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Comment by JeremyMorgan | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the last couple years I've been cheerleading for MS and telling people how much they've changed, how open things are becoming, and how awesome the development experience is. It's fallen on deaf ears or met with resistance, but today's announcements are really gonna drive the point home. Developers need to start looking more seriously at C#/.Net.

The Scotts (Hanselman/Guthrie), Miguel De Icaza and so many others have worked tirelessly on this, and we (.Net Developers) owe them a ton of gratitude for helping to make sure this ecosystem doesn't wither on the vine.

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> Developers need to start looking more seriously at C#/.Net.

I don't think they need to. They might if they have some particular need in it, but there are way more interesting things to learn if you are interested in something new, like Rust of example.

I don't think there is much overlap between the use cases of C#/.NET and rust. Rust would be a low level systems programming language, i.e. a replacement for C++.

While C++ has a place in the .NET ecosystem, there is a reason that C++ and .NET are different beasts and still exist side by side as different universes. CoD and Photoshop are C++, they would probably benefit from being Rust applications.

While in the past you would be well prepared if you knew (say), Haskell, C and Python, a good lineup in the future could be e.g. F# and Rust instead.

There is an overlap with languages like C# and Java in areas which are usually supposed to be served by systems programming languages. It surprised me in the past, but I guess big amount of developers can be the cause of it. For instance, why would you write Hadoop / HDFS in Java? Or mobile systems in C#? I'd write such things only in systems programming languages. But I guess some thought it's OK. So overlap does exist because of what's used in practice, not because they are theoretically close in approach.

How would Photoshop benefit from being Rust?

Is C++ broken? I'd say with the C++11 and C++14 changes, it's getting less and less "broken" from the complaints usually levied at it.

Rust is neat. Great for hobby stuff. But it hasn't even reached 1.0, and I highly doubt you're going to get enterprises to bet their infrastructure on it.

Yeah certainly not yet, but some enterprises bet their infrastructure on C++, and I think Rust has a real chance of being competitive in that arena in the long run.

For serious stuff that you need right now there is C++.

Yes, but Rust is on the final stretch to 1.0 with a finite set of features to be implemented before release. So soon we can get enterprise to look at it.

You could have made that remark at some point in time about any open source technology that eventually got lots of enterprises to bet their infrastructure on it so by that standard Rust will do just fine. Of course there is no telling what the future holds for Rust and other novel pieces of open source code but I would not dismiss them out of hand this easily. See: Linux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, MySql, Postgres, GCC and tons of other very successful open source projects that at some date in the past were pre 1.0, fragile and buggy.

Too little, too late IMHO.

Also MS has always come across as very opportunistic, giving the impression they will drop support for this if it serves them better.

That's my feeling as well. No amount of opening stuff can fix their reputation at this stage. Unless they'll completely drop all their crooked practices, which is not likely.

What company is not opportunistic? They are by definition.

That is why I said "very opportunistic".

That's not a meaningful distinction here. Let's not avoid the interesting part of this discussion with semantics.

Nonsense. :)

Unity has really driven home the popularity of Mono as a cross-platform code platform -- there are tons of people using it who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves .NET programmers. (yes, I realize there's a mix of library, language, and APIs in that soup).

But Mono merging with real .NET crossplatform support suddenly makes it a viable api for all sorts of non-microsoft use.

Back in the day, I remember how badly I wanted the dataset controls from .NET -- they have all this nice built-in functionality manage partial datasets from MSSQL to client memory and then sync multi-edits back to the database again (round trip). It's possibly the best round-trip data controls I've ever found in a library and it's mostly unheard of outside .NET circles. It makes the libraries that jQuery and Rails use

We have a lot to learn from each other -- I'm glad that MS has taken this step forward to embrace cross-platform again in such an open way.

Until people understand the power and assistance that VS really gives you, it will mostly fall on deaf ears I think. The massive reduction in cognitive load w/ VS2013+ ReSharper is just astounding to me. Yet I've met, work with, and read opinions from people who claim it's a slow piece of crap dinosaur that does nothing but hinder development. You'll pry their Vim and Sublime from their cold, dead, brute-forcing hands.

I agree that VS and ReSharper together are a great way to code. If only they ran on other platforms. It's almost tragic.

Until MS makes VS 20XX Professional cross-platform and free, I don't think they'll get much traction. I gave the a shot when I still used Windows via the Express editions. The fact that I had to jump between 3 editors to do anything and still didn't get NUnit integration is ridiculous.

Many languages can use the Eclipse, IntelliJ or Netbeans platform. The JVM provides a true multi-platform target as a first class idea. MS might be trying to do this, but they are really behind. I wonder if the world's most past.

From: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETAsOpenSour...

"There is a new FREE SKU for Visual Studio for open source developers and students called Visual Studio Community. It supports extensions and lots more all in one download. This is not Express. This is basically Pro."

See... I'm neither. I'm a single developer working on mostly closed source projects. As a result, I don't benefit too much from that. Also, I have a Mac and an Ubuntu laptop. So again, not much love from MS.

Now I admit this is the early days of their open source push. That's fine. But until they make VS Pro free, across the board, I doubt non-MS shops will really pickup the platform. There isn't much of a win without VS. Heck, most MS devs are so VS centric that you'll probably get nothing but confused looks if you did use an alternative IDE and said that during an interview.

> See... I'm neither. I'm a single developer working on mostly closed source projects.

From the actual site for VS Community [0]:

> Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community? A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community: Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

Sounds to me like you do fit in that category for this edition of VS. That being said, .NET development definitely does still seem very VS centric, but things seem to be changing. The experience of using sublime text + omnisharp[1] doesn't look too bad.

[0]: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-com... [1]: http://www.omnisharp.net/

If you are less than 5 developers ;) then you're good. Check the details!

It depends on what you're using it for.. I use Xamarin Studio(monodevelop) to work on a bunch of stuff. It works great. It falls down a bit trying to do ASP.NET stuff, but with the new open source push, ASP.NET vNext etc, this should get much better.

They have opened up the source on large chunks of the .net family compilers. Developing a decent ide on top of Rosalyn should relatively easy (as developing an ide could be). And while Rosalyn ides won't be as good as visual studio, Rosalyn should give them a fairly significant leg up.

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