It's Good to Bet on .NET | Hacker News Reader

It's Good to Bet on .NET

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41 pointssylens16 comments

> The tooling is best-in-class.

Something .net users should keep in mind is that much of that tooling is proprietary and can only be used in ways that Microsoft approves of. The debugger is proprietary and can only be used with the official vs code builds. The same with the extension marketplace and popular vs code features like live share.

You can't use the extension marketplace with unofficial forks/distributions of vs code like vscodium, gitpod, etc.

As someone who codes primarily to make a living rather than out of some innate passion, I’m perfectly fine with this.

When I change clients, I’m usually up and running within an hour because almost everything looks very familiar. Compare this to JavaScript development which can have any number of tool chain permutations.

A significant amount of tooling exists since the open source Roslyn compiler is designed to support incredible features for tooling, unlike any other open source ecosystem. C# and .NET were explicitly designed to support best-in-breed tooling (through metadata, easy code parseability, language features, etc).

Gcc, llvm, etc., are no where near capability for the he tooling support that Roslyn supports.

Modern .NET is very different from the days of Framework <= 4. Ballmer yelling DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS on stage is fun, but MS's best features have been the open nature of .NET in the past 5 years. Don't like VS? Use VS Code. Don't like VS Code? Use Rider.

I am perfectly ok with it, people developing software need to pay bills.

This hinders .NET adoption outside Windows on FOSS circles, but so what, there is still plenty of business on Microsoft shops, the same that won't blink twice when discussing license costs.

use the free VSCode. Or pay the $7 a month and use JetBrain's Rider (which is quickly rivaling Visual Studio in terms of productivity)

I beleive in what Stallman beleives.

All the wonderful things open source gave us command gratitude for open source. And the proprietary tooling, especially from microsoft and other big corporations in a way are a honeypoy. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Do not forget microsoft called gpl cancer.

The FOSS community is also not keen on what Stallman believes, trying to replace each piece of GPL software with Apache/MIT/BSD alternatives, including UNIX clones.

In a couple of decades the Linux kernel might be the only valuable GPL piece still around.

Isn't the point of GPL to be cancer?

The point of the GPL is to bind to the cancerous cells of copyright and neutralize them.

My understanding of the position taken by GPL authors is that the current implementation of copyright in the US favors publishers heavily to the detriment of users [1], that this is unjust [2], and that users deserve certain freedoms [3]. It's not about restricting developers, it's about removing restrictions that shouldn't have been imposed on users in the first place. If public domain is one end of the spectrum, see [4] for the other end.

EDIT: formatting

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

[3] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...

[4] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

How is copyright cancerous? Copyright doesn't infect other works afaik. But GPL clearly does.

In the US, copyright infects every work at conception. No one but the author has much of a right to do anything with a work without a license. The GPL is a license - it's a subset of big C Copyright. Without Copyright the GPL is unenforceable. The GPL can't infect anything that isn't infected with the notion of Copyright.

Every license, other than completely opting out of copyright and into the public domain, infects the derived work with some sort of terms. You'll see in a lot of proprietary licenses "No reverse engineering, etc." The GPL forbids you from forbidding anything except forbidding.

EDIT: nuance, "much of a right to do anything" should more specifically be "anything involving distributing to other people." There exist exemptions in copyright law for using copyrighted works for your own personal use. Giving that thing to other people is no longer personal use.

Not if it's in your interest.

For big corporations looks like it is cancer.

I have developed on .NET for ~ 8 years, starting with the Framework and then moving on to Core, and I am at my happiest in this ecosystem.

One notable highlight for me was and still is the documentation. Very easy to get started as a beginner, and as you progress, you keep coming back for more. It's been consistently good, in-depth, yet accessible, and covers the entire Microsoft world incl. Azure.

I'm really enjoying the direction .NET and particularly C# have been heading, and I agree it's, personally, been a joy to work with.

I'm looking forward to the new Visual Studio for Mac coming out of preview, though I should try Rider more too.

I just have a big complain, as the pace of .NET ecosystem and its languages increased (and Java as well), I kind of have to garbage collect my knowledge of other languages to be able to keep up and get brain storage place.

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