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A good 95% of the mobile game devs I know who use Macs use Unity. Unity code is done pretty much exclusively with C#.

100% of those people use Jetbrains Rider and/or VScode. One used to use Visual Studio, but moved to Rider a good year ago.

C#/.NET today is what Java wanted to be, it's an actually good and comfortable modern-ish language that actually works on multiple platforms.

The problem, and I say this being 22 years deep in it, is that .NET was never cool.

That seems unimportant, but being objectively the best thing going doesn’t build a community or any word-of-mouth around your product.

I’d love to think we’d see a thriving Nuget scene on the order of npm or gem, but if it was going to happen it would’ve happened by now.

Yeah, it took a LONG time for .NET and C# to get out of the "Micro$oft Bad" -reputation.

But having done a good 15 years of Enterprise Java professionally and having moved to C# for the last half decade, there isn't enough money in my country's IT salaries for me to go back to Java. It's not just the language, it's the whole ecosystem that's icky compared to C#/.NET.

Solution: cajole people from the community into effectively rebranding themselves into something sexier through a somewhat hostile fork run by competent people who "get it" and are not (currently) affiliated with MS. People love throwing support behind the rebels.

Make sure to rebrand the whole thing, though. References to "C#" and ".NET" shouldn't appear anywhere except on the project's /about/history page.

Modern java is a fairly good language. If you don't like it, can always opt into scala, kotlin, or clojure. I don't understand what you mean by Java not working on multiple platforms. If you like c#/.net that's fine but why try to put down Java which has been cross platform for a long time?

Cross platform is less and less important nowadays. When was the last time your phone ran a Java application natively? As in you had a legit JVM on your phone?

Everything is cross-compiled or cross-translated to something else. I write C# for Unity and it translates it to something that'll run on iOS, which definitely doesn't have the CLR natively in it.

C#/.NET is still far away from where Java has been, in cross platform support (almost every CPU and OS has some kind of JVM implementation), and being a bit better in handling value types and going the C++ way in adding features isn't the way many of us see it as better.

Unity used to be Mac only for years (around 2008) while still being based on .net / Mono.

I can't stand MacOS and neither could any of the other devs at the place I was working, so we had this funky system where we coded in VS, using the MS .net libs, but would deploy against Unity on Mac with Mono to run on iPhone 3gs. Those were strange times :)

For old school .NET Framework, not so much.

For .NET 5+… probably more than you think.

As a long term python dev I was starting to warm up to c# and considering it for some upcoming projects… even to the point of evaluating and considering paying for commercial licenses for third part c# libraries to fit the projects…

But this rug pull deeply shakes my faith in .Net as a cross platform development ecosystem…

I’ve done a complete 180 on my entire enthusiasm for .Net here… I know the underlying tools will continue… but if they don’t give enough of a shit to maintain their IDE (which for the .Net world is absolutely crucial… I cannot emphasise this enough… .Net development requires an IDE to maintain your sanity…) well…

This is basically step one in a slow abandonment of non Windows platforms… and everyone who lives on those non Windows platforms… be they Linux of MacOS… we know it spells doom.

As much as I worry that MS’ strategy for cross platform mobile/GUI development is… “unclear”, I am 100% all in on .NET for cross-platform web/console apps.

Rider on macOS is a really first class IDE, and VS Code is getting better.

But regardless of the IDE, cross platform compilation and execution has come a long way. I build on Mac, deploy to Windows and Linux, everything works flawlessly and overall .NET development outside of Windows has become a very smooth and enjoyable experience. It’s fast too.

The .NET ecosystem largely feels quite healthy. I personally just think there have been some missteps with MAUI and the retiring of anything Xamarin related - but I would guess this affects a minority of .NET developers.

So if you’re on the fence… I would still recommend giving it try, regardless of this announcement!

Yeah, I agree with this take. For web and console apps, C#/dotnet is a great choice and should continue to be. Blazor, I think, is also fine (for some use cases, it's situational) and I think it's at the point it'll achieve liftoff.

I've been playing around with MAUI the past few months and it... isn't great. Desktop feels like (and honestly, kinda is) an afterthought, and the documentation is sparse. I spent several hours fighting with a couple of native layout controls trying to get them to work, before giving up and implementing everything I wanted to do in half an hour in a web view.

It seems more like they want to concentrate their effort on the C# Dev Kit for VS Code. Whether that proves to be the correct choice remains to be seen, but it seems promising even though it's still early.

Since it understands Visual Studio solutions instead of just working at the project level, and has extra things like the test explorer, VSCode essentially _is_ an IDE. I'm sure people will complain, but people _always_ complain about change. I think this one has a good chance of working out for the better, even if the C# isn't as good yet. Regardless, it's probably a better investment for MS than continuing to pile features atop the tired old bones of MonoDevelop in the form of VS for Mac.

You don’t need Visual Studio for Mac to use C# and .Net. Visual Studio Code provides a pretty good cross platform experience, same for Rider (if you prefer IDEs). VS for Mac has always been a subpar tool compared to VS for Windows, and was competing with vscode. I’m surprised they maintained it for that long, it makes sense they stop now that vscode caught up, that’s where they will invest their energy moving forward. VS for Mac was its own codebase, I believe a fork of Monodevelop renamed Xamarin Studio, then renamed VS for Mac after Xamarin acquisition (I’m saying this from memory, I may be misremembering a few things).

The language is still interesting to explore, and .net is incredibly reliable and stable and will stay cross platform, it’s a really good platform to develop for IMHO.

I don’t know what kind of ‘rug pull’ you think this is. Microsoft has built a lot of good tools for cross platform (e.g., VS Code), and this seems like more of a culling the herd type of move.

Visual Studio on Mac was mostly inherited and never was as good as Visual Studio (Windows). I was enthusiastic when they released it, but it didn’t live up to standards. There are better options out there.

The best tool for .NET cross platform development is a packaged browser using JavaScript, whereas Java IDEs are written in Java.

What a great way to promote .NET capabilities outside Windows.

Yeah, I agree. I see a ton of Rider screenshots on projects, videos, presentation slides these days and I imagine those are almost all Mac users.

we are kotlin and .net shop with 90% macs. people use rider.

Not sure about the percentage, but I am one if those.

With .Net Core 5+ and Rider, there's not much against Macs for Web Dev. Most things speak for it, especially performance (compared to Win).

I do. The company I work for is heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, so a lot of our services are .NET. When I came back here after leaving for a bit I told them it was a dealbreaker that I get a Mac or Linux instead of Windows, so I have a Mac now. I use Visual Studio for Mac pretty regularly. Now I will likely be forced to use the absolute disaster of a VM that the company provides us with (Microsoft-supplied, of course).

I'm one of that tiny percentage, but all of my development is done by remoting into a cloud Windows VM.

I tried directly coding on the Mac when I first got it, but quickly gave up on that. (I hate Rider, which seems to put me in minority as far as most .Net devs go.)

What sort of work are you doing that made you give up on C# on mac? Backend or games?

I haven't really tried to write serious C# code on macOS, but I did write some CLI tools, which was not bad. VSCode debugging works great too.

Obviously .NET is not supported as well as it should anywhere except Windows, but it seems to be getting better.

Backend with a lot of existing code that's still in .Net Framework using tech like WCF and Windows Services.

I could get away with doing dev directly on the Mac if I was _only_ working in .Net Core on our newer applications and if I was willing to use Rider. Neither of which are true.

Don't know, but I have been using net core / vs code and a Mac since 2019 and switched to the M1 when it came out for the MacBook Pros. I was using VS inside a VM before that since probably 2009 or so.

> Honestly how many .NET developers ever used a Mac as their work machine? I have to think it's a tiny percentage.

I’m not sure this is the best time to look at past performance to predict future developments. Microsoft is actively working on WinUI 3, and Avalonia UI is also dragging WPF to multiple platforms. This comes in a time when GUI programming on Mac is a hot mess. If anything, I expect .NET development on Mac to soar.

> GUI programming on Mac is a hot mess

Care to elaborate?

Everyone in our team of 5 does..

With JetBrains Rider ist a great experience

Our entire engineering team (50+) are on Mac + .Net

A lot! Last company I worked for (40B+ valuation) every developer used a Mac laptop and we were a .net shop. I imagine this is the same at many other companies using .net.

all the ones using it for ios development. i don't know how many did, but this really sucks for those of us that have been using xamarin / .net for ios

I’ve only seen Mac users doing C# with vscode, these days omnisharp (or the new C# dev kit? I’m not familiar with this one) is fairly good (though not VS good IMHO).