I have no idea why people/companies don't pick asp.net core more often. The amount of headroom you have before bottlenecks is immense. It has world class tooling to boot too.
I moved from C# to Ruby, and along the way I read Design Patterns in Ruby[1] (which I highly recommend), and it went through several of the patterns I used to have to apply in C# to make it workable, and it would then show me they weren't needed in Ruby because of the structure of the language. Maybe C# has improved in these kind of things, but things like that matter when developers are also expensive and you want to crank out features.
The hosting question has me a little confused I guess. You don't need anything special to deploy or run modern .Net code? You can run your app anywhere that the Asp.Net Core runtime is supported [2]. Or bake your app into a container and run it anywhere that understands containers. MS has tutorials for deploying to Azure [3], but I honestly know nothing about it (Azure). Every place I've worked at that had cloud infrastructure has used AWS, and I've never needed to deploy a hobby app.
0: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/min-...
1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo...
2: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/7.0
3: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/quicksta...
I'm not sure how much you've played with Node, Ruby, etc BE ecosystems but there are plenty of "just `git push` and watch you app automatically deploy" services out there that makes it really easy to get started playing around with the actual framework and not get bogged down in docker files or AWS configuration.. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I'm also... busy. And I'd like to be able to try out a framework first before I decide if I wanna invest a lot of time working on a full-fledged project with it and these sorts of tools are perfect for that
Thanks for the links
Edit: Assuming a modern framework that can run basically anywhere. Something like old school .Net Framework that is essentially restricted to Windows and IIS would be a different story.
When it does get migrating, surprising as it may be, many companies are more willing to move to another platform than keep it on .NET, as full rewrite is almost required anyway. Dependencies on missing APIs, COM wrappers and such.
It is quite different to use an ecosystem born and raised on UNIX, and one that only in the last 5 years kind of matured into UNIX.
Additionally there is the whole issue with politics in VS4Mac/VSCode versus VS for tooling, which makes anyone outside of Windows to shell out for Rider if we want the same level of tooling.
Btw, regarding Postgres support: the guy maintaining the Postgres .NET drivers works for Microsoft on Entity Framework Core.
Regarding the boilerplate and the minimal hosting model and the minimal api… it starts to look like a nodejs express setup. Personally I think boilerplate was not that bad to begin with and saving a couple of lines of code (sometimes at the cost of legibility) is not worth it for me in a decent sized project.
Not sure if either of those points matter 8+ yrs on since I last looked, but I know I'm not the only developer who has these concepts burned into their soul.
Genuinely curious if anyone out there has some wisdom to share about this since I know next to nothing about the ecosystem
For this site's audience, I would recommend taking a long look at F# over C#. If you aren't aware of it, it's functional-first, OCaml-inspired, but you have access to all the Asp.net core framework you need (similar to accessing Java from Clojure). A batteries-included framework that seems popular is the "SAFE Stack"[0].