development. Since Maui is based on mono although modified, I am not so optimistic about it. Let’s see if Maui can regain the mobile development field in the next five years.
