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What Makes .NET Core So Special?

blog.jamesmichaelhickey.com

201–210 of 247 posts

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#201
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge C# advocate but we actually went the other way. Regardless of the tooling etc. we still have to use Golang for mission critical stuff. This is mainly due to the cold start times you mentioned - mainly the "first request" problem C# has with web related requests. I've been keeping up with the latest developments, and it seems that they're finally starting to address the problem with tiered compilation stuff…

You can usually cut the cold start performance in half by enabling Tiered Compilation. It's just one parameter in your project file, or via an environment variable. Disclaimer: I work on performance in the ASP.NET team.

I should say (since i've got your attention) that i'm almost 100% sure that all of your customers would be more than willing to sacrifice a startup time for a well-coordinated callback when everything is warmed up, as a toggleable option of course.

To explain this a bit better, i'd definitely be happy even waiting 10+ minutes for all of my controllers/hub methods to be instant response. I could then subscribe to an event when it is ready and let haproxy/nginx or whatever else know that the server is "good to go". This way, the server goes into the pool, and everyone is happy. I remember seeing that the Bing guys did something like this, but again it was majorly hacky.

Thanks for all the great work you're doing on C#/.NET Core in general by the way.

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average .NET developer never even tries different things like AWS or the Google Cloud, TravisCI or AppVeyor, etc. They just swallow anything which so-called MVPs and conference presenters force them down the throat, primarily Azure which is by all measures inferior to the other two and they don't even know. I've made an account because this attitude irritates me. 1. This is patently untrue. The real reason is t…

I do agree that the person you replied to was unnecessarily cynical (and quite irrational -- there is nothing surprising that Microsoft pitches Microsoft services in their own products), but your reply is contradictory. I've worked in a variety of shops, both "Microsoft" shops and non-Microsoft shops, and I would most certainly agree with the GP That Microsoft shops tend to be dominated by developers who like the com…

> I've worked in a variety of shops, both "Microsoft" shops and non-Microsoft shops, and I would most certainly agree with the GP That Microsoft shops tend to be dominated by developers who like the comfort of just eating whatever pablum Microsoft is serving, often even if that pablum will take years longer to digest than competitive alternatives. There is, in general, a tunnel vision that profoundly limits the options available to build solutions, at substantial project cost.

I dunno about this. The vast majority of costs in any project is contractors / staff rather than licenses.

I added up the cost of hiring 3 contractors for a month versus just buying a piece of software that did 90% of what the business needed. We were much more expensive.

> And it's understandable. If you're at a Microsoft shop you aren't going to challenge the norm if your first choice is SQL Server and BizTalk and Azure, etc. It's the easy, laziest option. Occasionally it might be the best option, but that's just accidental given that the choice was predetermined.

It is also kinda counter-productive for everyone else. If everyone knows how to do something in a particular language + IDE it makes things easy because knowledge can be shared without a steep learning curve.

e.g. I write lots of scripts using python, I mainly work in .NET shops.

I left instructions for the whole process on how to get the script to run for an adhoc support job I wrote 5 or 6 years ago. For whatever reason it broke (the db structure changed slightly). I have been in a lot of contracts since that job and it was just cheaper for them to call me up and pay me to fix the script than have one of their devs look at it.

The only reason I wrote it in python at the time was because I didn't know Powershell at the time and they said I could use what I wanted as long as it was documented.

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#203
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average .NET developer never even tries different things like AWS or the Google Cloud, TravisCI or AppVeyor, etc. They just swallow anything which so-called MVPs and conference presenters force them down the throat, primarily Azure which is by all measures inferior to the other two and they don't even know. I've made an account because this attitude irritates me. 1. This is patently untrue. The real reason is t…

This is a bit off-topic, but on another occasion, Scott Hanselman infamously used the term "5:01 developers" targetted at many of the same people ;)

TBH I worked in high stress environments (gambling and finance). Management didn't care that I would work to 7-8pm most evenings (9pm start) and do a few all nighters. A few times I was like 30 minutes late twice in a row I would get called in for a talk about "tardiness". I was younger at the time and I thought they would cut me a bit of slack after delivering the impossible on time!!

After a while you realise that it isn't worth the effort and just get a contract job where you earn twice as much and have none of the bullshit.

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#204
post #80

Besides Node.js the main competitor is is Java/JVM. C# is a bit nicer than Java, but you can use Kotlin or Scala on the JVM. All in all I see no real advantage over the JVM/Java world - more of the other way around, since the .Net ecoystem is not as big as the JVM ecosystem. However competition is always good.

I recently scraped some job sites in various major metropolis areas in the US and aggregated the keywords I found. There was about 5 Java jobs for every one .NET job.

.NET and C#/F# are pleasant and I wouldn't be opposed to going back to them, but job-wise it seems safer to stick with tried and true Java.

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be on the JVM I highly recommend giving Kotlin a look before Java. Great language and excellent tooling.

I would like to learn Kotlin, but I've no prior knowledge about Java... That's a real impediment? If it isn't, do you know (by chance) about some resource(s) for a total newbie/newcomer to the language? thanks in advance.

I'd say a rudimentary knowledge of the Java ecosystem is required, Maven or Gradle are the preferred deps management and build tools. It's a bit of a bummer as quite a bit of 3rd party docs assume you have already written things in Java, and gloss over things like, importing a library. For someone who doesn't have a magic importer (or worse yet, someone who is not using an IDE), you'll literally have to dig around in API docs just to figure out what comes from where (I'm looking RIGHT AT YOU Vertx!!)

Overall, the language feels pretty nice though.

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#206
post #58
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's unnecessarily angry at Microsoft. Of course they have to sell something . They offer some great tools for free (as in free speech) and you still complain that their MVPs promote their own paid services at their conferences?

IMO the issue isn't MS, really (though parts of the org are still worthy of strong skepticism), it's the cultural phenomenon of a certain generation of developers who essentially eat, breathe, and die by Microsofts product cycles... There are those argued that any innovation is unneccesary until MS launches a product for it, when it becomes a "must", ad nauseum. I'm talking about the developers who never discovered O…

> IMO the issue isn't MS, really (though parts of the org are still worthy of strong skepticism), it's the cultural phenomenon of a certain generation of developers who essentially eat, breathe, and die by Microsofts product cycles...

Although to be fair, they were taught this by Microsoft. Before Microsoft saw the writing on the wall and changed approach not that many years ago, the strategy was to provide a Microsoft solution for everything. Useful stuff from outside Microsoft would be either be cloned, or MS would simply not implement compatibility or integration.

The .NET ecosystem was, and still is, utter dominated by Microsoft at every level, unlike Java where multiple vendors provide implementations, innovations, certification etc. It's a bit unfair to blame the developers in the ecosystem for not pushing back hard enough against the organization that provided literally everything, from the software licenses to the professional certifications.

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft have announced that they will be porting WinForms and WPF over to .NET Core so that they no longer need the heavyweight .NET Framework. However, this DOES NOT make WinForms/WPF cross-platform. They will still be restricted to Windows but will allow you the benefits of .NET Core, such as allowing side-by-side versioning. They've come back full circle to forking Java for Windows only usage. .NET is the clos…

What in the world ever happened to Xamarin? Weren't they acquired by Microsoft two years ago? I felt sure we'd have a nice cross-platform desktop GUI by now. . . I'm feeling more fearful that they acquired Xamarin just to destroy it.

The only use I ever saw of it by others was to make mobile apps for both Android and iOS so I think it will stay there worse case.

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#208

.NET Core and F# are the only reasons why I still develop .NET. I really hope the platform can break out of the Microsoft silo and attract talent from other dev communities, because the biggest problem with .NET Core, despite the whole OSS move, is still that the majority of C# developers let themselves happily trap by the Microsoft marketing machinery. The average .NET developer never even tries different things lik…

> I really hope the platform can break out of the Microsoft silo and attract talent from other dev communities The problem is often trust. Like so many Microsoft projects, to me the goal of .Net Core seems to be to get as much people as possible on to a proprietary language and/or get as many devs as possible onto developing stuff that doesn't hurt Microsoft. There's no guarantee that MS will not pull the plug at som…

It isn't a proprietary language. Anyone can implement the language spec.

Do you people do any basic research, you know just googling or reading the license?

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#209

I want to like .Net Core, I really do. But in my opinion its just not yet ready for serious use. An example. If you want to use .Net Core you can't use entity framework, you have to use EF Core, which doesn't yet support mapping to views or stored procs, only tables. Now you might think that's fine, maybe you only want to map to tables. But it's the same story all over the ecosystem. Many major projects have a separa…

EF will be available in netcore 3.

Isn't that (EF6, I mean) only on Windows, though?

Re: What Makes .NET Core So Special?

#210
post #139

.NET Core and F# are the only reasons why I still develop .NET. I really hope the platform can break out of the Microsoft silo and attract talent from other dev communities, because the biggest problem with .NET Core, despite the whole OSS move, is still that the majority of C# developers let themselves happily trap by the Microsoft marketing machinery. The average .NET developer never even tries different things lik…

> is still that the majority of C# developers let themselves happily trap by the Microsoft marketing machinery. Or people choose what works for them? Or they have to deal with sunk costs? > They just swallow anything which so-called MVPs and conference presenters force them down the throat, primarily Azure which is by all measures inferior to the other two and they don't even know. Please get off that high horse of y…

> This is why I cringe at fanboyism. Whether it is F#, Ruby, Rust, etc. People get so irrational and consume by zealotry.

Amen brother.

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