Top 10 Microsoft Programming Languages

Microsoft has widened its net beyond .NET in its stable of programming languages, including .NET cross-platform support and its own JavaScript flavor. Explore Microsoft’s top programming languages now.

C++ is the workhorse language at Microsoft, which uses C++ to build many of its core applications. C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multiparadigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. C++ is widely used in the software industry, and remains one of the most popular languages ever created. Some of its application domains include systems software, application software, device drivers, embedded software, high-performance server and client applications, and entertainment software such as video games.

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Microsoft announced C# in 2001 as a modern, object-oriented programming language built from the ground up to exploit the power of XML-based Web services on the .NET platform. With its object-oriented design, C# is useful for developers building a wide range of high-performance Web applications and components—from XML-based Web services to middle-tier business objects and system-level applications. The language has been crafted to help developers accomplish more with fewer lines of code, and with fewer opportunities for error.

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JavaScript is an object-oriented scripting language used to enable programmatic access to objects within both the client application and other applications. It initially was used primarily for client-side development, but has been adopted as a server-side development language (Node.js). JavaScript is a dialect of the ECMAScript standard and is characterized as a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based language with first-class functions. JavaScript was influenced by many languages and was designed to look like Java, but to be easier for non-programmers to work with. Microsoft uses JavaScript in its Internet Explorer and Edge browsers and development platform. Microsoft invested into JavaScript support on many fronts, including its Node.js framework tooling story, Apache Cordova tooling story and the Web development tooling in Visual Studio.

To learn more about Javascript, check out this course!

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output. TypeScript is a free and open-source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict superset of JavaScript, and adds optional static typing and class-based object-oriented programming to the language. Microsoft says it is JavaScript that scales, and uses TypeScript in Office 365 and a variety of other projects. Like C#, Visual Basic and F#, TypeScript is included as a first-class programming language in Microsoft Visual Studio. Other TypeScript users include Google, which used TypeScript to build Angular 2.

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Basic can be considered the language that Microsoft was built upon. Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is an object-oriented computer programming language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft’s Visual Basic (VB), which is implemented on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Microsoft open-sourced both its VB and C# compilers in the .NET Compiler Platform, also known as the “Roslyn” project.

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F# is a typed functional programming language for the .NET Framework. It combines the succinctness, expressivity and compositionality of typed functional programming with the run-time support, libraries, interoperability, tools and object model of .NET. F# was developed by Don Syme at Microsoft Research. F# also is a fully supported language in Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio.

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Python is an interpreted, object-oriented programming language developed by Guido van Rossum. The name comes from one of van Rossum’s favorite television shows, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Python is very portable—Python interpreters are available for most operating system platforms. Microsoft provides Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS), a powerful plug-in Python IDE, for free and as an open-source project.

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R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is used widely among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. R is the world’s most widely used statistics programming language. Last year, Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics, a leader in providing R software and services, and is building R and Revolution’s technology into its data platform products so companies, developers and data scientists can use it across on-premises, hybrid cloud and Azure public cloud environments.

To learn more about R, check out this course!

Transact-SQL (T-SQL) is Microsoft’s proprietary extension to the Structured Query Language (SQL). T-SQL is central to using Microsoft SQL Server. All applications that communicate with an instance of SQL Server do so by sending Transact-SQL statements to the server. U-SQL unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of a developer’s own code, and is the big data query language of the Azure Data Lake Analytics service. It evolved out of Microsoft’s internal big data language called SCOPE and combines a familiar SQL-like declarative language with the extensibility and programmability provided by C# types, the C# expression language and big data processing concepts.

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Like Python, Java is not specific to Microsoft – far from it – but Microsoft does allow for it, and has their own JDK (Java Developer Kit). The most recent version of the open source language is Java 17, which was unveiled in 2021. One of the advantages of being an open source platform is that Java has a wide array of distributors, ranging from IBM (a big supporter of open source) to Amazon. A core aspect of the Java platform is the Java Virtual Machine, which executes Java bytecode programs.