The Microsoft .NET platform has been forked: Introducing Open.NET | Hacker News Reader

The Microsoft .NET platform has been forked: Introducing Open.NET

github.com

74 pointsghuntley66 comments

> Send a pull-request to https://github.com/open-dotnet/.github/blob/master/README.md containing a random emoji to receive an invitation to join this GitHub organisation which enables you to participate in the private planning discussions repository.

So...if you want to develop the "open" project, you have to join a private planning discussion? I appreciate the good intention here, but I think fundamentally that planning something like this should happen in the open. While you can say that this is an "open" method, I mean open as in "visible on search engines," and "visible to outside observers." Even a closed door with no lock and a "walk-ins welcome" sign on it is fundamentally a closed door.

Excellent points; I'm listening. Let's change the approach.

edit: adjusted.

Kudos

Seems like a way to game the number of collaborators displayed on the side-bar for every GitHub repo.

Membership of a GitHub organisation enables issues to be assigned to people in the community.

> Open .NET

> What would .NET look like without Visual Studio?

I am not sure what these people have been doing, but as someone who as been doing professional .NET development for the last two decades I have not used any Visual Studio at least since 2018. What is this headline trying to tell me?

> What use is an open-source programming language that can only be debugged with proprietary software?

Sorry, what?

> What would programming languages and a platform that didn’t have the Visual Studio baggage look like?

... what is "Visual Studio baggage"???

> What would .NET look like if it didn't lose that generation of brains back in 2006?

If anything, .NET had a Visual Studio lock-in back in those days, but not today ...

Sorry, I am really trying to understand the point here, but I just can't. Help? Also are we talking about .NET or "programming languages" here? Or both?

The same. I have been developing in C#/.NET Core for sometime and haven't used visual studio. I only use vim / vscode / Rider.

Even now that I work at Microsoft, I don't use Visual Studio. Its too resource intensive and I use vim to get the job done. Not sure why people use Visual Studio at all these days.

>Not sure why people use Visual Studio at all these days.

Intellisense, intellicode, having everything from refactoring, to debugging, to profiling, to publishing at one shortcut away.

Rider has all but intellicode, just (IMO) better. The main reason to use VS that I can see is a) there’s a free version and b) taste.

Other tools can do that too. The thing that keeps me on VS is muscle memory. And I'm fine with that. But that doesn't mean that there's no entire different world out there that's viable. :)

I haven't used C#, so don't really know, but doesn't Visual Studio have a great debugger for C# with things like custom visualizers? Looking from the outside, it seemed to me that for C# the Visual Studio debugger has an edge over the competition.

It used to, and it’s still a better choice if you’re still doing old school stuff like web-forms with GUI library extensions like Telrik, which a lot enterprise companies are legitimately still doing and to great effect.

But if you’re doing anything modern .Net, at least with C# then you won’t miss VS at all.

Me, I find Rider vastly superior in every way.

I only use VS when I need to do EF6 database first nonsense

>Sorry, I am really trying to understand the point here

The guy who forked the repo is claiming .NET is held back because MS is favoring Visual Studio and tools it sells for money instead of improving the open source ecosystem.

Which they do and did.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740701/microsoft-dotne...

https://dusted.codes/can-we-trust-microsoft-with-open-source

The worst part is the costing money tool isn't even good

I’ve worked professionally with .net for decades. At one point we had a few visual studio enterprise licenses. I haven’t used visual studio for C# since 2019 or something like that, because VSC is just flat out more productive for me personally.

I know some people are going to swear by some of the VS enterprise tooling, but we never missed any of it.

As far as .Net goes, this seems like an really odd time to do an open project. I mean, what are they going to be doing? Just copy paste official updates?

VS is bloated crapware

It’s a signal that the infrastructure is ready should MS ever attempt something like the hot reloading removal again. Of course it probably doesn’t have the resources to implement own features yet, but it may develop them. This is hopefully a threat to Microsoft to involve the damn community.

> Sorry, what?

I fail to understand your question, but can reiterate. The available good debuggers are proprietary, including the one that only runs in the proprietary version of VSCode. Thus you can’t really use it in another IDE - Same shit as with the original Visual Studio. OmniSharp is an effort to replace the proprietary debugger, but lacks features in comparison.

> ... what is "Visual Studio baggage"???

Patterns and actions relying on features in Visual Studio, either softly because every guide uses them (modifying project properties, changing the startup project, installing a package) and hardly because the implementation is literally inside of Visual Studio (almost hot reload).

> If anything, .NET had a Visual Studio lock-in back in those days, but not today ...

And it wasn’t great. Having had a .NET Framework job for a while I learned to like C# and hate Visual Studio. I’m glad most tutorials now use VSCode on Macs to get as far away as possible from VS and MS-isms.

I’m not glad they’re attempting to bring that terrible Visual Studio and Windows entanglement back. Hence I agree with the forker.

> Also are we talking about .NET or "programming languages" here? Or both?

They’re so closely related it doesn’t make that much sense to discuss them separately in this case. If you want to use C#, you need .NET. Technically this is about .NET, but probably with the main intention to save C#.

Do you have anything to back up those claims? As someone who makes a living out of working with .NET (albeit also a lot of other things) I call BS on every point. And please, don't link some irrelevant opinionated news articles from The Verge and whatnot again (which again only consist of ranting and Twitter screenshots), as the forker/OP already did ... Like what objectively is your problem with .NET and the way it is managed by Microsoft right now? For example you claim they bring back "Windows and Visual Studio entanglement"? Like, uhm ... what? And let's imagine for a second that that (whatever you are referring to) was true: How is this fork even attempting to solve this? Ranting in issues, READMEs and on HN surely isn't going to help.

You cited this[1] GitHub issue. In the comment section, I see this user[1] has been commenting many times saying negative things about Microsoft's open source commitment. Including this comment[3] saying:

> Maybe it is time to fork .NET and to get something like AdoptOpenJDK, etc…

However, this person hasn't done anything but forking other people's repos. Its kind of funny and sad.

[1]: https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/505

[2]: https://github.com/vintzl

[3]: https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/505#issuecomment-96123...

Does MSFT make "real" money from Visual Studio? Compared to Azure it must be spare change?

It would be like a commercial property developer hamstringing their property development by selling shovels to builders.

I can understand why Shovel Product Managers might want to keep shovels profitable, and not a subsidized product, but why are MSFT execs on board?

Edit: This may be a Apples and Oranges comparison but Azure bought in 15 billion in Q3 2021, Unity (which is sort of partially a .NET IDE) bought in 273.6 million in Q2.

After some level of tenure, many executives lose the feeling of being told no. If they have a strategic initiative they want to push (e.g. increase lock-in between .NET and Visual Studio), they've lived and worked in a culture where they can make decisions without impunity or anyone saying to say no; so why would they care about a bunch of random github comments?

To them, I doubt the community even feels like humans. They're numbers in a spreadsheet: userbases to be monetised; cattle to be bred and slaughtered for beef.

From the Verge article:

> Sources describe the move as a business-led decision, and it’s clear the company thought it would fly under the radar and not generate a backlash.

TL;DR is that some exec high up thought this would increase their KPIs, and have enough fear in the org chart (from 29 years of tenure and being a Corporate Vice President) that no one dares to question.

Let this action be clear: no matter how much a PR team spins, Microsoft's "open source" initiatives will never, ever, come close to true open source projects like Linux or SQLite.

Long term, its best to seek alternative means of funding, and reduce dependence on them. I don't think a commercial for-profit company should be on the hook to subsidize free software. The bottom line here is that the entity paying developers for their time has a very important say in what code they're going to work on.

Azure is a different business unit to dotnet / Crap I mean Visual Studio

No, it's the same business unit and GitHub now reports to the person who caused community desire to fork .NET. Here's the internal promotion email which was leaked from DevDiv on the same day of new GitHub CEO: https://pastebin.com/pA3uP0bG

See also the Candor newsletter which reported last week:

https://app.sparkmailapp.com/web-share/HUI6CY0rzr7BUdgLnS0Tv...

"After getting mauled allegedly in not one but 2 political fights at Mcrosoft, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is ready to move on. After a year of scandals and bad press for the division - what’s next?"

"Microsoft wants one thing: peace and quiet. With all the press GH has drummed up this year, it’s not surprising that it’s getting layered in under Julia Liuson’s org. The goal is no longer to innovate - just keep the ship steady and sell more. Meanwhile, Gitlab’s large co’ contracts are growing 75% YoY."

The developer division team is certainly producing division amongst the developers.

developing division

i meant to say I think it's different

isn't cloud a different business unit?

>It would be like a commercial property developer hamstringing their property development by selling shovels to builders.

>I can understand why Shovel Product Managers might want to keep shovels profitable, and not a subsidized product, but why are MSFT execs on board?

Shovel Divison Managers don't care if the company is profitable or if their actions hurt the company, they only care if their division makes profits so they can cash in some bonusses and make them seem important to company's future.

Does anyone think .NET ecosystem (platform, libraries, languages, tools) could get at the level it is without MS or someone else paying for millions of dev hours? Or that it can continue to stay at the top without millions of dev hours?

The only value I see in forking is only tracking MS close and undoing the "bad" changes MS does like the one with hot reload. Otherwise, I don't see how things could work without a massive investment.

that's the point of lots of OS forks, no?

Julia Liuson had something to learn from Bill Gates in Visual Studio vs .NET infight.

Bill Gates:

"One thing we have got to change in our strategy — allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory [sic] Windows."[1]

[1] http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/...

The part that follows is also interesting:

"Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well."

It is just a performance art, isn't it? It is hard for me to view it as a serious project...

It seems for me a guy wants the community to compete with MS, but the only thing he does is forking repos, inviting to discussions and posting on HN.

I don't think it will result in anything.

Looking at .NET repos in Github, they were forked over 2.5k times. What's different with this fork?

To contribute to a repo (i.e. send a PR) you need to fork a repo. This is different.

The https://open-dotnet.net/ does not work. I guess they are working on it?

It looks neat as the .Net framework has been splintered and changed. One without an MIT license and Microsoft control.

Not sure where you get that URL

I only see https://open-dot.net (which redirects me back to https://github.com/open-dotnet)

*He

Edit: Before I get downvoted for genderizing - I mean that it is one person.

'they' is generally always appropriate to use especially when it's a person you don't know personally. Heck, we use it for companies which are grammatically singular (in american english)

Here it is in fact one person though, which is also relevant to mention

And "they" can be used for one person though

... but as they just told you, doesn't hightlight that it's just one person, not multiple, as they wanted to do.

What’s the incident they refer to with yanking MIT code?

Does anyone have any backstory or links?

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28952502 (31 days ago, 59 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28973198 (29 days ago, 9 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28759630 (47 days ago, 106 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794352 (45 days ago, 336 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28897314 (35 days ago, 96 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28989341 (27 days ago, 54 comments)

Probably more too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1637565463&dateRange=custom&...

ICMYI there's some foundational issues (https://github.com/open-dotnet/.github/issues/7) at hand that need resolving such as .NET Foundation articles of incorporation give Microsoft veto over all decisions (like Zuckerberg) by the foundation. This problem should not block the community from progressing however as the .NET platform itself has been released under MIT.

I don't really see the problem. .Net was developed by Microsoft and so far they have done a pretty good job as a benevolent dictator. By all means, go ahead and fork it, but I don't see how this would improve the platform or gain trust from the enterprises using .Net. I mean, in my view even Mono was barely accepted and only because it ran on Linux.

At this stage, it is clear that different departments inside MSFT have diverging interests.

A solution to this would be splitting the company in two. Cloud and development tools, Azure, .NET, Github would be one part. The other would be Legacy and business apps, Windows, Office, Edge, gaming, hardware.

I like this initiative, although I fear it wont get a lot of real traction the statement is important and I believe a lot of us are thinking the same thing.

What is the relationship between .NET and LLVM? Can anyone please explain?

They don't really have anything to do with each other. (There was a project for a LLVM-based compiler for the .NET ecosystem, but as far as I know that never went anywhere)

Yes. Because dotnet is inherently JIT (e.g. linq expression tree and runtime code weaving and etc.) and you can't do that with llvm. So it was a dead end effort.

Here's a tutorial for implementing JIT in llvm: https://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/BuildingAJIT1.html

Also, there was a plan to AOT compile .NET not only for WASM targets but also for console.

Learned something new. Thank you.

None. LLVM is a compiler toolchain. Basically it takes care of the back-end of your compiler. .NET is a framework (native libraries + CLR) usually associated with C# ecosystem.

it's used in https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor and Blazor is part of the .NET developer platform

I forgot about Blazor and all that WebAssembly stuff... Thank you, I think this is why open-dotnet maintains a fork of LLVM.

Interesting project, good luck. Wish I could help.

Well well well. Seems like post has been Flaged. Again somebody wants to bury the voices. Well done M$. Well done.

I have no idea what you are talking about but would love to hear you out because it's clear there's pain. I don't work for Chocolatey and never have. Contact me please.

not sure if this is on topic, but what is the advantage of the .NET platform over Swift/_Kit and (especially) the JVM? Is it just the platform for Windows-specific things?

This is between the platform and C# itself, but the dotnet world gets usability improvements years / decades before Java. Nullable annotations, nicer generics, value types, Linq, type inference, more intuitive memory limits settings, ... and so many more. It's also got some opinionated standard(ish) solutions - you know which DI interface you'll use, likely which GUI toolkit you'll use. .Net/C# also had the modules and installation sorted for quite some time. And .Net FFI is so much better to deal with. And .net has a built-in async support.

Ikvm and similar projects show that they're roughly equivalent in power once compiled. But the .net dev friendliness is so much better imo.

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