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The Case for C# and .NET

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Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#11

Post by moonchrome »

wrnr wrote: post #2

I bet C# and F# are actually nice languages and I shortly considered adopting them together with Unity but at the end of the day I was still suspicious of Microsoft, and support for other platforms then windows. The article honestly sounds a bit like a straw man argument. Maybe bloomberg could have made another tech choice but then again I don't know the details.

I've been working in .NET for the last year using intel Mac for the first 6 months exclusively and recently switching between Windows desktop and Mac (performance of desktop machine mostly, not willing to be early adopter with M1/2)

I also use Rider exclusively and going to Visual Studio on Windows now and then I'm not missing much (visual studio did have some nice plugin for debugging compiler plugins, had to hack around than in Rider)

I can't comment on Unity part.

F# for me overpromises and underdelivers - it all sounds amazing in theory but it's been 3 times over the last decade where I've tried to use it (last time just a few months ago) and it never just works - I've spent diagnosing "why isn't this F# feature working as advertised" than solving my problem (from tooling like F# projects breaking autocomplete in VS solution - even for C# projects, to language features like type providers just being a nightmare to work with and integrate into CI/CD)

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#12

Post by celdon25 »

ihateolives wrote: post #6
cosmotic wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has first-party support for .NET on linux and it's open source. Their commitment to non-windows and non-.NET platforms has only increased over time.

For running, yes. For developing, no.

What part of the .NET SDK isn't supported on Linux?

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#13

Post by eropple »

ihateolives wrote: post #6
cosmotic wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has first-party support for .NET on linux and it's open source. Their commitment to non-windows and non-.NET platforms has only increased over time.

For running, yes. For developing, no.

Their support for VSCode is pretty considerable and reached the point where I'm comfortable working on non-GUI applications in C# in it a while ago, and from a UI perspective prefer it to Visual Studio.

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#14

Post by tbrownaw »

labrador wrote: post #5

> For the front-end, JavaScript is unavoidable (for now) Author really needs to give Blazor a try. I wrote some comments last week speculating that I'd use Dart or TypeScript with C# .NET on the client because WebAssembly doesn't do DOM manipulation, but turns out I should have waited to learn it better before making a comment. I've learned I can add events and event handlers to elements without ever leaving C#. Then…

In theory, blazor is really neat. But last I checked you have to either go fully thin-client (server side blazor) or have an annoyingly large initial download (client side blazor). Which is probably fine if everyone's wired to the company network, but maybe less so if there's mobile involved or the general public needs access from the local coffee shop.

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#15

Post by runevault »

labrador wrote: post #5

> For the front-end, JavaScript is unavoidable (for now) Author really needs to give Blazor a try. I wrote some comments last week speculating that I'd use Dart or TypeScript with C# .NET on the client because WebAssembly doesn't do DOM manipulation, but turns out I should have waited to learn it better before making a comment. I've learned I can add events and event handlers to elements without ever leaving C#. Then…

If you're willing to go down the f# rabbit hole there's also Fable which I need to try but I've heard very good things about.

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#16

Post by taccicardia »

labrador wrote: post #5

> For the front-end, JavaScript is unavoidable (for now) Author really needs to give Blazor a try. I wrote some comments last week speculating that I'd use Dart or TypeScript with C# .NET on the client because WebAssembly doesn't do DOM manipulation, but turns out I should have waited to learn it better before making a comment. I've learned I can add events and event handlers to elements without ever leaving C#. Then…

Can confirm, we’re developing in Blazor now and it’s fine. Not as loosey goosey as js, but makes as much sense as any other js framework. And having such tight integration with Entity Framework makes development a breeze.

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#17

Post by tus666 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #7

C# and TypeScript seem to be far and away the most popular programming languages today. At least from the perspective of recruiting in Australia. Python is on the way up and third most popular but well behind C# and TypeScript. Golang is on the way up but very small in terms of number of developers. Java is on the way down but will never vanish, it's just not super popular any more. Ruby is small enough to just be a…

> Python is on the way up and third most popular but well behind C# and TypeScript.

lolwut. TypeScript is niche compared to Python.

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#18

Post by sandreas »

I also think that C# and .NET are awesome. Especially latest releases dotnet 6 and upcoming 7 have a ton of new things to be even more productive.

I like the fact, that you can develop command line apps, Web APIs, Desktop Apps and smartphone apps all with the same toolset, including the fact that deployment is possible on nearly every major platform for every major platform (except iOS and macOS Apps, as always only on macOS). Even systems programming and AOT is doable or full featured static deployment is possible integrating a small runtime into a single binary.

And boy is .NET fast...

This facts made Golang pretty interesting to me, but what I did not like here is the lack of a usable cross platform Plugin-Loader technology, most of the stuff has to be monolithic, then the module management and some of the missing concepts (like generics, which is also now available in go).

The sheer amount of concepts in C# is overwhelming (from basics like Generics to less common ones like Extension-Methods, operator overloading, etc.).

I don't like Visual Studio as IDE, but VS Code is an acceptable alternative tool, although I personally prefer the non-free JetBrains Rider.

Nuget package manager also has it's caveats, e.g. that the official repo can only "unlist" packages, not delete them or that the publish times sometimes have horrible delays, but that's also still acceptable, since you can use the github package registry or bring your own to overcome these issues.

Technologies on my todo list include getting into MAUI (a cross platform UI stack) combined with Blazor[1], which can use Web Components in native UI apps and develop TRULY cross platform (Web, Desktop AND Mobile with the same codebase). Like electron, but without the browser dependency due to native integration.

Although everything is tied pretty tight to Microsoft, there is a huge open source community developing cross platform libraries, that are easy to use. Even though i find that microsoft has often made strange decisions in the past, the current state is clearly a recommendation to have a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eIsQ3Pm2bE

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#19

Post by caseymarquis »

labrador wrote: post #5

> For the front-end, JavaScript is unavoidable (for now) Author really needs to give Blazor a try. I wrote some comments last week speculating that I'd use Dart or TypeScript with C# .NET on the client because WebAssembly doesn't do DOM manipulation, but turns out I should have waited to learn it better before making a comment. I've learned I can add events and event handlers to elements without ever leaving C#. Then…

I'm a huge fan of C#, but I didn't really like Blazor when I tried it. I had expected to love it too. I found much of Blazor's boilerplate to be very ugly, I didn't like the complication involved in referencing npm libraries or backend code, and I couldn't figure out where several magical authentication related pages in the example app were coming from. I switched back to Typescript and Vue 3 (almost went with Svelte). I'm investigating the HotChocolate GraphQL library this week to see if I can marry the frontend and backend that way. I was hoping Blazor would give me a nice productivity boost, but native frontend development is hard to compete with. I'll likely try again in a few years.

Re: The Case for C# and .NET

#20

Post by tbrownaw »

ihateolives wrote: post #6
cosmotic wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has first-party support for .NET on linux and it's open source. Their commitment to non-windows and non-.NET platforms has only increased over time.

For running, yes. For developing, no.

What? I do occasional dotnet development on Linux. Using the dotnet SDK which is from Microsoft, and VS Code which is also from Microsoft.
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