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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

#491

Post by WorldMaker »

bergheim wrote: post #484
jsmeaton wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this, it was definitely news to me. If this is the case then it makes slightly more sense, but is still disappointing.

I don't understand this. It makes sense "because ML"?

Unfortunately, yes. I know a lot of companies (here on HN, my current employer, etc) are talking about ML like it is cheap and easy to build, but you get what you pay for and right now it looks from budgets that Microsoft is paying for a lot of high quality effort. Again, I think it would be beneficial if more of this work was done out in the open, in part to open it to good critique and peer review, and in part to make it more obvious to everyone (including companies such as my current employer) that proper data science is still an expensive investment that requires a ton of work and hidden costs. But the catch-22 there is of course the more expensive the investment the greater the desire to protect it and keep it secret (at least in the short term where it seems a competitive advantage).

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

#492

Post by michaelcampbell »

tomnipotent wrote: post #450
loeg wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.NET PRs sit unmerged for years if they're not a priority for MSFT. I'm glad it works well sometimes and that MSFT seems to care about .NET on Linux, but it's not that open.

Point out a major language that doesn't have a graveyard of PR's with similar stories.

That other languages may or may not be as bad as .NET does not make .NET any more or less bad.

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

#493

Post by varispeed »

generichuman wrote: post #462
varispeed wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a problem with that. You have essentially done work for multi-billion corporation without remuneration. That would probably violate many laws like minimum wage requirement and volunteering at for profit corporation (minimum wage must be paid). I wonder why this is not pursued.

Nearly everything that is open-source depends on people doing work for free that is used by other people who use it for profit. Maybe OP is making profit through the software they're writing using C#. Should Microsoft charge them for C# usage? Microsoft is the ones paying for development costs after all. The purpose of open-source software is to be able to fix problems for your use case and continue using the improve…

But this way you are promoting inequality. Being able to commit substantial amount of time to volunteer without remuneration is a domain of privileged people, usually from wealthy white background. They can they use their contributions as highlights in their CVs and for instance get better jobs than people who were not in a position to give their time for free. Hencewhy in many countries, like mine, things like internships have to be paid. If they weren't then positions were mostly filled with youth from wealthy families.

If Microsoft was honest about equality and open source, they would have donated the whole platform to a non-profit foundation and removed its name from it.

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

#495

Post by spiralx »

unclad5968 wrote: post #431
wutwutwutwut wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. I would guess that >95% of NET developers have no idea what you are even talking about. This really seems like the recurring bubble where posters on HN somehow things that a large majority of the industry is hitting F5 on HN while they are instead busy doing actual work.

You're probably right. I'm not a developer, just a tech nerd, so it's a mistake to assume others would care about minutia. Regardless, I think it is still fair to say that if any other language platform was withholding features like a debugger, nobody would consider those platforms particularly open.

I missed this "debacle" as well, the HN story on it in October only had 59 comments, of which about half a dozen were actually about the topic itself. Not much outrage here apparently.

> ... if any other language platform was withholding features like a debugger, ...

Except "withholding a debugger" is not the same as "a complex new feature that builds on top of the existing debugger will only be released on one platform to begin with" is it? Features in beta releases aren't guaranteed to in the final release, even if some users really liked it.

Visual Studio already had a lot of code relating to editing program state when the debugger is paused after hitting a breakpoint. Seems plausible that Hot Reload in VS would be able to leverage some of this code to reduce the amount of work required to build, test and deliver the feature on that platform. It would also mean getting feedback and issues more relevant to the core of the feature, because the integration and UX is an evolution of code that's been there pretty much since VS was first released.

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

#496

Post by heavyset_go »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #481
heavyset_go wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This platform comes with invisible strings attached, some of them will likely turn into chains in the future. Can you go into more detail about this?

MS has a long history of taking something (a tech, a concept, etc), playing fair for years to attrack people, then add more and more little details that in the end, lock you in into their ecosystem. In this particular instance, MS has been pushing the "dev env in the cloud" commercial strategy for some times, using the openess of the VSCode ecosystem as on of the bait. Don't get me wrong, I think VScode is a good pro…

Thanks

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

#497

Post by lovich »

robertlagrant wrote: post #480
lovich wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism?

Ah. That may be the world's worst example of a reasonable alternative based on its track record :)

The bar was if it was extremist or not, not it’s level of effectiveness.

If something nearly half the world followed is considered a extremist then I do not believe the word has any meaning left

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

#498

Post by jsmeaton »

bergheim wrote: post #484
jsmeaton wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this, it was definitely news to me. If this is the case then it makes slightly more sense, but is still disappointing.

I don't understand this. It makes sense "because ML"?

No, because it's no longer "just code". Bundling in assets (ML models, server keys, etc) makes it more difficult to open source something. So, while I don't agree that it should be closed source, it makes a little more sense to me why they might have gone that way.

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

#499

Post by giaour »

codebolt wrote: post #478
GABeech wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, you're not paying for C# you're paying for an IDE. You don't need VS to use C#. Especially now with Roslyn a the c# language server a lot of other IDEs can do a lot of the same things VS can do.

And if you're working on open source/non-commercially, the free community edition is also a good option.

Indie devs and small businesses (<5 installs) can use the community edition for commercial purposes, too. I use VS Code & the C# extension most of the time, and that's free as in beer for use by anybody.

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

#500

Post by pianoben »

benbristow wrote: post #398
pianoben wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you deal with (some parts of) the public sector, you certainly will encounter SOAP. For example - those online drivers-ed courses you buy in California to get rid of a ticket? They all talk to a SOAP backend maintained by the State. Certainly SOAP isn't everywhere the way it used to be (thankfully), but it's out there and isn't going away any time soon.

SOAP isn't actually that bad if you use it with a typed language like C#. It's hell trying to use it with something like Ruby/Python though - I remember struggling to talk to a SOAP API with Ruby and getting into headaches that my data was being rejected until I realised that the XML properties had to be in the exact order unlike JSON which doesn't care usually. Import a WSDL into Visual Studio and you've got your cl…

I never gave the Visual Studio WSDL code-generator the respect it deserved at the time. With hindsight, it was amazingly easy to use and generally "just worked".

> (if the API was written properly)

A very important caveat! I remember we hired some consultants from a world-renowned tech company - let's call them Big Red for now - and their big integration deliverable was a SOAP API with... one method. It accepted a string, and returned a string. And what was that one string? ...A SOAP request! The best code-generator in the world wouldn't have helped.

To this day I wonder if we actually ended up paying for that. I sure hope we didn't.

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