Microsoft C# named programming language of 2012

eSynergy Solutions had a very successful year in C# and we have found that this is still the market to be in . Bring on 2013 with the latest in C#,ASP.Net MVC,TDD/BDD/DDD, Windows Azure ,HPC,Cloud and agile.

I head up the delivery desk at eSynergy Solutions and I have found that C# has been a very demanding skill for 2012 and the rates have been between £ 300 - £ 500 a day for the perfect skill set.

Although most of our clients from 2012 were very interested in ASP.Net MVC, Pair Programming/Extreme Programming ,TDD/BDD and agile.

We are hoping that this will carry on to 2013 and we looking forward to building a stronger relationship with the Microsoft C# Community.

Microsoft's C# has been crowned the number one programming language of the year by the Popularity of Programming Language (PYPL) index.

Although Java is still the most widely used programming language in the world, C#'s popularity grew by 2.3 percent in 2012 – more than any other programming language during the same period. The growth of C# is thought to come at the expense of C and Visual Basic.

Java had a 28.3 percent developer share in 2012, even though its usage went down 0.3 percent. PHP, whose market share was down 1.6 percent to 15.4 percent, was the second most popular. C# and C++ came in joint third, each with a 10.5 percent share.

C and JavaScript, both dropped down two places, from third to fifth place and fifth to seventh place respectively. Python dropped from fifth to sixth place, despite growing 0.9 percent in popularity and becoming the second most popular language in the US.

The PYPL index is created by analysing how often language tutorials are searched on Google. The more a specific language tutorial is searched, the more popular the language is assumed to be.

According to Nat Friedman, CEO of cross-platform app creation platform Xamarin, the launch of Windows 8 has played an important role in the growth of C# in 2012. C# remains the dominant language of third-party application development on Windows devices.

However, other features such as asynchronous programming, garbage collection, type safety and the ability to execute applications quickly have all contributed to the popularity of C# among mobile developers. The portability of C# is also key, according to Friedman.

“Between Windows, iOS and Android, your C# code can run on over 2.2 billion devices. And beyond mobile, C# is highly portable in a wide range of environments across the spectrum of mobile, embedded, desktop, and server computing,” he said in a blog post.

The results of the PYPL index conflict with those of the better known TIOBE Programming Community Index, which ranks language popularity based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors.

TIOBE is broader in scope, in that it uses Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu to calculate the ratings. However, it uses the word “programming” in the search phrase rather than “tutorial”, which PYPL claims is “misleading”.

According to TIOBE's December 2012 results, Objective-C is the language of the year, rising 4.3 percent in popularity during 2012. C had the greatest developer share (18.7 percent), followed by Java with 17.6 percent and Objective-C with 11.1 percent.

Meanwhile, C# dropped a place to fifth place with a rating of 5.5 percent, and PHP was placed sixth.