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Comment by merb | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I actually fell in love with .NET Core 2.0. While their naming is still confusing and it's hard to know what will come next. I found myself amazingly productive with Razor Pages. It's really cool if you don't need an SPA and you could do everything pretty damn fast. It's like WebForms, but without the Microsoft specifics and instead relies on the good old html5 part to make an app great.

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I was talking with a friend yesterday. He got a position as a manager for a group of Java/Oracle devs. We started talking about how being a manager wasn't all its cracked up to be. We are coders and we are really good at what we do.

What makes coding more "fun" is the .NET framework. It had its headaches, but its a really nice and polished framework for getting things up and running. Especially with web building. .NET 4+, C#, and Core are Microsoft's message to the development world that they hear us.

Here's hoping they continue with this trend.

That is one thing I always admired about .NET from afar: there was generally one fairly polished framework that you could reasonably trust. In Javaland I feel like I sometimes I have to second-guess everything to make sure I'm using the "best" implementation of something.

That and C# is an ISO standard which is pretty cool.

As a non-apologetic Java-fanboy I can attest to "I have to second-guess everything to make sure I'm using the "best" implementation of something." This is true. The Spring Boot libraries helps to alleviate that a bit.

It's a good and a bad thing. It's good beacuse there is a lot of competition.

I'm a C# developer who has been learning React for the past year, and it really is an exhaustive job to look for the right JS library for every case, this is my process:

1. Facing a code task.

2. Asking myself, should I reinvent the wheel or should I look for a library?

3. Google for libraries solving the task, open at least 5 npm/github tabs.

4. For every tab, I should make sure the library is not too big for my needs/popular/still being maintained/not too many open issues. -Closing the tabs that didn't pass this step.

5. Taking a look at documentation/examples to determine if it can solve my problem. -Closing the tabs that didn't pass this step.

6. Testing the library and see if I can make it work.

7. Implement it in my project.

It's a really different environment, and it has its advantages, it's just that Microsoft has spoiled me a little with their out of the box implementations.

As a dev that's trying to brush up on JS after neglecting it for years, it's really hard to know where to start.

> That and C# is an ISO standard which is pretty cool.

Microsoft publish older versions of C# through ECMA, but that documentation is always behind the implementations (which are all now owned by Microsoft). The latest ECMA document is for version 5.0 of C#.

For years it was not really true. You need DI framework? Study all benchmarks and comparisons for 10 most common DI frameworks. Need ORM? Welcome to the NHibernate vs Entity Framework debate. Logging? Here you go with another 10 choices.

After a year-long pause in .NET development I got back into it recently and I can only agree. As a Linux dev, .NET core is an amazing product and it's incredibly productive compared to JS, Go or Java.

I'm also fairly exited for Blazor so I can write fullstack C#.

When I heard they bought github, my first thought was that I hope they enable this on github pages. Dynamic github pages would be amazing and it would attract a lot of new developers to Razor Pages.

> I found myself amazingly productive with Razor Pages

I'm curious, compared to what?

Plain old MVC.

SPAs too, it will depend on every project, of course, but a lot of projects don't actually need a REST API, and don't need a client side SPA with all the bindings and parameters coming and going, a lot of projects will be perfectly fine with server rendering.

Odd statement considering you can do ASP .NET Core MVC with Razor pages too. Which is usually my main approach to ASP .NET Core.

actually I'm a java guy or to say it differently, a scala guy and i mostly use mvc to create my normal web stuff. however with razor pages I'm so much faster to do stuff. because it's a little bit simpler to setup. Your model is actually just "code behind" and you could still have a good structure. and as a bonus, razor view engine is like twirl (scala project) minus some quirks. also you can still easily add typescript, etc. Or even make a SPA with the WebApi and SpaServices (heck I even use the Webpack Middleware). It's just amazing how integrated .Net Core 2 feels. And the easy stuff is already integrated into the Framework, like Authentication/Authorization. I've never had a secure cookie authentication running that quickly.

actually when I looked at .net core 1.0 I basically already tought it is abadonware, because of the new build system, because i wasn't a huge fan of c# and lot's of stuff just didn't worked, but since we needed to migrate our old WebForms application I somehow tought that before rewriting everything, it might be a good idea to look into it and it somehow clicked. c# is really moving fast and the recent additions even makes myself as a scala programmer feel more at home.

If you want to build an SPA, their boilerplate[0] for it is also excellent and supports several (angular, react, react-redux... unfortunately they deprecated Vue support [1] because it was great, but that's easy to bootstrap from react starter) and they even support server-side prerendering with a sidecar

[0]: https://github.com/aspnet/JavaScriptServices [1]: https://github.com/aspnet/Announcements/issues/289

How would you compare .NET core and the JavaScript ecosystem (node + frontend frameworks)?

.NET's ecosystem is somewhat lacking compared to Javascript. This is what I love about node.

On the other hand, the standard library that .NET provides is superior.

From my experience, it's possible to deploy a .NET site with just a hand-full of 3rd party dependencies (if any).

Well, you can as well call javascript code and use any node package from net core

https://dotnetthoughts.net/using-node-services-in-aspnet-cor...

That what made my decision to use dotnet core for web app

Its also like php^; whip stuff up quickly and easily, but keep your eye on the ball, or you get hit in the face by spaghetti code.

There's certainly something to be said for an easy way to get running quickly, when you can't be bothered with an SPA.

...but it doesn't scale. :)

(^ the comparison is more apt than you might imagine; razor pages are the 'one file per logical page' model for asp .net core, and very very reminiscent of webforms, and all the legacy that carries).

(... and don't even get me started on razor components, where every UI interaction (ie. every single browser event) involves a full round trip to the sevrer to rerender the component state, due in .net core 3.0.

I'm just saying: Microsoft have done some excellent work with .net core and kestrel but that doesn't mean every idea they have is a good one)

you can write spaghetti with every language in every framework.

btw. razor pages doesn't mean that you need to write spaghetti code. I've seen tons of MVC code where the view layer got way too much code.

most of the time it will help if people actually only put the bare minimum of code into the view layer. (only if/for/etc where absolute necessary)

Sure, but... I suggest that it is a trade off in which functionality is exchanged for convention and simplicity...and perhaps not for good reasons, or in a way that encourages good outcomes by default.

If I was under the impression the ASP.NET team was on the ball and agreed with the decision they were making, I'd be more prepared to run with it... but I'm not.

For example, there's an open github issue discussing the concerns people have raised about the ASP.NET team suggesting that razor pages are better than MVC.

Read it yourself and you'll be extremely familiar with the various opinions on the matter:

https://github.com/aspnet/Docs/issues/6146

This, is again, as I said before, an example of not everything that (specifically the ASP.NET team) does, being a good idea.

well most of these concerns are from people that actually never tried to run with razor pages, which is really sad.

as said my background was basically 5 years or more working in mvc and even partially working on the framework itself. and I would say that Razor Pages is a good starting point for any application.

currently I think both, Razor Pages AND MVC is important, but it's so easy to use both, so there is no problem. If something grows to much you can easily split it into the old traditional MVC paradigma, but actually most of the time I migrate directly to a web api instead of dotnet core mvc. (at the moment I have 2 mvc controllers, which are basically the same as web api 2 endpoints (no view/no model))

also razor pages is kind of MVVM which is common more (i mean in the javascript world more stuff is mvvm than mvc, not sure why java/c# can't follow that aswell?!) and more for UI related frameworks (which razor pages of course is) but most people didn't realized that on this github issue..

Exactly this, if you've got crazy logic going on it should be removed from the view and done in the controller. The only code in your view should aid displaying model data and defining the layout output. I usually do my best but of course there are exceptions, especially if using third party libraries for views.

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