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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

See the hellish naming and branding they've done with the .NET ecosystem... It is so convoluted, even people actively developing on their stacks would have and issue figuring out if they are downloading the right stuff.

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Microsoft appearingly random naming conventions make me want to actively avoid using their products because I know the web searches will be heavily polluted.

I thought big companies like this would have some sort of internal committee that decides if a new products branding makes it easier for customers to understand what the product is and where it fits in their offerings.

Having had to come up with a name for a corporate product and deal with things like trademarking, I can understand why they seem to repurpose names frequently. It is enormously time consuming to generate, vet, and apply for a trademark. There are so many other products and names and trademarks out there that it’s no wonder drug companies end up with unpronounceable gibberish for new product names.

This makes sense. I guess I didn't take namespace or government bureaucracy into consideration.

Come to think of it open source software has this issue too where two projects exist with the same name.

Yep, I have to do it occasionally.

The same with Visual Studio. It is referred to by a year, eg Visual Studio 2019, but then you need to look in the make files for the actual version number of the project, and then look on Wikipedia for a table matching versions to years.

Wikipedia at least has decent docs on versions.

That was insane, e.g. ".NET Messenger" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Messenger_service which was just MSN messenger, had nothing to do with .NET as in C#.

Then there was the "Skype" and "Skype for Business" naming debacle.

Not really. It was a little confusing when they renamed .net core to .net, but most people have moved past it

You see, that just doesn't lend itself as nicely to tribal parroting of worse than mediocre developers here in the comments (if such people are able to code at all).

I mean you literally work on Dotnet, don't you? That's probably why you don't have issues with the naming. I agree that it's currently fine now that it stabilized on the core naming scheme, but I don't see how it was very confusing when there's stuff like ASP.NET Core on framework, and ASP.NET Core on Dotnet core... that's just confusing, especially since other ecosystems don't usually have such a weird naming scheme.

It’s only problem in the eyes of HN because it is low-effort complaint from people who never used .NET and simply repeat what they read elsewhere. It’s just a popular thing to do, to make negative comments like this.

Otherwise, this problem is completely made up in terms of anything that happened in last there-four years.

And no, I don’t work on .NET save for a few simple contributions.

So the asp.net thing I highlighted isn't true? I'm sure the issue isn't that bad, but it sure is weird to claim that the naming wasn't horrible. Like, surely you could agree that the naming was much worse than it should've been?

Which languages do you program in? (asp.net core name is fine, because - who cares? it's not like js does any better, it's something you don't think about twice and is irrelevant to the experience)

Well no said that it was a huge deal. The point was that msft is horrible at naming things. Do you have any example of something like this happening in any other ecosystem?

In summary:

ASP.NET MVC 5: ASP.NET MVC 5 was a short-lived successor to ASP.NET MVC 4. It was released alongside ASP.NET Web API 2 in 2014. It actually ran on top of ASP.NET 4 (i.e. .NET 4.x version of System.Web.dll). Note that the entire

ASP.NET MVC library is now obsolete.

ASP.NET 5 was EOL'd and rebranded as ASP.NET Core and it includes the functionality of "ASP.NET MVC 5" built-in.

ASP.NET Core 1 and ASP.NET Core 2 can run on either .NET Core (cross-platform) or .NET Framework (Windows) because it targets .NET Standard.

ASP.NET Core 3 now only runs on .NET Core 3.0.

ASP.NET Core 4 does not exist and never has.

ASP.NET Core 5 exists (as of August 2020) however its official name seems to be "ASP.NET Core for .NET 5" and it only runs on .NET 5."

https://stackoverflow.com/a/51391202

Again, not a big deal in retrospect now that it has stabilized. But it was a huge deal. Because you couldn't easily figure out if you needed to use Asp.net MVC, or if that version is now deprecated, and if the core you're using means dotnetcore or aspnet core on framework... again, it's the type of stuff that matters when it happens and leaves a mark afterwards.

It seems they identify so closely with dotnet that any perceived criticism is taken as a personal slight. It's the only thing that explains such a rabid response to a reasonable observation.

I don't identify with something that is just a tool (although one of the best ones). What does piss me off however is when people perpetuate false facts, straight up lie about arbitrary matters, are incapable of changing their mind when facts change and when disagreed with, resort to personal attacks.

This can be seen through other issues in the industry but is particularly felt in bad teams - social cohesion resides on a set of commonly agreed upon beliefs within a group and the worse the team is the more such beliefs are at odds with reality, and all I've been seeing in the past year is HN slipping more and more into this when it comes to programming.

Whereas I do use dotnet daily, have done so for years, and I like the C# language and a lot of the ecosystem, certainly over Java .. and I still hate the naming scheme. I know the difference between all the confusingly named things, it's just that Microsoft branding insists on flattening them all together.

The internal codenames were better. If I say "Roslyn" it's a lot clearer what I'm referring to.

Is it not currently asp.net core?

.NET is kind of like JVM but also usually includes an SDK, a build system and a package manager (NuGet), when people use the term.

It is then targeted by various languages: C#, F#, VB.NET and smaller projects - anything that emits "canonical" .NET assemblies (that use IL) works.

ASP.NET Core is a web framework for .NET, it's distributed with SDK so "comes out of box".

EF Core is an ORM framework, it does not come out of box and can be added as nuget packages (the dependency itself and then specific DB driver).

> ASP.NET Core is a web framework for .NET

ASP.NET Core is not a web framework for .NET; it's at least four different web frameworks you can choose between. It's more like the overarching branding for anything web-related in the dotnet ecosystem.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo...

Kind of?

All these, effectively, plug into ASP.NET Core, on top of WebApplicationBuilder and WebApplication. They are then, usually, hosted with Kestrel (web server) and operate with the same set of abstractions. Razor Pages and Blazor are distinct names and I have never seen anyone confuse them with the ASP.NET Core itself.

ASP is an odd name to an old hat like me. Active Server Pages haven't been a thing in a while.

You see, this is where it gets confusing. ASP refers to a specific technology, active server pages, but it's also the overarching term used for anything to do with dotnet and the web. So you get this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo... - you can have an entirely frontend SPA, in at least two ways, and still be called "ASP.NET"

I have an application which only serves over GRPC. It has to pull in "Asp.Net" nuget packages, because that's the branding under which the Kestrel HTTP2 server lives.

Yes, it's still called "ASP.NET Core", even though ".NET Core" was renamed ".NET" from version 5 -- not to be confused with ".NET Framework 5", which was renamed ".NET Core 1.0" before launch.

Don't forget ".NET Standard" that could be used from both .NET Core and .NET Framework, until version 2.1.

It was very confusing, and for a while there every team inside Microsoft started adding .NET to their name for some internal visibility points regardless of any connection with the common language runtime.

That's how you ended up with names like Windows .NET Server 2003.

These events have little to do with .NET* of today, 21 years later.

*the one that is hosted here: https://github.com/dotnet

Huh, I always wondered about that. So what's the mechanism, was there an executive with a .NET mandate or something?

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