Moving to C# was a great strategic move that should allow for better corporate world participation for distributed ledgers. Most languages allow for the implementation of anything - though C# has many advantages over other languages for development.
Since the DNotes platform is to work primarily to engage the corporate community, it is best to look at what companies look for when deciding on a language to employ:
Common use
Corporate entities put a large emphasis on reducing risk. Using the most commonly used coding languages that are proven and strongly supported, which makes finding capable programmers easy.
C# is widely supported, with it being easy to find programmers worldwide. By comparison, C++ (the code used for Bitcoin core and most blockchains) is very difficult to find highly capable programmers for - which makes developing and finding coders for C++ very expensive and time consuming.
Programming speed and cost
Companies both large and small are hyper-aware of the cost to creating applications, for which C# is a much better alternative than C/C++. Programmers in C# are much more productive in this regard due to C#'s forgiving nature in debugging. C#'s integration with the .NET framework and standard libraries (pre-programmed code) makes finding solutions much faster than C++ where much time can be spend writing code that should have already been written. Businesses need their enterprise applications to be written, tested and integrated quickly and will always prefer to use language which get them the best ROI in the fastest time.
Ease of hiring programmers
Microsoft and Oracle certify developers. Corporations hiring a lot of people find it much easier to confirm that the people they are considering hiring know they have the required base level of coding ability. By contrast, most top coders in C++ are very difficult to employ as they are rarer in number due to C++'s steeper learning curve.
When rapid and agile business application development is the primary goal, C# must be considered as one of the, if not the best programming language to opt for.
Thanks, TeeGee. Well explained without getting too technical. From a long-term strategic prospective, this will place DNotes in solid technology leadership to be a formidable player in the corporate space which has been seeing increasing demand to deploy projects involving smart contracts and the blockchain technologies. The only other coin that we know of at this time, coding in C#, is Startis. We certain appreciate their leadership and contributions to our industry.
One important and often overlooked procedure in advancement is to pay a nod of acknowledgement and respect to others who have made contributions within an industry, and who have chosen a similar path whether those contributions be rooted in similar values, strategy, or principles.
The open source nature of Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin has spawned an industry of immense benefit and advancement that many others have come to build upon or modify for different purposes. Open source allows anybody from anywhere to contribute to this industry's success, and to test consumer preferences for a much wider array of use cases than would otherwise be possible.
Open source is great for this purpose, but there are also many people who instead of using the open-source nature to build and improve upon a network choose to only incorporate the work of others without ever actually building on top of it, or contributing anything new. There are many cryptocurrencies of this ilk, who you will find that while on the face of it may have kept up with 'industry standards', have only spend a few weeks incorporating the code of other open source developers into their own network.
This type of application development is very rapid (take note of all the coins adopting segwit and lightning network features), however it is very limiting. For one cryptocurrencies that rely on the adoption of open source engineering only likely lack the skills to fully customize and contribute themselves (will never be able to pull ahead -- only keep up), and their network will always be at the mercy of the industry's open source nature, and the continuation of development by external teams who may abandon their work, and/or defer to something better in the future. This can create a lot of issues in future since removing features from a cryptocurrency and replacing them is much more difficult than implementing something new. Over time, I expect that many cryptocurrencies will become alienated from newer developments as the technical expertise required and cost of changing a blockchain to remove incompatibility issues for future upgrades increases. Take for example that older cars are highly customizable - you can take remove the engine, or fuel injectors, and put in a better one without too much trouble, but if you were to completely change the engine of a latest car model with advanced engine electronics, all the integrated detection systems and custom functionalities will likely be compromised.
I view blockchains in this fashion. As the top crypto-engineers make their upgrades more blockchain-specific to integrate within their own ecosystem, those crypto that rely upon copying and implementing modular updates will find their technical ability to copy insufficient, and/or the incompatibility issues from blockchain design engineering irreconcilable even if the technical coding ability is there.
DNotes is one such currency with this foresight. We will opt to rely on our own tightly integrated development, than the development of others. This will make our model difficult, or impossible for others to replicate.