[jameshart]

In general, you're correct about the difference being social, nt one of licencing. You're wrong on one thing: Microsoft's .NET 1.0 CLR and compilers were also free from day one. You never HAD to use VS to develop with .NET, any more than you HAD to use NetBeans or Eclipse to develop with Java.

[jasode]

Yes, the .NET SDK had a command line compiler so theoretically, it could compile .cs files for free. However, nobody used it for serious Windows Forms GUI type of work. Realistically, corporations and hobbyists had to buy VS Studio to write non-trivial apps. On the other hand, people were writing Java GUI apps with free tools. Eclipse was free back in 2001 before .NET 1.0 was released.

The only common use case I remember for the free C# command line compiler was to type in exercises from C# tutorials.

Also, even if compiling C# source code was free, the execution stack for the NET runtime was not free. MS Windows operating system licenses and MS SQL Server cost money. In comparison, Linux and MySQL were free. The different costs for deployment affected social dynamics as well.

[bunderbunder]

True, but I shudder at the thought of having to manage msbuild files by hand without the help of Visual Studio.

[jameshart]

For .NET 1.0, there was no msbuild - csproj files were not build files, and they weren't part of .NET, but part of VS. And until James Duncan Davidson got fed up with maintaining batch files and threw together Ant to manage his Tomcat build process, there was no build solution for Java, either.

[recursive]

meh. It's not that bad.

[MichaelGG]

Free on Windows. And only supported on Windows, despite Rotor. That's a fairly non-trivial "hidden" cost.

[ghuntley]

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr

Windows, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD

[MichaelGG]

Comment was in respect to .Net 1.0. They had a BSD version well before this,too, but just for "research".