.NET 6 Released

Is there any reason I should care about .NET today if I'm not already in the ecosystem? I've done C# professionally in the past, and C# is a good language. I wish Microsoft focused on open source and wider industry adoption for C#/.NET sooner so that it could have taken some share from Java. Now .NET is finally open source but Microsoft is a bad steward of the open source ecosystem for .NET, and I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable to say to my team "let's do this next project in C#". I don't see any particular reason to make my own tools in C# vs anything else.

So without already being in an existing Windows-based Microsoft shop, is there any reason I should be interested in .NET today?

We used to have a saying on the team when I worked there:

"Nobody can name things like we can't!" (followed by cry-sobbing)

The more serious response to this is:

For better or for worse, The .NET Framework (which is now squarely legacy tech) has stuck around and been reliable. People have had their trust in it validated. For two decades now, if you're a CTO at some big enterprise, you know that .NET Framework will get the job done for much of your development needs. From a Microsoft branding perspective, this is amazing. But it's got all kinds of problems can't be fixed unless you break everyone. Uh-oh!

This is the biggest reason why branding and naming has been so complicated pver the years. And it's even come with little sub-problems, like the fact that the version number for one "flavor" of .NET would match up with the version number for another "flavor" of .NET and so now you're screwed no matter which decision you pick.

A cleaner approach would be to throw it all away and do a complete rebrand (we had a little proposal to call it "Concert" where C# and F# could be played in harmony with each other, how cute) but with that you throw away the brand of one of the most successful pieces of technology ever produced by the company. Not exactly a winning proposal.

The other factor here is that with .NET there is so much software involved. It's three entire programming languages, a runtime, a huge standard library, a web framework, a database access and management framework, a machine learning framework, several Windows app frameworks, a mobile framework, IDE tooling, command-line tooling, and a bunch of other stuff too. .NET is far larger than many other competing stacks in terms of what a single vendor produces. Since Microsoft produces so much software for .NET and aligns their releases, they also message each one, and with that there's a big sea of stuff to keep track of.

I don't know if I have an answer for how to handle the complexity of it all. A lot of folks I know in the F# community only keep track the F# language and IDE tooling updates, then dive into specific stuff only when they care about it (e.g., doing web programming? check out the ASP.NET release notes). But that may not be an option if you're a decision-maker at a company.

Is it possible to load ".NET Framework" assemblies into ".NET 6" applications?

(We have a lot of .NET Framework libraries, shared between different applications, and a complex dependency graph between them. So I'm wondering if it is possible to migrate away from .NET Framework by starting with the executables and working our way down the dependency graph.)

In my country and some European states .NET is far more popular among devs than Java. Depends mostly on the region and what is taught in universities. The two most popular unis in my country all use teach .NET in the final years of studies and a lot of professors are MS MVP's.

No, you can however have .NET Standard assemblies that can load into both .NET (Core) and .NET (old) applications.

Those use a common API subset, and are a stopgap to make migration easier.