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MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

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Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#81

Post by edgyswingset »

tomjen3 wrote: post #68
edgyswingset wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that just because a language runs on a platform with a potentially large number of third-party support (JVM) doesn't mean it's going to be nice to use. For example, I ended up having to write Java code when dealing with large XML data sets in a Clojure system, because the current offerings simply didn't let me do what I needed in fluent Clojure code. I suspect Kotlin has those same kinds of issues, just amp…

Kotlin is basically a nicer Java and will seemlessly integrate. You can even mix Java and Kotlin in the same project.

The fact that it integrates with Java isn't what I'm getting at. Developing in Clojure eventually forced me to write some Java, which I didn't want to do. I just don't see Kotlin as somehow solving that problem.

Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#82

Post by ZenoArrow »

wsc981 wrote: post #52
akshayB wrote: post #6

This is good news but little bit too late. Microsoft strategy of sticking with windows to slow down Linux and Mac back fired . If they opened up .Net few years back cross platform app development landscape would have been totally different today.

I'm not sure Microsoft came too late to the party. Perhaps MSBuild is a bit crappy (I don't know, never used it), but I can imagine Roslyn becoming more useful now on other platforms since it's open sourced. It'll be great that one can be sure the runtime behaves the same on all platforms Roslyn will run on. And it'll also be nice if new runtime features will be available on every platform at (more or less) the same…

> "And who knows, maybe someone will build a decent MSBuild replacement. Or perhaps the Xamarin guys already have a nice alternative."

You might want to check out FAKE, it essentially lets you write MSBuild configurations using F#:

http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/

This recent announcement means that a multi-platform FAKE in the near future looks like a good bet.

Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#83

Post by sosuke »

mb_72 wrote: post #79
CydeWeys wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there really that many people building .NET projects on non-Windows systems? It's been my experience that companies that are using .NET are pretty much full Windows everywhere.

I'm writing Mac, Android and iOS apps using Xamarin in C# using a shared PCL that is 99% the same code across all platforms. This might not be all that common, but Xamarin has seemingly been gaining momentum over the last couple of years.

I've been looking at Xamarin now for a while, how do you like it so far? Does it live up to its claims?

Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#84

Post by to3m »

Someone1234 wrote: post #19
serve_yay wrote: post #12

Hoo boy, MSBuild was always by far my least-favorite part of being a .NET developer. I would like to flippantly say they should just throw it away and replace it, but probably much too late for that.

I have no strong opinions for or against MSBuild. What is it that you dislike about it? Or what is it that other tools do that MSBuild fails to do? PS - I have done a lot of .Net development, but rarely did anything beyond the basics with MSBuild directly (mostly via Visual Studio, or took the pre-generated command line and stuck in a script).

I hated it too. I don't recall a single good moment about using MSBuild. I never once felt like I'd figured it out, nor that I was getting to grips with it. But perhaps its brilliance was just beyond my ken.

It was astoundingly verbose, rather poorly documented (I didn't think much of the official book either), extremely short on any kind of examples that might be usable with slight tweaks when you're getting started, and seemed to make unnecessarily heavy weather out of the simplest of tasks. Your debugging options are rather limited (especially if something goes wrong in one of your DLLs!), and I for one found the log files very hard to read.

(On more than four occasions, I also lost a lot of source files after doing a build|clean. I never managed to finger MSBuild for this directly, but there aren't that many programs that are invoked on build|clean, and fewer yet that rely a filing system watcher to tell them which to delete, so I know where my suspicions lie.)

I also have vague memories of finding out that only certain constructs could be made conditional, and that there were no facilities for abstracting conditions, making some of my files very repetitive and long-winded - but to be honest, at this point, I've blanked most of it.

Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#85

Post by tracker1 »

kenbellows wrote: post #7
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #3

I know MSBuild gets a lot of hate but this is still great news. The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be awesome. I'm curious, when everything is finally done, what the adoption rates will be like. Will hard-core Linux users who used Java migrate when it makes sense? Will they avoid it because "M$"? All good stuff.

The Mono framework[1] has been pretty popular in some circles for years now, so I imagine a decent amount of adoption can be expected once .Net Core proves stable. 1: http://www.mono-project.com/

For that matter, Mono has been sharing the parts of the new .Net Core as they come out and make sense to do so...

Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#86

Post by bigdubs »

serve_yay wrote: post #72
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at a mostly-Microsoft shop and I cannot fathom why anyone would want to deal with MSBuild for other platforms. There are so many better alternatives. And as bad as MSBuild is for building .NET stuff, at least it's the right tool for that job. Trying to shoehorn it into some other stack entirely, which you know is just going to cause even more pain? No. Just no.

Shit, I would probably build out an entirely separate build system and then just call it with MSBuild if I had to.

That's what people do already; why nant is a thing.

Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#87

Post by TheWiseOne »

cptnbob wrote: post #46
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at a mostly-Microsoft shop and I cannot fathom why anyone would want to deal with MSBuild for other platforms. There are so many better alternatives. And as bad as MSBuild is for building .NET stuff, at least it's the right tool for that job. Trying to shoehorn it into some other stack entirely, which you know is just going to cause even more pain? No. Just no.

What's even worse is that I recently jumped into asp.net 5 and tripped over three build systems and a pile of cack just trying to get it off the ground. Now msbuild as well!?! Also its not even the right tool to build .net stuff. Add the shoddy dependency resolution steps plus the shitty performance of NTFS on lots of small files (MFT contention) we have to wait 8 minutes for a build. I wrote my own system in powersh…

Something like Cake (http://cakebuild.net/), Bau (https://github.com/bau-build/bau) or Psake (https://github.com/psake/psake) are much better than using MSBuild.

Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#89

Post by rjbwork »

V-2 wrote: post #76
tomjen3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 year ago, yes. C# is awesome as a language but I don't see a reason to switch to .net when the JVM has Kotlin, which is nicer than C#, but still super lightweight and thoroughly pragmatic.

Nicer in what sense? I do like both, I'd take either of them over Java on any day, but whereas Kotlin is maybe better suited for functional style programming (immutability out of the box, data classes etc. - however .NET people always have F# for this stuff), it's hardly on the same level as C#. For instance Kotlin doesn't have reified generics (if I recall correctly they actually attempted it, but it's too hard to g…

>Kotlin's equivalent of LINQ doesn't use deferred evaluation.

Wow, I'm pretty surprised at that. Any kind of list comprehension/functional sub-language over collections seems like it ought to be deferred/lazy from the ground up. I'm doubly surprised at that from JetBrains.

Re: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core

#90

Post by mb_72 »

sosuke wrote: post #83
mb_72 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm writing Mac, Android and iOS apps using Xamarin in C# using a shared PCL that is 99% the same code across all platforms. This might not be all that common, but Xamarin has seemingly been gaining momentum over the last couple of years.

I've been looking at Xamarin now for a while, how do you like it so far? Does it live up to its claims?

I've mostly spent time on the Mac side of things so far, and have helped out a colleague with the mobile stuff. Recently they've added a lot of documentation for the Mac side that covers basically anything you want to know - or at least it covered all the stuff I wanted to know when I first started the Mac app 12 months ago.

For mobile, Xamarin Forms can be a little difficult to wotk with, but it's getting better all the time. I don't really want to bother with learning native development at the moment, and because we have a pile of calculations and logic in our shared PCL Xamarin is working out for us.

There is some criticism that the pricing model makes it expensive for people developing at the low end of the mobile market ($1 or $2 apps), however I think that's more a failure of that kind of market in general rather than a problem with Xamarin pricing itself.

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