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Comment by rsalus | Hacker News Reader

these blog posts have really turned me into a dotnet evangelist. love the framework & language.

Too bad there’s such a lingering culture of Windows and creaky Lenovos and Dells around it. I’m sure it can be different, but I’m not taking my chances ever again. Simply not worth my sanity.

Not sure when your last foray into the .NET ecosystem was, but every since it is xplat and unified (.NET 5 probably) it is a real joy. I use VSCode as IDE for C# on my mac, and deploy to Linux.

He didn't say you can't use Linux or MacOS, he said there's still a culture of being Windows and Microsoft only across .NET shops. As an ex .NET dev I can confirm, the community is quite close minded, language is awesome.

I think it's changing a lot recently. Our eng team of ~150 has been fully macos for several years now and we've deployed to Linux for ten.

This.

The community is being diluted by…a different demographic!

Including the internal Microsoft community

do you mind sharing the company name?

> As an ex .NET dev

Just curious.. what language(s) are you using now?

I landed in a web3 Node, Typescript startup so... Not great. But it allowed me to see an entirely different world so I can't complain.

Why do I care if other shops are Windows-only? The language and ecosystem are phenomenal and Linux support is first-class.

I've been using .NET almost exclusively on Linux since it was called .NET Core 2.0, and development platforms other than Windows do feel like second class citizens. Any time you venture into anything remotely advanced, the tooling is usually Windows only.

"Everything" expects you to use MSSQL, even if today there's ok official support for PostgreSQL and SQLite. Most "thought leaders" of various sorts are on Windows and expect you to use it. This pervades throughout the ecosystem.

Can't see this ever changing as it's not in MS' interest to turn other operating systems into good .NET development platforms.

I'm sure you know more about this than me, but EF works fine with SQLite for a project I work on. There are limitations, but I think there's a difference between the idea of EF deliberately not implementing some features for SQLite and SQLite itself not having support for some EF features (which is the reality I'm familiar with).

SQL Server is the flagship database project on the Microsoft side and that team surely has some imperative to facilitate the EF vision. It simply must be less of a priority for the PostgreSQL and SQLite maintainers to do so. Is that really a valid dig on the .net ecosystem, though?

Incidentally, I'm seriously considering dropping EF. The ability to apply migrations is nice. I find the means of authoring them to be arcane and capricious. Not having to write every simple query is nice, but it gets really hard to do complex or high performance stuff. After a decade of using this thing, I find myself fighting the Entity tracker more and more and now I'm seriously questioning if it's really all worth it.

I use EF now - but only for the string interpolation in Database.SqlQuery and Database.ExecuteSql. We don't use POCOs but instead use XML and JSON with Linq.

It's really the navigations that make EF a problem. I've built a typed object graph database on top of Sqlite that works really well specifically because it's in Sqlite, so the overhead of the 1+N query problem with recursively descending navigations isn't a big problem. But it requires lazy loading and that requires all the navigation to happen inside a single service scope and that makes sequencing some things get difficult (can't just pass the results around willy nilly).

The navigation system in EF is where all of the pain points originate. All of my troubles with getting the migration generator to work are because I'm trying to express rather complex relationships. For example, to store a record representing a property on an object, I need to have two foreign keys from the Properties table to the Types table: one for the type of the property and one for the type in which the property lives. Types themselves have many relationships to other types: their base type, interface types they implement, generic type parameters, constraints on generic type parameters (actually, haven't even implemented that one as is too much).

I'm generally happy with the performance and expressivity of the system I've developed so far, but damn, it came with a lot of pain.

To be fair, in EFcore (other than EF) lazy-loading and auto-navigation is not on by default - you opted in at some point (with all its trade-offs). EFcore differs from traditional EF that they removed a lot of the magic or made it opt-in, and you can use EFcore as a very basic/thin query engine similar to Dapper.

I think for most projects, add an ORM only after you start getting really annoyed and understand what you are trading.

I can't even remember the last time I used MSSQL with .NET. I'm embarrassed that I worked on projects now that were paying huge sums for licenses when .NET works so absolutely well with every other DB.

These days I just use EF with Sqlite on 99% of my projects.

I used .NET for many years with Postgres on a huge project. Honestly, I don't know what you mean. Can you break down "Everything" a little. What is it that expects MSSQL? Who are the thought leaders pushing it?

I'd say Microsoft's revenue related push with .NET these days is to try to subtly nudge you into Azure (where MSSQL is rare and Windows is virtually non-existent). But, I also think they know they will kill .NET if they go overboard with it as the competition is strong.

I do all my dev in .NET on a mac, using Postgres and Sqlite only, so I don't relate to your experience at all. It's dead simple for me and I'm not even that good of a developer.

That is not my experience. Sure, the background of .NET is windows, but in the last decade or so it opened up to other platforms, and so many shops prefer deploying their .NET based applications to linux for multitude of reasons. Along with this comes linux oriented culture. So windows culture is not tied to .NET per se, more so tied to certain shops I would say. Speaking from anecdotal experience, I have no numbers on this :)

Obviously, don't use it if you don't want to and don't have to. It is not worse than Go or Java however which is its only meaningful competition.

Note that Linux often runs on Lenovos and Dells, some of which may be creaky. I guess you are saying you prefer macOS.

It is different. I do nearly 100% of my .NET development on macOS, only dropping into Windows to support .NET Framework users of open-source projects I work on, and we deploy exclusively now on Linux containers. The apps I maintain haven't touched a Windows server in years. My colleagues (and OSS co-maintainers) use a mix of macOS, Windows, and Linux. I use Rider instead of Visual Studio.

The only time I've been forced into a "culture of Windows and creaky Lenovos and Dells" recently was on a Java project. (Anecdotally, of course. Java has a similarly cross-platform culture as a whole.)

I do .NET dev exclusively on a mac completely within Visual Studio Code and it's by far the easiest and most enjoyable framework and ecosystem I've had the pleasure of working in. I couldn't be happier with it.

Have you tried Rider?

Now if only they could spend time making Visual Studio 2026 perform up to par.

Just today I created e.g. 100 changes in a file, performed an undo and it rolled back 90 or so of the changes while somehow managing to keep the 5 at the start and the 5 at the end.

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