TypeScript VS ScriptSharp – What’s the tradeoff’s?

Question 1

Which one is more feature rich?

Neither - the compiled JavaScript makes all of JavaScript available to you.

Which is better documented?

Documentation is probably not the right question. Which has more information available / a strong community to help you when you get stuck? As of now, there are 141 ScriptSharp questions (with 48 followers) on Stack Overflow and 623 TypeScript questions (with 328 followers).

TypeScript has a very clear language specification. I had a look for the documentation on ScriptSharp - someone will need to point out where this is... I assume there is a sub-set of C# you can use and I would be interested in knowing what that sub-set is.

Is TypeScript really strongly typed?

TypeScript is statically typed. It will check types at compile-time (and IDEs will check at design-time). Errors will be generated for type violations, although you can also opt to have dynamic typing also if you want to.

Which one should I use?

If you can't bear the thought of writing code in anything other than C#, you should use ScriptSharp. In all other cases, I recommend TypeScript. Understanding JavaScript is beneficial given how the language is so ubiquitous and TypeScript gives you early access to ECMAScript 6 language features, so if you decided to ditch everything and use pure JavaScript, your TypeScript coding experience will be more valuable.

I am biased, in a way. I like TypeScript so much I wrote a book on it. However, the enthusiasm for TypeScript (rather than Dart, CoffeeScript, ScriptSharp) preceded that project.

Question 2

ScriptSharp has been under constant development though it is a one-man show. We have been using ScriptSharp for a large scale web application for close to 3 years now and it has served us well. Ability to write code in C# has helped us move quickly and we have had lesser training overhead.

There is a clear downside to ScriptSharp that when the new versions release, there are a lot of breaking changes in some versions. But we like it so much that we are willing to put up with the breaking changes and make our changes accordingly.

If you have a dedicated infrastructure team to handle such architectural changes, you can use them to keep up with ScriptSharp and write the wrappers for the javascript libraries, I highly recommend ScriptSharp based on our experience. Please evaluate a simple prototype in both before you decide on which technology to go with. You can also try Sharpkit for an interesting alternative. Link-> http://sharpkit.net/

Question 3

I am looking into this as well and from my research it appears that Microsoft has used Script# to build the front end of all of their large web apps like Office Web Apps, Hotmail, Office 365, SharePoint 2013, and they are using older versions than the most recent release of Script# because people are saying that it is stable enough as it is. The problem is that Microsoft seems to be keeping this productivity tool from us by not releasing the Script# definition files (import libraries) to the public for things like SharePoint, CRM, and Office so it seems that most people are moving towards TypeScript instead. I however am leaning towards using Script# and building the definitions that I need as I need them.

References:

http://markeev.com/Articles/sharepoint-javascript-typescript.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/archive/2009/10/20/sharepoint-2010-client-side-javascript-object-model-library-written-in-script.aspx

Getting Started: http---scriptsharpcontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Getting%20started%20with%20ScriptSharp

Oh and there is a CRM definition on Codeplex but I am out of links :)

Question 4

If you are .net developer then definitely you should at least check script#. Yes, it is one-man show. Yes, it is not as advertised as TypeScript but can many developers around compete with MS logo?

I have practical experience with Script# but not with TypeScript. And the only reason why don't want to touch later is that script# is applicable for people already familiar with c#+JS while TypeScript is a completely new story and a new cost for your project.