Live data from Hacker News

Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

andrewlock.net

71–80 of 357 posts

Re: Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

#71

.NET has been doing a lot of things right. My startup's codebase is nearly all .NET 7: landing page, web app, Windows service, API. The main non-.NET code is vanilla JS in the web app. I've been keeping a close eye on Next.js, which is very well done, but I love how versatile .NET is. With one language, I can write all of the above, and my dependencies are minimal thanks to .NET's rich standard library - a refreshing…

Fortunately NextJS and .Net isn’t strictly an either/or proposition. I’ve moved most of my new front-end development to NextJS at this point and use C# for most everything behind it.

Re: Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

#72
Odd question maybe, my company uses C# and I've been picking up more backend responsibilities. However, I'm a Linux and Neovim user. I do have Windows and Visual Studio available but I just find it awkward.

Is anyone here having success with Linux and Neovim for C#? Even trying to learn more about the language is awkward as so many resources go straight into VS.

Re: Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

#74
post #45

As a fan of O'Caml, I have to ask: what's the status of F# on .NET? ...and is it used much compared to C#, or is its use at least growing, or is it stagnating/dying?

Seems to be about the same as it's ever been. Still being updated and worked on, and still very few people use it.

My impression - the people who use it historically (and I've met a few) aren't the companies that typically proponent open source software and the like. They are "closed source" shops (e.g. finance, insurance, etc). Even I am not willing to post on more than a throwaway account. I'm currently using it for large scale production systems in a very large public company powering a large data volume product with very high peaks of customer traffic and it works a treat. We decided to try C# 9 after some F# because "higher management" - compared to F# the dev's have found it verbose and painful still, despite the new features.

The productivity benefits are small and sprinkled - I don't personally think there isn't one "killer feature/app". It isn't just one thing, its little things that add up. Given the team jumped from other ecosystems (e.g. Go/Node/etc) they found F# easier to approach than C#. This is the perspective of the team I run and it comes up in PR comments (I do less code writing these days). Comments like "don't have to do this in F#", or "we need a framework for this because C#" are known to occur. Easier unit test writing, less dep injection headaches, concise function passing, easier inlining of math for perf, easy mocking/stubbing, unions, etc etc.

The big weakness to me is that the people that use it typically don't want to flaunt it, and that means good mentoring, the best/simple patterns to use, etc and management buy-in are not really public. Communities that you can join are not into large scale apps, meaning good scalable patterns and lessons learnt are hard to find.

Re: Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

#75
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it with .Net 7 it becomes simply .Net and confusion with Framework, Standard, Core is now gone?

Yes. Has been that way since 5.

Which specifically wasn't named .NET 4 because that would be confused with .NET Framework 4.x :) Which I'm currently stuck on for work :(

Re: Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

#77
post #32

I'd be curious to know what is the actual adoption of .net core. I.e. of all the actively developed applications (not just new projects), what is the .net core / .net framework split. I found that the upgrade process is not seamless. Asp.net core has little to do with asp.net MVC. Winform introduced all sorts of contraints. The BCL is full of small changes or features missing. People are less vocal than for the pytho…

The move away from web forms has indeed been painful. Mostly because our web forms were pretty stupidly implemented, though. It’s a legitimate downer, though. It’s been a lot easier to migrate back-end services.

Nullable reference types are completely optional. You can turn them off at the project level. I find they make more sense for some projects (domain logic, etc.) than others (EF and API projects for example).

Re: Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

#78

[flagged]

> You now have “.NET 4.8.2” applications that cannot be upgraded to “.NET 5”. Try explaining that to a non technical person.

“A common convention in software is that new major version number of a platform indicates that software from earlier major versions may require changes, often quite significant, to function” is pretty easy for non-technical people to understand.

Re: Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

#79

I love the new dotnet ecosystem and use it professionally but am I the only one who thinks two years isn’t long enough for a “long term support” release? Obviously you’ll be able to run older versions of the framework so long as the underlying OS supports it but depending what type of environment you’re in this means you’re likely going to have to update perfectly working applications every two years. Do I think that…

You actually get three years of support from .NET for Long Term Support (LTS) release. You can find the full support policy here: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/platform/support/policy

Re: Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

#80
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It better be at a 30GB install size.

A 2TB nvme drive is less than $200. If VS is saving significant dev time, people would install it even if much larger install.

I think people question why VS is so freaking huge when it's contemporaries are not.

Most of that disk size is supposedly in the toolchain (requiring 2-60GB of disk space alone[1]). Why is this so big? Modern toolchains from other vendors are not this large.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022...

Post reply on HN