Hacker News Reader

Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

You can use .NET without ASP.NET. You also don't have to use all of ASP.NET either, it just comes with a full featureset and the default templates are configured for easy productivity. You can bind directly to sockets and write TCP responses using the fantastic memory and networking code, or use the robust Kestrel webserver to write low-level HTTP responses, or go up the stack and let it handle everything while you only deal with objects.

.NET supports as much ceremony as you want to deal with.

View on HN

> You can use .NET without ASP.NET. You also don't have to use all of ASP.NET either, it just comes with a full featureset and the default templates are configured for easy productivity

This is only true in theory, but couldn't be further away in reality.

Microsoft suffocates everything which is not built in-house 1), so there is absolutely no OSS ecosystem going on in .NET which would allow a choice of different non-ASP.NET web frameworks.

Other languages have a wealth of different web frameworks and some are super basic and lightweight and others are huge with batteries included.

You don't get that in .NET at all. Everything is ASP.NET Core, and ASP.NET Core is a typical Microsoft product - an attempt to build a one size fits all solution, the magic silver bullet to solve everyone's problems at once. Like with all silver bullets, when trying to please everybody you end up pleasing nobody.

1) Except F#. In F# you will find a more vibrant OSS community and non ASP.NET alternatives (most famously Suave), but only because Microsoft doesn't care about F#. Instead of creating an equal level playing field for C# and F# they are morphing C# into an F# hybrid and eventually will stop caring about F# even more than now.

It's completely true in reality. I've used .NET for the last 4 startups and use various layers as needed for performance and flexibility. I know many other people and companies doing the same, and it's one of the main advantages of how much .NET gives you to pick and choose from.

ASP.NET is not a single monolithic thing, the Core evolution has made everything modular and you can plug and play the parts you want. You can use just routing to translate URLs to endpoints, or just the view engine, or just the serialization bindings, or just razor pages, or just MVC, or just low-level HTTP responses, or just GRPC, or anything else. The entire pipeline is a series of middleware, which itself layered on the Kestrel webserver, which itself is layered on low-level sockets wrapped with Pipelines and Memory APIs.

There is no one-size fits all, and asp.net explicitly recognizes and solves for it. The issue might be your expectation that there is a small/light and large/heavy framework. There isn't, you just make one to fit you.

I'd say it's the community that suffocates everything not developed by Microsoft, not Microsoft itself directly.

It's probably a cover your ass situation, especially at the larger, more conservative, enterprise-y, non-tech companies .NET is frequently used at. No middle manager would get fired for suggesting to use a Microsoft developed & endorsed solution instead of using some hipster open source framework.

On the first part - I agree - and it's exactly this (MS's overwhelming influence on forcing direction) that keeps the .NET ecosystem back.

For ex, AFAIK, there was no community participation on DI Design and community feedback on DI design was rejected. Then it was made the default in ASP.NET.

https://blog.simpleinjector.org/2016/06/whats-wrong-with-the...

Well they're basically turning C# into Scala, and Scala is (rightfully) dead/dying, can't die fast enough IMO, so maybe they are just hastening the demise of C# so F# can take the throne.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com