I did C# development for nearly 5 years and never once did I use Reflection.Emit. I find it strange that you would name this as the functionality you miss. Do you find yourself needing to dynamically emit code a lot in the work you do? It’s a pretty specialized feature. While what it can do is very cool, it’s not terribly useful for the vast majority of programmers.

I think if you spend a little time looking into KVC and KVO in Cocoa, you’ll find you don’t really need reflection. Everything can be done dynamically by design.

I’ve always felt that one of Microsoft’s few strengths is their dev tools. This hasn’t changed, however, I wouldn’t say that XCode isn’t just as powerful. It doesn’t slow me down at all now that I understand it and that is the key, I think. I can do just as much if not more on the Mac after 8 months of just learning in my spare time using XCode.

And as far as multi-threading goes, it’s super simple on OS X. It’s not terribly difficult in C# either, but I again wouldn’t say that the Windows side is better by any stretch.

Best Regards.

-Matt

The biggest hurdle for me has been the tools. Xcode, pardon my french, sucks rocks compared to Visual Studio 2005 w/ Resharper 3. The language syntax difference hasn’t bothered me much at all. I do miss the powerful reflection features, especially Reflection.Emit.

The other big change for me is that I came from working on high-load server-side applications to working on a desktop, single user, GUI application. For contrast, the former had a primary focus on multi-threaded performance and required close attention to resource contention, etc whereas the scenarios I’m dealing with now are primarily single threaded, or “fire and forget” multi-threaded. I suspect now that Macs are getting more and more cores, we’ll start to see an increased focus on multi-threading, and I’m looking forward to that.

All in all, the transition has been pretty smooth, but the tools still have a LONG way to go — a LONG LONG LONG way to go. I’m just sort of left thinking that with Xcode you get what you pay for (i.e. it’s free,) but from what I understand it’s really the only game in town for Cocoa development.

First thing I noticed was that XCode 2.x was available free on the OS disk. I was pretty amazed by the tools that came in the Development folder. But now that Leopard is out, I am more than amazed. It’s really great that Apple is giving us the same tools that they use including some great debugging tools!

I started looking at programming the Mac a few months ago. It’s been pretty slow sailing so far. My first hurdle is trying to learn Objective-C. I’m finding some of it’s concepts a little baffling. However, I am starting to get the hang of it and am pretty impressed. Plus, I don’t mind the “[]” at all. I actually like the message passing pattern when compared to Java.

My really big hurdle now is getting my head around the frameworks (Kits, what ever they are called here). I was pretty good with Java on Windows, but I’m not finding it very easy to figure out the API frameworks. Websites like this and Cocoa Dev Central has been a big help, but they only go so far. So, I try to pull as much source code down as I can and look through as much as I can to get a better feel for this stuff.

I’m sure I’ll get the hang of this soon. Then I just have to try to come up with a great program that no one else has thought of to write. ;) Not all that easy for the Mac since there seems to be a really great program for just about everything you would want to do. :) Still…