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Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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