Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeshaman | Hacker News Reader

Good move, but (too) late.

The move is designed to attract iOS and Android Devs to .NET.

But let's see:

As an iOS developer, I've invested years in learning Objective-C and Cocoa, UIKit, etc. Now I'm starting with Swift. I'm sure a lot of iOS devs feel this way. Besides, if I can't use it from OSX, then I'm out.

Why should I forget everything and learn C#/.NET ? If I want a write-once-run-everywhere thing, then I could go for one of the miriad Javascript or HTML5 cross-platform frameworks or C++ with Qt, JUCE or the likes.

Same thought pattern applies for Android/Java - why would a seasoned Android/Java developer want to learn a whole new framework and programming language ?

Is C#/.NET so much better than Java/Android or ObjC/Swift that it mandates switching to it ?

View on HN

This doesn't seem like a mobile play at all, honestly.

They're opening the core, and large portions of the web server stack. This points to it being a play for web development, not native mobile.

There are some additional integrations with Xamarin - but Xamarin isn't owned by MS nor is it the key highlight of today's announcements.

I should have read TFA before commenting :)

But that is even more puzzling. The backend space is so crowded with native, scripting and exotic languages, that I really don't see how they can attract hardcore c/c++/go/node.js/python/ruby/perl/php/erlang/haskell/lisp or Java crowds to .NET.

Maybe it's exciting for existing .net developers to be able to deploy their backend apps on linux servers.

You could have said the same thing about several of the languages you listed, even within the last 5 years. The difference here is that C# already has a massive userbase.

I am curious how .NET MVC will progress now. It was considered to be a decent offering. It is of course lacking the ecosystem.

I think it's much more of a "I already write C#, so now I can write apps for other platforms without needing to learn their language!"

That leads to further evangelism at conferences, more talk about how C# is great and the platform is excellent, etc. I think they hope to persuade entire dev shops to switch over, rather than single devs, in a very long-term sort of way -- even if it's just a small percentage that change, the press is potentially worth it. MS has an image problem, and this would help mobilize their core to speak to more of the good parts.

This is my interpretation: Microsoft's biggest threat right now is that to be a viable mobile developer at the moment you pretty much need to buy a Mac and embrace OSX. Once you have done that you are obviously not running Visual Studio any more but will be using XCode and cross platform tools like Eclipse. Then you are further extremely unlikely to write things in C#. So this is about saying to the existing C# developers, "don't leave, don't buy a Mac, we are going to support you to write everything you need (Android, iOS etc.) without leaving the comfort of Visual Studio".

The article answers many of your questions. For intstance, it announced support for Linux and OSX.

C# and .NET let you dev on OSX, Linux and Windows, then deploy to OSX, iOS, Windows, Windows Store, Windows Phone, Linux and Android. Your only other real option for that kind of portability is C / C++, but. Well, you know, then you're working in C / C++.

When you use .NET to target iOS, you still use all the iOS frameworks. It's not like those cross platform Java widgets. The only thing that changes is that you don't need to use ObjC or Swift. Yes you have another stdlib, but your main investment in learning the UI and other platform specific stuff is not lost.

F# really is so much better, too. And C# is pretty great if you haven't embraced the holy lambda yet.

Just on a 'I can see the code in the stack traces' is benefit enough. I envy android devs being able to do that, while with apple code it's a bunch of binary.

You can see the comments that the platform dev put, which helps you deal with their assumptions about edge cases that are not documented. You can also see how they develop for C# internally to get ideas how to make your app better too.

Maybe it's not so much about drawing developers to them but trying to keep existing .NET developers from straying?

As you say this news is great for C# developers. The rest of us couldn't care less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com