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Comment by sumnole | Hacker News Reader

the .net ecosystem is somewhat pay to win - its like the apple store of the devtool world, clients are actually willing to pay. if your company has the funds, you have access to some of the best tools in development, but you can get pretty far with its free options too.

C# is quite a nice language to work with. historically projects were very enterprisey oop monsters but cleaner functional paradigms are trending in the .net space.

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Yes, I quite like C#, the language. That's why I put so much effort into trying to make it work - it's become one of my favorite languages!

You can absolutely write in a functional style. It does not have to be the enterprise OOP monsters of the past. Apart from something radical such as adapting a Hindley-Milner type system, I'm not sure it can support functions much better than it already is.

I think most people simple oppose to the idea of a static type system, and my experience is that static type checking is an absolute time saver in the long run for large long lived. Significantly.

I'd love to hear more about the top tier paid tools. I haven't really experienced that before.

Closest I can think of is the days of yore where .NET Component licensing was a thing that was encountered frequently enough it was mentioned more prominently in books. This was useful for a lot of 3rd party developers that wanted to provide either tooling or runtime libraries to IT Shops. UI Toolkits and other 'specialized' libraries would use this mechanism as a way to keep some level of IP Protection.

I ran into this scheme in the wild with Devart's DotConnect for Oracle; at the time it was worlds better than the free 1st party providers, and came with some interesting T4 templates for generating models for either EF or their special adaptation of L2S, and MVC CRUD HTML generation. Fairly cheap for an unlimited site license too.

General dev tools: ndepend, ncrunch, Redgate sql kit, Jetbrains dot suite, LinqPad

RAD components: Telerik, Asp.net zero

Libraries: EPPlus, SyncFusion PDF

Editors: VS enterprise, JetBrains Rider

DB: Sql Server OS: Windows, Windows Server

MS products for biz: Azure DevOps, Teams, Office Suite

misc Windows tools: Listary, Directory Opus, Chocolatey, PowerGrep

all stuff that makes the dev experience very comfortable

Why is any of this necessary?

It's not, although Microsoft absolutely tries to make it much easier to write/deploy/maintain C# in an all-Azure tech stack. That's good or bad, depending on whether you have other reasons to be on Azure.

I'd say Visual Studio (not VSCode) is pretty much the only not-really-optional, not-really-free dependency. I suppose that means you also need to buy Windows.

Personally, while I use(d) C# for work and I think it comes with a solid toolchain and I have no big complaints, I have never chosen it when I could choose the stack from the beginning.

With lsp-mode you can write C# in emacs and still get Intellisense code completion!

This list to me reflects a different element of the .NET ecosystem: .NET teams don't just buy into .NET, they also adopt often buy whole hog into a grab bag of other MS solutions alongside.

Are Windows Server, SQL Server, Azure DevOps, Teams, Chocolatey, and PowerGrep really a better dev experience than Linux, Postgres, Github, Slack, apt, and actual grep?

Many are debatable, but SQL Server & Windows Server are honestly a huge pain to deal with, and on top of that cost a boatload in licensing fees. Even Microsoft has decided Azure devops is a waste of time post github acquisition and it is apparently eventually going away. Teams honestly sucks in comparison to Slack.

That is seriously outdated in 2021. A modern .NET developer use Postgre, SPAs like everyone else, vscode notebooks, VS Code, etc.

Visual Studio or JetBrains rider is the only thing a professional developer needs. Which is tiny investment for a professional. The rest of the products I have not seen in new projects use for years.

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