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Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

I lead a .NET development team, and I have no plans start using Core any time soon. That's based on my experience testing it out -- just too different, too based on a myriad of nuget packages (which is too much like NPM for me).

This confirms my decision. I'm sure it will be nice once it's all sorted out. The money quote for me is below:

Since our goal was to represent any .NET platform we had to break it up into smaller NuGet packages. This works reasonably well if all these components can be deployed with the application because you can update them independently. However, when you target an abstract specification, such as PCLs or the .NET Standard, this story doesn’t work so well because there is a very specific combination of versions that will allow you to run on the right set of platforms. In order to avoid that issue, we’ve defined .NET Standard as a single NuGet package.

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Here's the other side of the coin, as someone who's worked primarily with npm (JS), composer (PHP), had a taste of cargo (rust) and of course yum, apt-get, etc.: packages are awesome. npm is weird and hellish because people write single-function packages, but that isn't the case in other ecosystems. NuGet provides an easy and familiar way for me to get into it, as opposed to having to absorb the entire ecosystem at once.

I agree though, that the challenge is different in a compiled language (from JS/PHP), and when dependencies get specific you might be out of luck (when .NET Core was announced I had a hard time following Microsoft's own tutorial because minor revision was different between two key packages)

Nuget does get a little fun when you are dealing with a solution with multiple library projects that feed into a final executable. So far, I've either had to upgrade all versions of a Nuget package across projects, or spend a lot of time messing around with app/web.config assembly redirects.

At least the granularity of Nuget packages is not at npm-level fineness, although it does sort of feel like it is trending in that direction.

Try paket, will save you a lot of headaches with the redirect stuff

_packages are awesome. npm is weird and hellish because people write single-function packages, but that isn't the case in other ecosystems_

I have no knowledge of how NuGet works but is there anything in NuGet that is stopping the developers from writing/using single line packages?

Technically, no, but the proliferation of those in the likes of the npm ecosystem is almost entirely due to the shittiness of the JS standard library (such as it is...)

. NET, however, has an excellent stdlib, so in practice you simply do not get packages like this.

I'm on the opposite side of the coin. I only start up a windows VM when I absolutely have to. Yet, here I am building an ASP.Net Core MVC web app on a mac using nothing but project.json and the command line dot net tool. So far its worked pretty well. I'd still personally use GO but my employee know .net so...

> and I have no plans start using Core any time soon.

It doesn't matter what your plans are. If Microsoft forces you to move on to something like .NET Core you will. Eventually, when it comes to ASP.NET there will no difference between the core and the non core version.

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