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Comment by Aurelius3 | Hacker News Reader

As someone just getting into .NET (c# desktop applications) anything I should know about .NET and/or it's history?

Microsoft will frequently hype up things only to drop them 1-2-3 years later. Beware of the hype, especially when coming from MS.

Also, keep stuff up-to-date, MS will at the same time maintain things forever and drop them mercilessly (look at .NET framework itself; it still runs - so counts as "maintained"; but if you didn't migrate to .NET core/ .NET5 / .NET6, you're in a very bad position for the future. With the announcement of .NET core they made a lot of code obsolete).

The previous two things combined create a somewhat bizarre situation: you want to keep up to date with the latest things MS is up to.... but not TOO up-to-date, because you can get into the "hype that will be killed" train. E.g. .NET core 1 was too early to jump onboard - wasn't clear that it's not going to be an UWP. But by .NET core 3, you'd better pay close attention and be ready to invest whatever it takes to move on to the new tech. Probably around .NET core 2.1 was the moment when one should've confidently said that "MS is serious about this .NET core stuff"? (though the exact timing is of course debateable)

.NET Framework was actively developed for two decades. It's not a jab at them to finally move on to a new runtime while simultaneously providing a very excellent migration path.

And all the things Microsoft "hypes up them drops after a few years" have low adoption compared to their main offerings anyways. It would be silly of them to continue actively developing things like Silverlight when everyone saw that better options were available.

It makes perfect sense to do what they do! And in all honesty sometimes they grind for a very long time before achieving true success (see: Xbox).

That said, people don't always realize how many things Microsoft tries (and subsequently abandons, because of course not all of them are going to be a success). That .net core was a success is clear now; but you could've easily believed that UWP will be a success and invested in it (in fact, I know teams who did, with really bad consequences for them). What I say is... just wait a bit. In the early days, not even Microsoft knows what will succeed, and they will "sell" their new initiatives very hard (of course!).

>> Microsoft will frequently hype up things only to drop them 1-2-3 years later.

Same as Google. Same as YC :)

The main important historical fact is the jump from .NET Framework to .NET Core.

Core is cross-platform, whereas Framework is Windows-only.

Also, some APIs were put in before generics were introduced and thus don't have type safety. The main ramification of this is to basically always use things in the System.Collections.Generic namespace over other collections.

The desktop GUI story is awful and Microsoft have no good ways of fixing it.

Most everything else is awesome. .NET core or .NET 6 is what you want.

What do you think of WinForms?

WinForms is great. There are several companies making WinForms components (controls) still.

https://www.devexpress.com/products/net/controls/winforms/

https://www.syncfusion.com/winforms-ui-controls

https://www.nevron.com/products-open-vision-winforms-ui-cont...

https://www.infragistics.com/products/windows-forms

https://www.grapecity.com/componentone/winforms-ui-controls

.NET Core is where it is now, and the UI story is (as always) evolving FAST. Make sure to build a good separation between back- and frontend, and be ready to switch

If you are lucky and you are making not-very-complex UIs, you can make a thin wrapper using some of the "newer" frameworks. If you make heavy/classic UI's you will probably have to go for WPF or a Third party framework instead.

.NET 5 nixed the "Core" naming I think. It's all .NET now. (They kept "ASP.NET Core" for libraries)

Ah right. ".NET" is it. Not "Framework" (Which no one ever pronounced before) i.e. 4.X

This sounds like good advice no matter what language/framework

Yeah, use Qt instead :)

You are basically selling your soul to Microsoft. Microsoft is controlling virtually all development even on the open source side.

Also, expect to write 5-10 times more code than with other popular languages. You may not notice this when you come from Java or C++ because then it is an improvement.

Hate Microsoft much? You’re not selling anything to Microsoft. You sound like you just stepped out of the 90s.

As for the misinformation about writing 5-10 times more code than other popular languages, which languages would that be?

It’s bullshit. There is not even a 2x factor between high level languages when it comes to productivity (and lines of code is a shitty metric to begin with. Typing speed is most definitely not the bottleneck for programmers)

I did not speak about productivity or typing speed. Readability and reading speed is a factor affected by lines of code.

Switching between files when every class is in its own file and you need to touch half a dozen classes for each API endpoint, is more of a factor...

To be pedantic, It is entirely possible in .net to have either multiple classes per file or multiple files per class.this has been in since least .net 2

Pardon my formatting I'm on a phone

Namespace foo{ Class class1{} Class class2{} }

And

Partial class foo{ }

Do you understand that this is a choice made by someone instead of a requirement?

It's not just idiomatic but pretty much standard in C# to have a single file per class so it's a fair criticism.

No it's not "idiomatic". Stop this nonsense. Look at the biggest C# code base, ASP.NET Core, and there are many instances where this is not the case.

You don't need to preface a method with `private` to be so but people still do it, why? My theory is the influx of Java dev influences, same with the "One class per file nonsense".

Where I work it is a hard convention. It is also a sensible convention because anything else makes the codebase even harder to navigate/refactor and whatever.

When working in teams, you really shouldn't put more than one class in one file, except for rare exceptions of very small and inconsequential classes. Otherwise the files get pretty big and the chance of merge conflicts get bigger.

The underlying problem - in my opinion - is that C# encourages you to overcomplicate things and that it is relatively verbose. Of course you can put a class with multiple members and methods in one line. But then it's also unreadable. Readability matters.

All languages with a syntax derived from C have a fundamental readability/verbosity problem, C# is no exception. F# for example doesn't have that baggage and is a lot more concise.

It is a convention, but not entirely without reason. Breaking the convention leads to other problems.

You still need a metric shit ton of classes, so finding any one class gets harder. The chance of merge conflicts increases because of more lines per file.

I don't hate Microsoft. You just need to be clear that if you build something with the .NET ecosystem, you are fully dependent on that company, even if some people want to suggest otherwise. And this seems to bite people occasionally.

You keep making these false statements.

.NET is open source. You're not dependent on Microsoft at all if you don't want to be. If Microsoft closes shop tomorrow, .NET will live on.

You've got a minimal amount of .NET experience (based on your own assertion 3 months ago) and you're spouting incorrect/false information. You were forced to use .NET, maybe that's why you're so unhappy with it. I've used C#/Java/Go/Python/Typescript/JS in my professional life and I've never felt more productive than when I'm building software with C#/.NET. Is it perfect? Not by a longshot. If I had my way I'd be using F#, but alas it's not popular/well-promoted (that I blame squarely on MS.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?next=29303588&id=bayesi...

If you think .NET will continue without Microsoft, you are delusional. It won't "die" as in the codebase disappearing, and there would even be the occasional patch, but the project and platform as such would essentially be dead in the water.

You are also beholden to the direction Microsoft wants to take the project/platform. There is nothing the other open source contributors, such as there are, can do about it. Fork? Maybe, but there's not THAT much activity around it anyway.

Again, all of this is a risk or "situation" one may be happy to take. Just be aware of it. At the end, .NET is more code, harder to learn, harder to recruit for, easier to over-complicate, and the ecosystem of libraries is thinner than with Django, Python and Javascript.

The language that was originally created for one-line scripts in the browser.

Others are downvoting you, but this is a perspective I appreciate as it is something I have been thinking about. Although I don't think selling out to MS is a large concern for me at the current time. I do think in the future it is important to become more independent and versatile.

So what other compiled languages would be an improvement to .NET's ones?

Depends on what you are doing. I'd also question the need for "compiled language" in most cases.

.NET is sometimes/often chosen for "performance reasons". In my opinion, for websites or web applications this is completely bogus. ASP.NET will slow your development down so much (compared to Django/Node/PhP/RoR) that you won't see any of those benefits any time soon.

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