Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#781

Post by coldtea » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 7:32 AM UTC

iamjustasking wrote: post #477

tdsamardzhiev wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For enterprise work I'd actually agree that nothing beats C#. I also love Haskell, but let's be honest - it won't get me hired, or at least not here in Bulgaria.

"For enterprise work I'd actually agree that nothing beats C#." - i'm sad to read this. It's a pain to develop even a simple thing with c#/java because of the 'great' lang design and ugly tools. "I also love Haskell, but let's be honest - it won't get me hired, or at least not here in Bulgaria." - with a toy lang, nobody(if sane) will hire you.

"with a toy lang, nobody(if sane) will hire you"

C# is the "toy lang"? How old are you exactly?

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#782

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:02 AM UTC

simplemath wrote: post #755

ams6110 wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure I believe that they're trying to do a "nice thing" out of the goodness of their hearts. They've held pretty tightly to .NET because in order to deploy anything developed in .NET you needed to buy Windows licenses. Recently that hasn't played out so well. Software developers look to minimize costs and overhead that doesn't contribute to their mission (e.g. licenses and license compliance). There's just…

Your analysis is absolutely solid, but I'm not sure anyone read this and thought "Oh gee how nice of M$ to give back". In the end I think this is overwhelmingly a net positive for both MSFT and developers.

You know, if MS had done this even a year ago, the project I'm working on would have the server-side in .Net instead of node. I'm replacing a very old .Net project having built up too much code debt to be maintained with a green field project using flux/react server and client. I really like ASP.Net MVC since v3 it's been a pleasure to work with and the first release of anything ASP that actually mirrored how I used ASP.Net for a long time before it. MVC meant no more hacking with asmx/ashx to work around the web forms event lifecycle issues. Razor is such a great view/template language I still can't believe it hasn't become more popular. All of that said, there really is a lot of power in being able to use the same JS tooling both server and client. JS has always been a favorite language of mine, and I've been using node tooling even in VS web projects for 3-4 years now for client resources (pre-build events with grunt, and now gulp). I think this makes a ton of sense in the wake of Azure as a platform. Especially if MS can do services in docker containers (windows or linux) and run on their infrastructure with relative ease. Companies are paying for the tooling (beyond express, now community versions), and they pay for ease of deployment/infrastructure. They don't want to pay for a lot of enterprise windows licensing anymore... MS sees the writing on the wall. What I think will be really telling, is if by the end of 2016, VS runs in linux and osx as well.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#783

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:08 AM UTC

Rapzid wrote: post #768

useerup wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

async/await is HUGE. It opens an almost frictionless asynchronous pathway from your code all the way down to asynchronous capabilities of the underlying platform. Which was always the problem with leveraging async/overlapped IO: It was too complex and it turned your application logic inside-out because everything had to be performed in callbacks. async/await takes that on directly: You get everything executed in call…

Tasks are pretty awesome and just about as convenient as Go-routines. Now if we could just get typed channels in .Net >:]

I don't think it would be very hard at all to create a generic CSP system with C# (or F# for that matter). I've built similar systems using WCF.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#784

Post by alkonaut » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:16 AM UTC

MrBra wrote: post #771

.NET newbie here. Could someone explain me if thanks to this it is currently possible to write GUI multiplatform apps?

It's possible but the windows ui libs like Windows.Forms and WPF won't be included in the core. You have always been able to use monk+Qt and this will likely improve now. See e.g MonoDevelop.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#785

Post by Jacky800 » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:19 AM UTC

This is a very bad news. .NET and Microsoft must die after apppl.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#786

Post by e12e » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:19 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #655

Here's Github repo: https://github.com/dotnet . Wow, these things are being released under MIT licence - who would have thought .Net would be more "free-er" than Java? In other news: * Visual Studio 2015 and ASP.NET 5 will support gulp, grunt, bower and npm for front end developers. * OmniSharp is a family of Open Source projects, each with one goal - To enable great .NET development in YOUR editor of choice - http:/…

It's amazing that there's not a concrete word about license (and patent grant) choice in the press release, or on the page(s) for MS Visual Studio Community Edition.

Someone should remind MS that we've been burned before by "open source" that turned out to be "open for what fits MS, not what fits you".

All that said, I'm happy to see this under MIT!

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#787

Post by piokoch » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:25 AM UTC

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #736

com2kid wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just a low level drone here at MS, and I obviously am not involved in any important decisions, but I'd like to add that all the above things happened back when the current generation that works here was growing up. We were all on Slashdot, being outraged and angry 13 year olds. Except now my generation works here, and I think the changes (such as all the ones announced today!) are a good sign of that. At least si…

Patent threats and lawsuits against Android OEMs. Locking down computers using UEFI Secure Boot and taking control away from the owners of the machine. Sabotaging the office document standard process at ISO. Corruption in cases where governments explored switching to alternative operating systems. Supporting software patents. All these happened within last 5 years (and continue to happen).

Frankly speaking when it comes to corruption, MS cannot beat HP and IBM here. The IBM case is a big one, investigated currently by most elitary anticorruption Police unit in Poland. See articles below.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#788

Post by mcv » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:28 AM UTC

jpgvm wrote: post #61

I'm a hardcore *nix guy but boy do I love me some C#. Up until now it's been the best language I have worked with but the worst platform due to it's lack of 'nice things' that we just expect from languages/ecosystems these days. Where 'nice things' is defined as being open-source, having open-source ecosystem of developer tools etc. This isn't so much the beginning (as good stuff has been happening for a couple of ye…

This is my impression too. I'm not terribly familiar with C#, and used to avoid anything from Microsoft like the plague, but a lot of stuff I hear about C# sounds like it's a bit ahead of Java. (Really, Java should be more like Groovy, if you ask me.)

But the JVM platform is great, and I'm just not going to get locked into a MS ecosystem. But if MS opens up to the rest of the world, well, that changes things considerably.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#789

Post by custardcream » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:33 AM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #733

jpgvm wrote: post #61

I'm a hardcore *nix guy but boy do I love me some C#. Up until now it's been the best language I have worked with but the worst platform due to it's lack of 'nice things' that we just expect from languages/ecosystems these days. Where 'nice things' is defined as being open-source, having open-source ecosystem of developer tools etc. This isn't so much the beginning (as good stuff has been happening for a couple of ye…

I actually have this conversation frequently with my developers (most of them are .NET), so I'm really happy to hear someone else say this as well. I've done about a an even split in my career with C# and Java and feel as competent as the next guy bouncing between the two languages and delivering projects for clients, but I like writing C# the most, by far. The language is more modern, things like async/await, Linq,…

Similar situation. I deal with Unix/windows approximately 50/50 from a devops perspective. My word I'll also take anything Unix over windows at the moment regardless of the tech. To be fair in the short term, windows is maximally productive but if you hit an edge case or a rough spot you're SOL, especially if it involves Microsoft support or scripting. Rough edges cost me a lot of money and willpower.

An example: I opened a case when IE9 was in developer preview with partner support. When they rewrote the download manager in IE for this release they changed how download prompting worked and removed a setting from the UI (and left it in the registry). This broke ClickOnce launches entirely for over 2000 users for us. Fast forward nearly 5 years and it's still broken, the case is still open and to get everything to work for the client we have to frig a registry setting on every workstation they roll out. That sucks for us and the client, badly.

This is a typical story for us. When you deal with VSTO, MSI packaging, managing large clusters of windows server machines, random bugs that just blow up in your face suddenly after working for years, signing code, trying to get repeatable builds out of a CLR solution and automating all of these things, forget it. PowerShell gets you 80% of the way there but the last 20% is a tar pit of pain and impossibility.

Now I've been in the Microsoft ecosystem for 20 years, certified and bought into it all. Perhaps I'm bitter and tired but I can't see past all this experience and have mixed memories of c#. All I see is hung instances of visual studio and working out which project file is buggered and all this is destroying the best language I ever used. I don't want to waste my life on giving them another chance.

There is literally none of the above on Unix platforms from experience. I've only encountered one bug in the last 15 years due to a CIFS kernel bug and RH fixed it within two days. I haven't had any automation friction at all.

I'm worn out and confused to be honest when I read back this post.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#790

Post by V-2 » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:44 AM UTC

miguelrochefort wrote: post #247

NicoJuicy wrote: post #145

Being a fan of Android and Microsoft for years... I truelly hope that Google would discuss about changing from Java to C#... They don't have to change to c#, but this would be a win for both of them (Microsoft and Google) and a huge loss for Oracle/Apple.

It's called Xamarin.

Yeah and it costs one grand a year. Plus it's playing constant catch up with Android SDK. I remember moving files manually or my projects wouldn't build (when Google made some change in folder structure that Xamarin hadn't reacted to yet). Don't get me wrong, I think it's awesome, it just has some limitations that are beyond Xamarin's control. Plus it's pricey.