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Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup (2022)?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup (2022)?

#11

Post by romanhn »

xnorswap wrote: post #5
romanhn wrote: post #3

Not exactly a startup (yet?), but I'm using .NET 6 in my side project to build the API backing a React SPA. It was funny arriving at it, because I started out by trying to choose between Python and Elixir, having left the Microsoft ecosystem 10 years ago (and vowing not to return to it). At the end of the day, .NET bubbled up to the top as the sweet spot of familiarity, maintainability due to strong typing, integrati…

How is EF with postgres these days? In the framework days it always used to come with a heavy dose of caution, but I'm expecting post-open source it's a lot better?

My needs are pretty basic, so it's been fairly smooth sailing so far. I love that I can use EF to generate join tables without needing to create entity classes for them, while still retaining the ability to customize field/table names and such.

Back in the day I transitioned from coding to management in the period where Linq to SQL was being phased out, while EF was still very half-baked, so I've had a healthy dose of skepticism picking it up years later. But so far I'm quite impressed (while double checking that every query generates reasonable SQL).

Re: Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup (2022)?

#14

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

mdaniel wrote: post #9
WorldMaker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it matter if the deployment is "newsworthy" or not? "Newsworthy" doesn't mean "productive" nor does it mean "good for a startup trying to build revenue". I guess it might matter to attracting talent or investment? But productivity should still be more useful to a startup over novelty. That said, .NET Core 1.x through .NET Core 3.x and .NET 5+ have great heterogeneous support. I've seen teams develop on Linu…

Sorry if that word ruffled feathers, I wasn't trying to be a troll :-( And yes, I appreciate that the marketingware for .NET claims a lot of cross platform, but from outside of that ecosystem it has been my experience that Microsoft's definition of cross platform can often be "works on Windows 10 and Server 2008" which is quite different from what normal people think of as cross platform The mention of that "nano" co…

I shipped a .NET Core product on a handful of Raspberry Pi's running whatever the current version of Debian was at the time. That's cross platform enough for me.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup (2022)?

#15

Post by WorldMaker »

mdaniel wrote: post #9
WorldMaker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it matter if the deployment is "newsworthy" or not? "Newsworthy" doesn't mean "productive" nor does it mean "good for a startup trying to build revenue". I guess it might matter to attracting talent or investment? But productivity should still be more useful to a startup over novelty. That said, .NET Core 1.x through .NET Core 3.x and .NET 5+ have great heterogeneous support. I've seen teams develop on Linu…

Sorry if that word ruffled feathers, I wasn't trying to be a troll :-( And yes, I appreciate that the marketingware for .NET claims a lot of cross platform, but from outside of that ecosystem it has been my experience that Microsoft's definition of cross platform can often be "works on Windows 10 and Server 2008" which is quite different from what normal people think of as cross platform The mention of that "nano" co…

I just used "nano" as a general term because I couldn't think of a better one (which does show my personal bias here more than the ecosystem's), but I was also thinking about about a lot of deployments on some sort of container optimized Alpine Linux, I forget what that was specifically called.

So far as I'm aware most of the remaining cross platform concerns in the .NET ecosystem are almost all in drawing/rendering and in cross-platform desktop UI. There's at least one MAUI fork working on a Linux renderer for MAUI UIs, but no official support like every other platform MAUI supports today (Windows, iOS, Android, Mac Catalyst). Drawing/rendering is mostly a legacy ecosystem support issue: System.Drawing API has been around a very long time and was always just a thin wrapper around Windows GDI that it had some abstraction leaks that the .NET team thought were too hard to patch and instead gave up on making System.Drawing itself cross-platform. There are multiple cross-platform replacements for System.Drawing backed by everything from Cairo to SDL to ImageMagick, but they are replacements and for the most part aren't "drop in" replacements and there's still just so many libraries (and developers) so used to System.Drawing being always available that it's still too easy in the ecosystem to stumble into a library you want to use with a hard dependency on System.Drawing.

Other than needing to watch for System.Drawing dependencies, I've got ASP.NET Core/EF web backends that build, test, run on Linux no sweat with no cross-platform issues. (Including fun things like cross-builds: a Linux CI that is also building the Windows x64 self-contained binaries for other servers. I can't think of that many cross-platform stacks where you can do that.)

I think it's still very rare to hear about cross-platform .NET not because it's uncommon (it may be much more common than anyone suspects), but just that especially to HN, .NET is still very much "dark matter". It's out there getting (boring) jobs done (in boring companies) and no one is really blogging about it or "hyping it" because no one really needs to be. That's why "newsworthy" may have touched a bit of a nerve.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup (2022)?

#16

Post by mdaniel »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #14
mdaniel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if that word ruffled feathers, I wasn't trying to be a troll :-( And yes, I appreciate that the marketingware for .NET claims a lot of cross platform, but from outside of that ecosystem it has been my experience that Microsoft's definition of cross platform can often be "works on Windows 10 and Server 2008" which is quite different from what normal people think of as cross platform The mention of that "nano" co…

I shipped a .NET Core product on a handful of Raspberry Pi's running whatever the current version of Debian was at the time. That's cross platform enough for me.

That's good to know, thank you. To help with the first part of my comment, upon which local system did you develop that product (and, I guess implied in that question is: was it just you, or were there other developers with their own workstation setups)?

Re: Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup (2022)?

#18

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

mdaniel wrote: post #16
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shipped a .NET Core product on a handful of Raspberry Pi's running whatever the current version of Debian was at the time. That's cross platform enough for me.

That's good to know, thank you. To help with the first part of my comment, upon which local system did you develop that product (and, I guess implied in that question is: was it just you, or were there other developers with their own workstation setups)?

Visual Studio on Windows 10. I don't know why you'd use anything else for a .NET project: it's by far the path of least resistance.

I was one of 3 developers but the others were writing iOS and Android apps that interfaced with my Web product. That said, they had identical setups. Since the code was hosted locally on the Pi and we were all remote, they needed to be able to build and deploy my code also.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup (2022)?

#20

Post by foobarbaz33 »

I don't work for a start up but...

.NET Core is great. It's good to go for cross platform development for anything non-gui related.

For client-side apps it is not cross-platform. There's MAUI which might hit all the targets you want, except GNU/Linux. Although Android/Linux is supported. The way to solve this is a web-based UI. There's several ways to go about having a locally running program with a web-based UI. Hijacking a web-based UI is not unique to .NET, so this is not an advantage, it's just this hack makes the lack of native UI not quite as important.

Also, which language/platform has really nailed down cross platform UI's while still being at least "somewhat" native on each target? There's really not many options. It's an industry wide problem. .NET has some decent escape hatches like Blazor. And maybe MAUI will get it right but the jury is still out.

As far as your development environment, you can use VS-code as your IDE in a cross platform way. Develop .NET software on a new M1 Mac? Yes you can! And with LSP you are not tied down to Microsoft tooling. With a little bit of configuration, you can can make Emacs or Vim a fully featured .NET IDE.

There's native AOT compilation so if you have some microservice that needs to spin up stuff, you don't need to worry about start up time.

Overall .NET just seems like an absolute killer tech. I think people are doing themselves a disservice to dismiss it just because it's from M$.

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