Since I haven't see many new Windows apps the recent years, who is actively developing new apps in C# and if yes, what kind of apps, which platforms, etc.? Is it mainly games?
.NET has won the war over the desktop in what concerns native applications for Windows on the big corporations.
On all enterprise customers that we work with, think DAX, if the application is to run native on the desktop, which is usually means Windows workstations, the software stack tends to be .NET with some C++ here and there.
Sun never managed to understand the desktop and Oracle even less.
So unless the customer has requirements for portable desktop applications, the solution is .NET.
Totally clear that mainstream desktop is Windows, native and .NET but the question again and since there are rarely new apps on Windows: who is actively developing new desktop apps in C#, .NET on Windows which are not games?
>who is actively developing new desktop apps in C#, .NET on Windows which are not games?
Almost everybody doing in-house enterprise desktop apps (and those are a heck of a lot) and tons of people doing desktop Windows apps that don't need to be C++ (e.g. not Photoshop, Office and co).
Again, those are in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Check any Windows app review site or repo for examples.
I just made one today. Took me about two hours to make a simple app for reviewing ~GB sized slides from digital microscope. I haven't written any in the past 5 years, though. I'm still blown away by how much more efficient I'm with Windows Forms compared to anything on the web.
There is a lot of code being written outside of your bubble. I don't mean that in a negative way; we all have our own bubble, but you have to appreciate that what you're into does not represent the industry as a whole.
I don't know about Windows or Windows Phone apps, but I know that C# is quite popular for developing web applications and services, although it's mainly so among non-silicon-valley companies.
C# and .NET used to be tied to Windows and IIS, Microsoft's web server, but recent developments are making it possible to create self-hosted applications and services written in C# that run in Linux. The self-hosting functionality is fairly mature by now, but the Microsoft implementation of cross platform C#/.NET is very early in its development.
It'll be interesting to see if Linux becomes a popular environment for developing and hosting .NET applications.I predict that it will be used, but it won't overtake the widely-used open-source alternatives such as Ruby, Python, and Node.js.
It's very easy to use C# to develop Windows services. I've written a few Windows services with C#, and it was pretty simple.
I am doing healthcare development in C# - CQMs (clinical quality measures), CCDA generation and parsing, HL7 processing, patient portals, doctor portals, ePrescribing, direct messaging, lots of REST APIs as client and server, the list goes on and on. C# is an excellent fit for all of this and lets us develop powerful applications quickly. The web sites are IIS and most of the applications are distributed as Windows Services.
The typical model for most of our applications is we have three components - background agent, UI, and database. The UI handles configuration, user management, controls starting and stopping of processes, and also handles incoming API calls. The background agent is usually a windows service and the database is usually SQL Server.
Our products are used by hospitals as installable products and also by software vendors as libraries and bolt-on applications.
To be honest though I love working on CQMs. Of all the projects I've worked on in my career this is by far my favorite. Like CCDAs I could care less for the QRDA aspect but neither of those are my focus.
Lots of games use C# because the popular Unity engine uses Mono as a runtime for user code.
Anecdotally I have some friends writing business software at various BigCo companies that use C#.
Edit: it's perhaps worth mentioning that there is some more nuance to the Unity situation with their IL2CPP tech. Bottom line: engine users are writing C#.
