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I'm going to ignore the "Shit HN says" vibes on this one for the most part, but I suspect that Microsoft and the Azure team specifically might have some relevant thoughts about building distributed systems regardless of if you like their dashboards or not.

As for Blazor, I think you might be missing the larger point here that I am trying to make. But .NET is still this Windows thing in the minds of most people. That hasn't officially been true for a couple of years now but the .NET crowd are coming to things like Linux and Front End now for the first time.

There are about to be a lot more conversations between say the React crowd and the Enterprise app development crowd, I am actually excited to see what they can all learn from one another.

I'd agree with them that the portal is terrible. Multiple times a day I get blank page errors, where the page is completely blank except for a single non-sensical error message in black text.

However their actual services are also pretty terrible. Pretty much everything takes significantly longer to deploy than the AWS couterpart. There are so many preview and deprecated features that it is often hard to judge exactly what feature set you are getting, this is often compounded by the fact that almost everything has multiple SKUs which also change available features. Azure AD RBAC is a bit of a mess, although its conceptually simpler than AWS IAM policies its just a pain to use in practice, and its often slow for changes in permissions to actually reflect. Azure VM disks are annoying to use too, you can't set the size of the OS drive at creation and extra data disks come unformatted. "Grossly incompetent" is probably an overstep though, Azure is very impressive, just not as impressive as its competitors right now.

Having said all that their are a couple places where Azure really shines in my opinion:

* Resource groups (GCP has a similar feature) allow you to more easily keep track of related resources across services. * Price transparency. Many (not all) services tell you up front hourly/monthly costs as you are deploying them through the portal. You don't have to track down a pricing page or calculator yourself. * Azure functions are amazing when using C#/.Net. A huge amount of the regular boilerplate is abstracted away into simple C# annotations so you can get a large % of business logic.

Hi, I work on the portal team. Would you mind sharing what the issue is you're seeing?

Hi, can you guys look at the portal security? In some corporate accounts most people have limited access to do stuff, but it is all enabled; you spend a few minutes to create a new resource just to get an access error after you submit, when it should be disabled (displayed, but disabled) if you cannot do it, do the access check before not after. There are so many options we never know which one is enabled and which one is not.

Hi, thanks for replying. I'll send you a message on Monday when I get back to work to recreate it.

I think I might agree that the Azure portal is slow, has bad UX and is somewhat inconsistent but I very much suspect that with the pace of change in cloud systems, it is very likely to be driven by some database so that it is easy to create new config pages for each new product without having to write an entire new web app.

It is a web app though and I wouldn't see that AWS is necessarily ahead. The IAM setup is still very head scratching, although some things like SES setup with DNS are very easy.

Like someone else said, not really related to .Net

What specifically do you find slow? I work on the portal team and would love to hear specifics that we can go chase down.

Here are some random things I clicked on:

    Dashboard takes 12s
    An app service takes 40s
    The deployment centre takes 22s
    Opening a single deployment log takes 4.5s
    Opening process explorer takes 30s
    Opening kudu took 12s

And this is on a saturday morning, obviously during the week it's much worse.

What did they abandon? Silverlight? That went the same way as Flash because plugins were killed by browsers and mobile. Blazor is much different and a core part of the web stack. Considering you can still run WebForms apps written in C# 2.0 today, support and backwards compatibility is actually a strength of this ecosystem.

But yes the Azure dashboard isn't great, however that's not relevant to .NET.

FWIW Silverlight is _still_ being supported. EOL is October 12, 2021.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/sil...

As context, AngularJS EOL's December 31st 2021. Silverlight debuted 2007, AngularJS 2010.

Everything. There isn't a single first-party desktop GUI framework left that is actively supported and developed. UWP is of course still available but modern apps have failed.

You can still use WPF and WinForms, but they have serious limitations and feel old. WPF for example makes G-SYNC switch to 60 Hz.

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf

https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms

https://github.com/dotnet/winforms

>There isn't a single first-party desktop GUI framework left that is actively supported and developed.

This is demonstrably false...

Well, yes and no. We can certainly agree that neither WPF nor WinForms are dead. How could they be? There’s simply no alternative. However, they sure aren’t alive either. Development has been stalled for many years and both are very old.

I’m pretty sure it’s no longer feasible to modernize even WPF. I just checked: It still has its G-SYNC issues, even on .NET 5.

Totally forgot about Xamarin too because it’s so irrelevant. But maybe MAUI will change that, who knows. I’ll believe it when I see it I guess.

> How could they be?

They could be EoLed.

> There’s simply no alternative.

Are you seriously saying there are no alternatives to WPF or Winforms?

>However, they sure aren’t alive either. Development has been stalled for many years

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDYcq1yKhiA

> and both are very old.

Linux is old.

> I’m pretty sure it’s no longer feasible to modernize even WPF. I just checked: It still has its G-SYNC issues, even on .NET 5.

Or because the issue only has 6 thumbs up on Github, so MS is spending its resources elsewhere.

> Totally forgot about Xamarin too because it’s so irrelevant.

Sorry, but you just read as so salty you're hard to take seriously.

What is the alternative then? How would you have created a new Windows desktop application in 2015? 2018?

And yes, since 2012 there were no major changes to WPF. And even these changes were small. The last truly major change came with .NET 4.0. So there was a decade of almost nothing, even while XAML evolved with UWP. It truly doesn't get any more dead than that.

Of course I'm salty. WPF promised a lot, delivered some then died. Xamarin wasn't even part of Microsoft back then. UWP is a joke. Microsoft neglected the "Win32" desktop for way too long. Now it lets the community do what it should've done ages ago.

> How would you have created a new Windows desktop application in 2015? 2018?

Xamarin worked in 2016, as did UWP itself. Failing those Win32. Funny that you're arbitrarily throwing in a year, given that your OP didn't mention it, but whatever. If anything you can criticize MS for making too many UI frameworks lol.

You keep calling things that are literally still supported "dead". How about you use terms with real meaning, instead of just saying things that are literally untrue...

> It truly doesn't get any more dead than that.

> Of course I'm salty. WPF promised a lot, delivered some then died.

> We can certainly agree that neither WPF nor WinForms are dead.

Okay I'm done here. I wish you the best with your salt.

Also both in very active development:

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml (WinUI 3)

WinUI 3 includes all of what used to the the UWP controls and Renderer but "lifted and shifted" out of OS updates and also made accessible to non-UWP (primarily Win32) applications in Project Reunion (and techniques such as "XAML Islands").