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Comment by superbaconman | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how Microsoft expects to keep developers working for their ecosystem when they're not building anything marginally better than their existing competition.

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Have you heard about .NET? It's one of the best frameworks out there, very well supported, has been improving steadly for the last years and now that it's open source, I only expect more.

Yes, there are some minor things that other new frameworks do better, but this is normal, any framework needs time to adapt. But in general, there is not a single thing that .NET is not attacking in all the current trends of development.

In fact, a lot of things are being based on .NET, including javascript 7 features like async functions and Netflix's RxJava that is a port of .NET Rx.

I'm not saying it's the absolute best framework out there, but it is pretty good. Saying Microsoft is doing nothing in this area is just crazy.

dotNET is an MS only platform.

Is dotNET better than the collective JVM language ecosystem from a feature standpoint? Probably not. Sure you want to limit the debate to Java, which is basically a legacy language.

The JVM software ecosystem is still much better than dotNET, which took forever to get Hibernate and other framework ports over to it, and the typical developer still takes all microsoft-dictated "best practices" as canon from the holy see.

So sure, it's better than C++.

  dotNET is a MS only platform.

These people would like to disagree: https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr https://github.com/ajensenwaud/coreclr http://www.mono-project.com/

And does Java support unsigned integers yet?

Are there any major projects built using mono?

Unity is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28game_engine%29

Unity has been using an old version of .Net for licensing reasons.

Also, about a year or so ago, they started porting to an LLVM-based solution and Unity 5+ is expected to be discontinue the Mono runtime.

Not sure there would be any point to unsigned integers in Java. Most cases where you would want to use them you are better off writing in C and calling it via JNI. That's what is done on Android when you need performance, anyway, that or RenderScript.

C#/.Net has so many advantages over Java (and lots of cons too), and you choose "unsigned integers"?

> dotNET is an MS only platform.

Not anymore. It's open source now, and that's the point the OP was making.

edit: Wait, downvoted? Am I wrong? I'd love to know if I have a misunderstanding of the situation. I thought MS opensourced .net and CLR and everything.

While true, this blanket statement does a disservice to the actual situation. The parts of the language/CIL stack that make .NET important -- apps on Windows -- remains closed. It is only the ASP web stack that has been open-sourced, and can now be run on non-Windows platforms. When the WinForm libraries are open-sourced (and, perhaps, Visual Studio), then there can be an honest evaluation about ".NET" being open sourced. That's my opinion, anyway, as a 20-year Linux fan and current .NET Windows developer. I don't have enough rep to downvote anyone.

As a 12 year .NET developer and linux user I can't express how much I disagree with you. First because saying that nowadays windows apps is more important than asp.net is crazy talk. Most development is web nowadays and will just increase.

Second because what is being open sourced is not "the rest of the framework", but what is needed to build a new framework today, without the dependencies and problems from yesterday. The team announced that in time, even wpf and other windows stuff would be built on top of the new corefx as additional libraries.

The new corefx is not an asp.net only thing. It's just that asp.net is the most demanded and also the least dependent part of the framework to start this change.

There is still a lot of things to be done in order to achieve that, but I'm pretty sure it will happen because once things like collections and linq start evolving on corefx, they won't want to maintain two distinct frameworks.

Take a look at the most discussed topics on github, there is a lot of stuff being discussed there by the core team.

Developers who use the MS ecosystem knows that their tooling is what makes MS ecosystem worth it. They released Community edition of Visual Studio which is the same as VS Professional but for open-source and independent developers.

.net core is now open source and can run on Linux/OS X. It can also use docker, that just made my skill set more appealing. These "marginal" improvements are actually huge steps for developers. For one, MS is leveraging what non-MS developers utilize. Doing so will make their product flexible and developers happy. WPF is getting a boost so that a single app can be written for multiple viewports in Windows 10. That'll simplify development.

Hololens? If they can pull it off that'll be a hugely important platform for developers. Businesses also still rely on Windows and will for a long time so there is plenty of financial reason for developers to remain part of that ecosystem.

This would be the perfect tagline for Hololens: Hololens - carry a cinema sized tv anywhere you go.

One thing they've gotten better at is exactly that: it's no longer "their" ecosystem. They're much more heavily into standard HTML5 now than Google, for example.

They don't need people to build for their ecosystem anymore because they are making their ecosystem the same as everyone elses and beating them on quality.

That's what they're trying to do in THEORY but let's be frank, Windows 8's app ecosystem has flopped even if they're using HTML5/CSS and other standards.

But webapps still work fine on Windows, and they'll work on iOS and Android, too.

Microsoft should buy or clone Ninite.

What competition? Microsoft may be shunned by startups/hackers (that could change quickly if they keep turning the ship the way they've been), but in your average boring old cube farm they are absolutely ahead of other sellers in both product quality and revenue.

They are also shunned by many large shops on the server-side. Where I work now (70,000+ people), there is a strict "no Microsoft on the servers" policy.

The "average boring old cube farm" uses Java. Microsoft = Windows + Office.

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