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Comment by cglan | Hacker News Reader

Gonna be honest, .NET seems to have a weird cult following on here and Reddit but I find the naming to be absolutely atrocious and I hate developing with it. Everything is .Net including .net classic but not everything is compatible making documentation a huge pain to find. It’s also ridiculously over complicated and enterprisy with a lot of heavy weight boilerplate that reminds me of Java. It also copies a lot of the mistakes of the spring framework where you’ll have side effects or code paths that occur that aren’t really able to be found with a debugger. The language itself is fine but the framework around it is just repeating all the same mistakes of everything else

One of the reasons I love go is that everything seems to be explicit. Notice something occurring? Well chances are you can set a breakpoint and trace what’s happening

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A list of the top ten weird cult followings on HN and Reddit would not include .NET

If anything I see way less discussion of C# than it merits, given its key role in the world's most popular game engine.

I definitely don’t find modern .NET (ie .NET Core) to be overly enterprisy or boilerplated at all. Certainly nothing like .NET framework or Java.

Gotta admit GP has a point about naming though.

Search for info on .NET and you will find stuff on ASP.NET, .NET Framework, .NET Core at the very least. Probably more.

You have to really know what you are looking for and that's hard sometimes because everything is just .NET

This was made even worse when .NET Core was renamed to just '.NET', making it difficult to get good, specific results when googling.

Simply search for ".NET 5" and ".NET 6" including quotes.

I very rarely search "dotnet". Usually searches are based more around the specific technology/library/namespace in the ecosystem I have questions on. This feels to me like a non-issue.

This .net core good, asp.net MVC etc bad.

You haven't seen nice MVC middleware pipeline configurations with a decent number of services (DI).

Sometimes I feel like being on JEE 1.4 days.

Gotta love those enterprise architects.

What's so enterprisey about the modern Host/DI? Honestly seems really clean and thin to me.

Nothing, IMO. DI, when used properly, significantly cleans up code bases. It's code bases without DI that often become both untestable and unwieldy.

The keyword here is used properly.

Now go on to work on codebases with rules that every class must have an interface, there are no news, everything must come over service locators, 3rd APIs aren't accessed directly, rather over wrapper classes,....

Ah and no PR ever gets accepted if the rules aren't followed.

Any language that permits any style choices at all is going to be vulnerable to self-inflicted rules requiring bad style.

Just like any language used in enterprise shops is not free from enterprise space architects, and .NET is no exception given its customer base from Microsoft products.

Codebases with rules that every class must have an interface, there are no new in use other than basic stuff like arrays, everything must come over service locators (configurable externally), 3rd APIs aren't accessed directly, rather over wrapper classes,....

Sounds like a problem with your devs/architects/process than the language stack. It would create a mess out of Java or Go or Ruby too.

I think pretty much every .NET developer would agree with you that the naming and versioning has been an absolute clusterfuck.

It is starting to settle down into a sensible place since .NET 5 though.

If only they would drop ".NET" and "C#" and officially replace them with dotnet and csharp in all material.

Some unique searchable term would be great. As other replies point out, .net, c#, dotnet, and csharp are all collisions with old documentation.

You can use date search in Google, you know?

'The problem with java is not java, it is java developers.' .NET certainly enables the same ridiculous layers of enterprisey junk, and even promotes them in older default frameworks.

But like any language, it just takes discipline to stop your team building this bloat.

A CLI app in .NET is as clean as you build it, and sensible frameworks are now available for web stuff too.

> Everything is .Net including .net classic but not everything is compatible making documentation a huge pain to find.

I wish they would have just called the new version ".core" and be done with it.

For a long time, it was difficult to figure out if a particular piece of information you found by googling ".net" was for the old or the new. Things are improving though, as the old version gradually fades, so you can reasonably assume the new version unless stated otherwise...

I can't agree with this assessment. I'm curious as to what environment you are comparing it to?

The thing i see a lot of people bringing up as the large problem with .Net is naming and branding. I could agree with those sentiments but dont really how those are serious criticisms. Thats like saying i hate Java cause i prefer tea.

Anyway if you hate developing in .Net dont do it but I personally find it a lot more enjoyable than other languages ive worked with.

>It’s also ridiculously over complicated and enterprisy

What does it mean? dependency injection?

There are some older libraries which are horrible enterprise-ware: WCF (Windows Communication Foundation, think SOAP) and older Entity Frameworks in particular.

From the tone of the OP I would assume that things such as encouraging good engineering practises such as good interface design and using appropriately sized units of code are also "problems" with .Net. You hear that a lot from inexperienced developers.

The thing is - the modern framework is far nicer and has largely avoided the problem. Even to the point that I prefer occasionally having to deal with some of the ugly enterprise libraries to the constant hunting down of broken dependencies, vague runtime bugs or massive framework churn you see in the Python/Javascript world. Or having an overly verbose and ugly language like Go or Java.

Awww gee .. enterprisey used that way just seem to mean 'has features i don't need right now'.

WCF had problems with configuration complexity, but that was because it was ambitious! It had so many capabilities and provided a uniform configuration interface for all of them, so it was complex.

.NET was built as a platform to allow ALL sorts of programming, not just beginners level - therefore it comes with a degree of complexity.

I've come to appreciate that mostly people calling it 'too complex' or 'enterprisey' just haven't understood why someone else needs the features they don't understand yet.

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