401–410 of 428 posts
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30 years ago we used DOS and DLL Hell was a completely unknown concept. We did have to deal with himem.sys though.
On the contrary, 30 years ago we were using Windows 3.0, which is about when dll hell started being a real thing. (DLL hell stopped being a problem a lot sooner than you probably think, too...)
Does not match my experience at work unfortunately.
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Perceived cool factor, I think. Both .NET/C# and Java are the core of Dark Matter Development [0]. They're what a huge chunk of developers and enterprise actually use but they're not cool and they don't get blogged about. Obviously the history of EEE and Windows only legacy means there's a lot of hostility to anything .NET specifically amongst a subpopulation of developers. However I don't think it sufficiently expla…
> It's a bit of a shame because it would be nice to have more startup opportunities in .NET Even if you ignore the history of companies like MS and Oracle what it comes down to is vendor lockin. If there's a chance a vendor will pop up in 3 years time with a huge bill, why take the risk when there are plenty of free alternatives.
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On the contrary, 30 years ago we were using Windows 3.0, which is about when dll hell started being a real thing. (DLL hell stopped being a problem a lot sooner than you probably think, too...)
>DLL hell stopped being a problem a lot sooner than you probably think, too Does not match my experience at work unfortunately.
Sometimes the issue is that people have tended to conflate "dll hell" and "dependency hell." That's an old pet peeve of mine and I realize it doesn't matter...
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Replace ".NET" with "Windows" maybe? AS a longtime original VB/Winforms developer - MS lost their mind on desktop development and didn't look back. They chased EVERY fad that could be chased. Silverlight, UPF, XAML, WPF, Islands, MAUI. This is one of those things - imagine if they'd focused on building an amazing and cross platform (ultimately) toolkit with just a basic drag and drop designer? Who cares about "stylin…
are you still doing desktop work? if so, what are you using?
Lightweight web apps mostly in python (Flask).
Slack apps / bots with a bunch of commands (backend does lookups, generates PDFs)
People don't fully realize what we gave up dumping desktop development, you used to be able to build our nice biz specific crud apps (customers, projects, scheduling etc) using a bunch of tools. These things were usually darn fast if you were careful and you could make them very keyboard driven (ie, put the keyboard shortcuts on button labels etc).
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XAML is good. It's very easy to build interface by nesting components then styling it if needed, and doing data binding. All the web alternatives are harder to use and came 10-20 years later.
XAML is why I’ll never write a Desktop App with .NET, who’s been unable to rid themselves from it. React, Vue, Svelte as well as Flutter & SwiftUI all implement different but vastly more productive reactive dev models. MAUI will not be resurrecting .NET Desktop Apps which have been on decline since WPF. Blazor Desktop Apps might, anything XAML won’t.
For example, my experience with CSS has been the opposite of that. F5 a million times before the layout works the way I want it to. Sometimes even googling how to do create some type of layout because I can't think of it on my own.
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> Replace ".NET" with "Windows" maybe? There's Uno, Avalonia, Xamarin Forms, and MAUI, all cross-platform. I think it's a mess no matter what.
In all fairness, at one point you could actually make sense of things. Unless I'm misremembering, until recently Avalonia was still being touted as primarily a replacement for Desktop WPF. I was shocked to see they're talking about mobile now too. I guess it's somewhat expected. Uno basically does what MAUI does. The main difference being, Uno has been around for a while longer and something you've been able to use f…
Why do you care about this stuff? I don't understand. Surely most developers can build a simple app with a few buttons easily in whichever framework they're using. This stuff doesn't really matter for I'd dare to say 90% of developers. What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff. And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.
Not sure why you think how difficult it is to put a couple buttons on a page and make them do something would have any effect on the success of a UI framework. That's literally not even a consideration when we make decisions on what to use for a project.
If WPF ran on other platforms, we would use it for everything. We use Avalonia instead, and it's pretty great.
But there are 2 basic types of multiplatform UI frameworks - the ones that wrap native controls and look like most other apps on the platform, and the ones that do their own rendering and look the same on every platform. Avalonia is in the second group, so if the former is a hard requirement then it is not a good choice.
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Replace ".NET" with "Windows" maybe? AS a longtime original VB/Winforms developer - MS lost their mind on desktop development and didn't look back. They chased EVERY fad that could be chased. Silverlight, UPF, XAML, WPF, Islands, MAUI. This is one of those things - imagine if they'd focused on building an amazing and cross platform (ultimately) toolkit with just a basic drag and drop designer? Who cares about "stylin…
Not only lost productivity, but getting executive buy in to invest in WPF was difficult after Silverlight. Kinda joking, kinda serious, but all the Microsoft UI changes in the last 10-15 years have definitely helped enterprise IT adopt internal web applications. :)
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Very true. I used to be a desktop dev but since Windows 8 MS has convinced me it’s better to do web stuff.
It’s fun to think that, after all these years, we are back to screen-oriented terminals (browsers) accessing mainframes (cloud apps)… I loved the 3278.
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msbuild had publish since at least .net 3.5 (when I started to use the platform) it was just a little bit akward to use tough. and of course dotnet publish is 1000x better than msbuild with it's obscure syntax (which got way better in .net5 and 6 with -p: syntax, etc.)
-p:Property=Value (or /p: Property=Value) has existed in Ms build since the beginning. That's not a .NET 5 or 6 thing.
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>From a management perspective, this is not bad. You get movable team members. I have a friend-of-a-friend who has a successful 30 person contracting business. They do C#. He , the co-owner benefits from this. I was responding to a question from a FAANG developer. FAANG developers don't get moved. FAANG developers move when they want to move: to projects that they find interesting; to other FAANGs; or to start-ups. A…
>FAANG developers move when they want to move: to projects that they find interesting; to other FAANGs; If a developer knows C# he can tackle more than one domain. Suppose you got bored and want to switch. Or there are new interesting opportunities. If you know C#, you just switch without having to learn a new language and libraries.
This. You see this as a positive. I see this as a negative. And we're both right, right? You are right in your domain, and I am right in mine.