> They are crippling the app development story for .NET on Mac
Honestly how many .NET developers ever used a Mac as their work machine? I have to think it's a tiny percentage.
Honestly how many .NET developers ever used a Mac as their work machine? I have to think it's a tiny percentage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .NET 5+… probably more than you think.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a great way to promote .NET capabilities outside Windows.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
Care to elaborate?
With JetBrains Rider ist a great experience