I highly doubt C# (and .NET) are going to disappear any time soon. Time spent learning them would certainly not be wasted.


Remember also that once you've learned to program, your skills will transfer to other languages and frameworks with a significantly reduced learning overhead. Any good experienced programmer will almost certainly work with numerous technologies during their career.


Don't worry about non-issues like your language or framework of choice falling out of use in the future -- get busy with the process of learning, and then keep up with technology changes as they actually happen.

Familiarising yourself with any programming language is a good thing but choosing which one to learn would depend on the platform that you wish to target.

For a beginner the target platform should be the PC though, which means any language is fine, when the OP is in a position to target other platforms he will also be at a level where jumping to a new language is trivial.

.NET is of course limited to windows nt (which is the mainline desktop OS), windows CE (embedded windows I think), windows mobile and the xbox. But of course you also have mono targetting just about everything else and being fully compatible with C#. I don't think time spent on C# is time wasted, its probably going to be around and going strong for many many years yet. Even if you were to move into iOS or android development you have access to monotouch (mono for ipod/iphone/ipad) and monodroid (mono for both ARM and x86 android). The PS Vita uses C# although I don't think its using mono underneath to power it, think sony have their own framework but its still the same language on top.

If you haven't heard of mono. Microsoft released a few details of how .NET actually worked. Mono took those details and have built what is essentially an open source clone of .NET. Its available primarily for mac, windows and linux. It has closed source ports to iOS and android aswell.



Basically, C# is everywhere now

C# is alive and kicking, fully supported in Windows 8. The .NET framework is fine too, although WinForms may be being retired in favour of WPF ( the writing for this has been on the wall for a LOOOOOOOOONG time, so nobody should find that shocking ). Additionally, mono has done a shockingly good job, powering both Unity and PlayStation mobile, so no, C# isn't going anywhere.


Now... XNA... thats a different story.

Mind you, Microsoft originally planned to get gimp Visual Studio Express in the next release, and changed their minds under developer backlash, so maybe they will take a similar stance with XNA.