Hacker News Reader

Comment by numlock86 | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

View on HN

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, 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.

>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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com