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Comment by metaltyphoon | Hacker News Reader

This is a reason why so many enterprises use C#. Most of the time you just use Microsoft made libraries and rarely brings in 3rd party.

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Having worked on four different enterprise grade C# codebases, they most certainly have plenty of 3rd party dependencies. It would absolutely be the exception to not have 3rd party dependencies.

Yes, but the 3rd party dependencies tend to be conveniences rather than foundational. Easier mapping, easier mocking, easier test assertions, so a more security minded company can very easily just disallow their use without major impact. If it's something foundational to your project then what you're doing is probably somewhat niche. Most of the time there's some dependency from Microsoft that's rarely worse enough to justify using the 3rd party one.

I dunno, there's definitely stuff that's convenience related, sure, and then there's stuff that's less so. Things like MediatR, Dapper, Serilog, Refit are all pretty common in .NET projects. There's usually always some library for generating PDFs for reporting purposes etc. The ecosystem of NuGet packages is pretty large. It's definitely not all just Microsoft dependencies, nor is that usually how developers in the ecosystem think in my experience.

OP might be remembering how things were 10 years ago or so, before .NET Core became the .NET. Although there are still many companies with legacy codebases running on .NET 4.

That aside, dependency graphs in .NET land still tend to be much smaller.

Or purchase third party libraries. This does two things - limits what you drag in and also if you drag it in you can sue someone for errors.

This definitely not why enterprise "chooses" C# and neither of these were design decisions like implied. MS would have loved to have the explosive, viral ecosystem of Node earlier in .NET's life. Regardless a lot of companies using C# still use node-based solutions on the web so a insular development environment for one tier doesn't protect them.

I am not so sure about that. .net core is the moment they opened up, making it cross platform, going against the grain of owning it as a platform.

If they see a gap in .net, which is filled in by a third party, they would have no problem qualms about implementing their own solution in .net that meets their quality requirements. And to be fair, .net delivers on that. This might anger some, but the philosophy is that it should be a batteries included one-stop shop, maybe driven by the culture of quite some ms shops that wouldn't eat anything unless ms feeds it them.

This has a consequence that the third-party ecosystem is a lot smaller, but I doubt MS regrets that. If you compare that to F#, things are quite different wrt filling in the gaps, as MS does not focus on F#. A lot of good stuff for F# comes from the community.

They actually had a pretty active community on CodePlex - I used and contributed to many projects there... they killed that in ... checks the web... 2017, replaced with GitHub, and it just isn't the same...

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