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Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

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Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#111

Post by throwuxiytayq »

jve wrote: post #79
ripperdoc wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can echo this, while doing its job most of the time, Omnisharp has been one of the least stable parts of my VS Code C# experience (the least stable as usual being anything relating to Unity ;) ). Issues like runaway compiler threads, slow response times, OmniSharp frequently losing the mono-path and requires restart (this is some config issue and interaction with Unity, but could have been handled automatically). I…

Ah, no wonder I felt unproductive with C# on VSCode. I couldn't wrap my head around that it is now how you should write C# code with such bad intellisense n stuff.

A few years ago I spent a couple of months using C# w/ vscode. The experience was indeed harrowing.

Omnisharp would take forever to start up (always downloading a new Omnisharp binary on every restart for some reason?!), type checking was unresponsive to the point of being unusable, and the whole thing would freeze and stop working entirely every once in a while, requiring me to reload the IDE. I tried various versions of Omnisharp (stable/beta) across many C# projects and several vscode deployments on multiple machines and never got it to work well. I eventually decided Omnisharp would never improve and abandoned vscode because of how uniformly bad it was for C#.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#112

Post by exyi »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #6

I love C#, had a job doing it on Mono and really enjoyed working on it, but never trusted to work on anything personal with it, in order to avoid being stuck depending on Microsoft since they bought Xamarin, and I resisted even when they published ASP.Net Core on github, really think that microsoft is un-trustable

I'd say that most corporate-backed platforms will have similar issues. The corporations simply have other interests than the community (next quarter profit + control / long term stability + independence). Only way to keep them from doing this is pushing back whenever they try. MS did that with Pylance, it went well and now they are trying again with C#

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#113

Post by rakoo »

someotherperson wrote: post #71
kelnos wrote: post #37

This sort of thing has been MS's playbook since I was a kid, or earlier. It surprises me that people are still surprised when things like this happen. I especially think someone with Miguel de Icaza's experience should know better[0]. It's interesting to see the generational difference here. Many of my somewhat-younger (even only by 7-10 years) programmer/techie friends just don't remember the Microsoft of the 80s an…

Opinions like this have always been weird to me. Not wrong, but weird. Any contribution that M$ (remember when people would sub the S for a dollar sign?) makes to open source or open standards is to support their own bottom line and we shouldn't expect anything else. The directors have a legal responsibility to the company and to boost the share price, not for the betterment of humanity. To this effect, companies wil…

> Public companies are inherently evil by default -- this is because the only goal of a public company is to strengthen the share price

Agree with your arguments, but more generally companies are inherently evil by default, because their only goal is to maximize profits. You can only hope that they will behave correctly regarding their employees, their competitors, their neighborhood, and the environment.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#114

Post by dustinmoris »

As I have said it on the original GitHub issue, there are multiple reasons for why the lives of .NET developers will always suck.

First of all every division at Microsoft needs to be cash positive. At DevDiv (developer devision) the main bread maker is Visual Studio. .NET is free and makes no money. VS Code is free and makes no money. OmniSharp is/was free and made no money. ASP.NET is free and makes no money. It's mostly SQL and Visual Studio licenses which pay the salaries of the .NET team. For that reason Microsoft can never let it happen that a free and open .NET extension can make VS Code a good enough experience for the vast majority of .NET developers. It's not by accident that despite Microsoft owning C#, .NET, VS Code and OmniSharp the C# experience on VS Code was the worst of its kind in comparison to any other programming language. It's by choice in order to push developers to use Visual Studio.

Another big reason is that Microsoft needs to keep a tight grip around their .NET developers, because .NET is the main driver to Azure adoption. Azure is an extremely unattractive product to any other development community. Azure is slow, it breaks, it over promises and under delivers and it is almost twice as expensive to AWS or GCP once you actually establish feature parity. It's mainly .NET devs who get cleverly pushed to Azure and siloed away from anything non-Microsoft by Microsoft. The world runs in the cloud nowadays and the cloud is a unix based environment. Microsoft has felt the bleed of its traditional Windows centric developer base migrating away to macOS and Linux and becoming more wise about their technology choices. In order to stop the bleed Microsoft tries hard to convince its remaining Windows developers to remain in the Windows/Azure silo by giving them just enough sugar coating so they never step outside. WSL, the new unix-like terminal in Windows, Windows containers, etc. are all attempts to keep Windows folks on Windows and therefore closer to Azure.

The irony with all of this is of course that if you are a software developer, you'll have a MUCH MUCH better experience with Microsoft owned products (GitHub, VS Code, etc.) if you choose any programming language which is NOT .NET, because (at least for now) they will not try to come after you to lock you into their Windows/Azure based silo.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#115

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

I'm an old-school GNU stalwart, and after Mircosoft has done in 1990s-2010s I wouldn't touch anything Microsoft makes even with a 10 feet pole, nor suggest anyone touching it.

They say they're different now, open source and all, but still, nah. It is a wolf in a sheep's clothing. Anything Microsoft does is a potential Trojan horse, don't use it.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#117

Post by Ygg2 »

oblio wrote: post #103
bayindirh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a lot of younger developers and "tech citizens" think MS is a saint now. They need to love Open Source / Linux because their platform has lost to the openness, composability and lightness of Linux. They lost the server space, but they're retrying to seize desktop from Linux with WSL and invading the developer tools space and trying to isolate Desktop Linux as an "irrelevant layer which runs MS software and techn…

> trying to isolate Desktop Linux as an irrelevant layer They're obviously doing that, but they don't really need to. Desktop Linux is its own enemy. 2 major GUI toolkits, frequent upgrades to them, generally with breaking changes, multiple DEs, frequent upgrades to them, also with breaking changes, a full decades of bickering over a solution that solves actual end user and operator problems in a standardizing way (s…

> I'm willing to bet $100 that this discussion will look the same way in 15 years

I'm willing to take it, but only because I think there won't be a Linux in 15 years.

And yeah. Android doesn't count. It's essentially an enclave that runs Dalvik programs.

Linux basic assumptions about hardware don't hold on mobile.

I think Linux is suffering from the Lisp curse. Because they never choosed a DE, there is endless splintering and re-invention of the wheel.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#118

Post by bayindirh »

Ygg2 wrote: post #117
oblio wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trying to isolate Desktop Linux as an irrelevant layer They're obviously doing that, but they don't really need to. Desktop Linux is its own enemy. 2 major GUI toolkits, frequent upgrades to them, generally with breaking changes, multiple DEs, frequent upgrades to them, also with breaking changes, a full decades of bickering over a solution that solves actual end user and operator problems in a standardizing way (s…

> I'm willing to bet $100 that this discussion will look the same way in 15 years I'm willing to take it, but only because I think there won't be a Linux in 15 years. And yeah. Android doesn't count. It's essentially an enclave that runs Dalvik programs. Linux basic assumptions about hardware don't hold on mobile. I think Linux is suffering from the Lisp curse. Because they never choosed a DE, there is endless splint…

> I'm willing to take it, but only because I think there won't be a Linux in 15 years.

Let's see. I've added a reminder in my calendar with a link to this comment.

> Because they never choosed a DE...

But they created a Desktop Standard which allows every DE to behave the same where it matters. This unified a lot of things. So every DE is a shell and workflow with same underlying principles underside. Much like POSIX.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#119

Post by pjmlp »

mhh__ wrote: post #36
pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears offering free beer forever isn't sustainable, even when one has deep pockets, go figure.

Sustainable and optimal are different. For a company like Microsoft at least.

Shareware and Public Domain are back with a different name, many still haven't gotten it.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#120

Post by phendrenad2 »

foepys wrote: post #35
DeathArrow wrote: post #14

.NET is open. You can find its source on Github. The .NET platform being open doesn't mean everything targeting the .NET platform is open, too.

A problem of the .NET ecosystem is that there is no open source debugger for C#. The Microsoft-provided debugger has strict license terms that only allow it to be used in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. JetBrains needed to write their own debugger for their cross-platform IDE Rider. Luckily they already knew a lot about .NET to do this and it turned out very well but it's still not the official debugger and als…

How does the lack of an open-source debugger (which is wrong by the way, there are several projects on github), invalidate the fact that .NET is open-source?
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