Quote Originally Posted by Claudia2006
I'm looking to hire a software developer who has used ASP for several years and C++ for 10 years, but never actually used C# - how difficult or easy would it be for him to start coding in C#?
What I experienced when moving from 10 year of C++ experience to C# was that it was really easy to learn. The language was simple, clean and IMO very similar to C++. In addition the IDE (Visual Studio) was far better than most C++ IDEs I had previously used - especially for GUI application.

My first 'Hello World' was up in seconds, and my first 'Hello Windows' was up in minutes. So, I don't think it will take him a long time to 'start coding'.

Quote Originally Posted by Claudia2006
How long would be a safe guess of his "learning curve"?
Don't ever ask software developers 'how long would?'. Hopefully his learning curve will constantly point upwards. What I saw was that me and my colleagues did a lot of stupid mistakes. We got the software up and running (almost bug-free) but we used alot of C/C++ techniques during design and when actually writing the code in C#. The result was alot of unnecessary code and poor performance (CPU, memory and somewhat time-to-market). So, learning the language wasn't enough, we also had to to understand and use the .NET Framework.

Now, the Framework is large and it will take some time to learn every corner of it (4 years later and I still discover new things) but the most important stuff was up in matter of days (or weeks).

Maybe reading a typical "C# for C++ Developers"-book would be beneficial.

- petter