9 ms·

I know MSBuild gets a lot of hate but this is still great news. The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be a

I know MSBuild gets a lot of hate but this is still great news. The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be awesome. I'm curious, when everything is finally done, what the adoption rates will be like. Will hard-core Linux users who used Java migrate when it makes sense? Will they avoid it because "M$"? All good stuff.

Touche 11y ago
.NET was already somewhat popular on Linux for GTK apps. I don't know if you're going to see adoption for web servers unless it can be competitive with Java in performance, which I don't think Mono has traditionally been.
- deet 11y ago
  Seconded. Performance is the main thing holding me back. I'm very excited about C# and other .NET languages for server applications, and would like to make it my primary server side environment, but am waiting for three things: 1) A production ready compiler and runtime on Linux (coming) 2) Tooling to support the new .NET project structures and dependency management (coming, it seems) 3) A production ready server solution with reasonable performance. On Mono, .NET Linux server apps consistently score near the bottom of benchmarks, essentially ruling it out. (Who knows? It seems too early to know whether this will happen.)
  - pbz 11y ago
    There has been work on performance and more to come (source: ASP.NET Community Standup podcasts). The stated goal is to be in the ballpark of the top performers. You can follow the progress here: https://github.com/aspnet/benchmarks https://github.com/aspnet/benchmarks Just keep in mind that the work just started (and it was recently put on hold to get the Linux version - beta 7 - out the door).
    - deet 11y ago
      Very happy to see a focus on performance on the roadmap. I've actually seen that benchmark page, but all the results it lists are for the Web Server running on Windows (perfsvr), where Linux is only used for load generation. Any idea if the results are similar with the server running on the Linux machine (perfsvr2)?
      - jongalloway2 11y ago
        That's a good question to ask now that beta 7 is out. I'll try to remember to bring that up at the next Community Standup.
    - jongalloway2 11y ago
      Updates have slowed on it (I haven't had the heart to nag them because they've been so busy with beta 7) but they're continuing to make good progress on it, e.g. https://twitter.com/DamianEdwards/status/632000189818007552 https://twitter.com/DamianEdwards/status/632000189818007552 "Kestrel hit 151k RPS just now for plaintext test with pipelining (depth 16). Lots of known things to fix still, big gains to come #aspnet" "have a fix in the works that'll give us another 5-10% & a list of other things to attack after that. Fun stuff :)"
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
kenbellows 11y ago
The Mono framework[1] has been pretty popular in some circles for years now, so I imagine a decent amount of adoption can be expected once .Net Core proves stable. 1: http://www.mono-project.com/ http://www.mono-project.com/
- tracker1 11y ago
  For that matter, Mono has been sharing the parts of the new .Net Core as they come out and make sense to do so...
swozey 11y ago
It will be very nice to be able to do CI/compilation on extremely cheap and fast (to spin up) linux slaves as opposed to requiring an expensive (license, hardware) and slow (miserably slow ec2 boots) Windows servers.
- nathanaldensr 11y ago
  Good Lord, yes. It takes forever for my TeamCity build agent AMIs to spin up and actually connect to the TeamCity server. It would be awesome to replace that bulky Windows build agent with a Linux one.
  - swozey 11y ago
    I gave up on activating windows agents programatically, I keep one powerful windows build server running, it spins down at night after regression testing, then back on during the day when employees come into the office. The pocketbook definitely feels it, though.
fiatjaf 11y ago
Anyone who does not like MS because of the $ cannot at the same time like Java.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Indeed. And they cannot play the "but Java is OSS" card anymore as Oracle has made it pretty clear that Java's APIs are proprietary and that you will be sued if you do anything not authorised by them (which effectively removes the 'open' in "open source software"). Say what you will about the Android Java situation, but it doesn't exactly scream "this is open and free software."
  - deegles 11y ago
    I read somewhere that Microsoft's structured the patents/licenses in the .NET ecosystem in such a way as to make that kind of lawsuit unlikely. Can anyone comment if that is true?
    - jongalloway2 11y ago
      There are patent pledges and promises not to assert patents: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecifications https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecifications Portions of .NET are under ECMA and ISO standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure#Standardization_and_licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure... I think the most important part is that the new cross-platform .NET core framework, CLR, and compiler (Roslyn) are under permissive open source licenses (MIT for fx and clr, Apache 2 for Roslyn). You can see licenses and patent pledges here: https://github.com/dotnet/ https://github.com/dotnet/ Disclaimers: 1. Microsoft employee until they notice I'm hanging out on hacker news instead of replying to e-mails and "fix the glitch". 2. Not that smart and definitely not a lawyer.
      - fimoreth 11y ago
        > 1. Microsoft employee until they notice I'm hanging out on hacker news instead of replying to e-mails and "fix the glitch". Shh, they might find us.
edwinnathaniel 11y ago
> Will hard-core Linux users who used Java migrate when it makes sense? Probably only for mobile/desktop app but less likely for back-end/webservice/infrastructure stuff. Take MSBuild. This is pretty much Ant. Sure, there's NuGet but Ant+Ivy or MSBuild+NuGet combo isn't anywhere close to Maven (despite the XML hate). Libraries, communities, tools, frameworks of .NET ecosystem is still behind Java. Unfortunately language features and syntatic sugar alone probably not enough to sway these users. Besides, Java and C# are very similar, technically there's less reward in learning a very similar language.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Can you/someone give a quick rundown of why maven is really so much better than everything else?
  - edwinnathaniel 11y ago
    Maven manage your module/projects from building, dependency management, generating project website (if you want to), deals with packaging, and deployment (if you want to), and many more (via plugins). Maven is essentially NuGet+MSBuild or Ant+Ivy or Bundler+Gem+Rake without having to manage build tasks manually. Those tasks are: 1. Compile code 2. Compile test code 3. Run unit-test 4. Run integration-test (separately from unit-test) 5. Setup paths for running unit-test (say you want to use different config/resource files for your unit-test) 6. Package your artifacts _without_ the unit-test artifacts Maven has these built-in and in a non-disruptive manner. Don't have unit-tests? Maven won't run anything for you. You have unit-tests source code and assets that you don't want to be included in your final build? Maven will handle that out-of-the-box-no-config needed. While people might prefer to use "one tool that does its jobs beautifully/correctly", the reality is that you need at least 2 things to build the project: tool to manage your dependency and tool to build+package your project.
  - balefrost 11y ago
    Maven love is far from universal: http://kent.spillner.org/blog/work/2009/11/14/java-build-tools.html http://kent.spillner.org/blog/work/2009/11/14/java-build-too...
tomjen3 11y ago
1 year ago, yes. C# is awesome as a language but I don't see a reason to switch to .net when the JVM has Kotlin, which is nicer than C#, but still super lightweight and thoroughly pragmatic.
- tychuz 11y ago
  My reason would be: I can choose from a ton of C# positions, meanwhile Kotlin would have what? In my and neigbour countries I can find exactly zero Kotlin job offers.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    That is true. I assumed I would eventually go into business for myself and see no reason to use C# - besides Kotlin is very young, there is still plenty of time to get in on the ground floor so to speak.
- CmonDev 11y ago
  Cool! How would you build an app for iOS and WinPhone using Kotlin?
  - wtetzner 11y ago
    Don't know about Windows Phone, but for iOS you could use RoboVM. http://robovm.com/ http://robovm.com/
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    The same way I do in any other language: I don't.
  - cptnbob 11y ago
    HTML! And you get to do it once for both...
  - yareally 11y ago
    For Windows at least, there's IKVM: http://www.ikvm.net/ http://www.ikvm.net/
ossreality 11y ago
>The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be awesome This is already possible without the bullshit msbuild.
naasking 11y ago
> The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be awesome. Except msbuild can't easily support builds across different version of .NET on the same platform. I hate digging into its needlessly archaic build files.
lmm 11y ago
It's a whole different ecosystem - it's not like Scala where I can sling in one class on an existing Java codebase. .net isn't just its own VM, it's its own IDE, its own build tool, its own packaging model.... For little standalone pieces - the kind that people write in D or OCaml because they want to - I can see .net being used on linux. But I don't see anyone migrating an enterprise Java codebase - it's just too much effort for too little gain.
rbanffy 11y ago
Does building .net projects require MSBuild?
godzilla82 11y ago
Do you have any practical experience of using MSBuild? If you have ever worked on MSBuild and other build tools (e.g. ant, maven, even make for that matter), you would have noticed how difficult it is to write or extend simple build tasks in msbuild. Have you ever tried to use MSBuild to build anything on a machine that doesnt have visual studio installed? If you use any other ide, the separation of IDE and the compiler is very clear. Try figuring out the build parameters that Visual studio uses to compile your code.

Touche 11y ago

.NET was already somewhat popular on Linux for GTK apps. I don't know if you're going to see adoption for web servers unless it can be competitive with Java in performance, which I don't think Mono has traditionally been.

deet 11y ago
Seconded. Performance is the main thing holding me back. I'm very excited about C# and other .NET languages for server applications, and would like to make it my primary server side environment, but am waiting for three things: 1) A production ready compiler and runtime on Linux (coming) 2) Tooling to support the new .NET project structures and dependency management (coming, it seems) 3) A production ready server solution with reasonable performance. On Mono, .NET Linux server apps consistently score near the bottom of benchmarks, essentially ruling it out. (Who knows? It seems too early to know whether this will happen.)
- pbz 11y ago
  There has been work on performance and more to come (source: ASP.NET Community Standup podcasts). The stated goal is to be in the ballpark of the top performers. You can follow the progress here: https://github.com/aspnet/benchmarks https://github.com/aspnet/benchmarks Just keep in mind that the work just started (and it was recently put on hold to get the Linux version - beta 7 - out the door).
  - deet 11y ago
    Very happy to see a focus on performance on the roadmap. I've actually seen that benchmark page, but all the results it lists are for the Web Server running on Windows (perfsvr), where Linux is only used for load generation. Any idea if the results are similar with the server running on the Linux machine (perfsvr2)?
    - jongalloway2 11y ago
      That's a good question to ask now that beta 7 is out. I'll try to remember to bring that up at the next Community Standup.
  - jongalloway2 11y ago
    Updates have slowed on it (I haven't had the heart to nag them because they've been so busy with beta 7) but they're continuing to make good progress on it, e.g. https://twitter.com/DamianEdwards/status/632000189818007552 https://twitter.com/DamianEdwards/status/632000189818007552 "Kestrel hit 151k RPS just now for plaintext test with pipelining (depth 16). Lots of known things to fix still, big gains to come #aspnet" "have a fix in the works that'll give us another 5-10% & a list of other things to attack after that. Fun stuff :)"

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

kenbellows 11y ago

The Mono framework[1] has been pretty popular in some circles for years now, so I imagine a decent amount of adoption can be expected once .Net Core proves stable. 1: http://www.mono-project.com/ http://www.mono-project.com/

tracker1 11y ago
For that matter, Mono has been sharing the parts of the new .Net Core as they come out and make sense to do so...

swozey 11y ago

It will be very nice to be able to do CI/compilation on extremely cheap and fast (to spin up) linux slaves as opposed to requiring an expensive (license, hardware) and slow (miserably slow ec2 boots) Windows servers.

nathanaldensr 11y ago
Good Lord, yes. It takes forever for my TeamCity build agent AMIs to spin up and actually connect to the TeamCity server. It would be awesome to replace that bulky Windows build agent with a Linux one.
- swozey 11y ago
  I gave up on activating windows agents programatically, I keep one powerful windows build server running, it spins down at night after regression testing, then back on during the day when employees come into the office. The pocketbook definitely feels it, though.

fiatjaf 11y ago

Anyone who does not like MS because of the $ cannot at the same time like Java.

Someone1234 11y ago
Indeed. And they cannot play the "but Java is OSS" card anymore as Oracle has made it pretty clear that Java's APIs are proprietary and that you will be sued if you do anything not authorised by them (which effectively removes the 'open' in "open source software"). Say what you will about the Android Java situation, but it doesn't exactly scream "this is open and free software."
- deegles 11y ago
  I read somewhere that Microsoft's structured the patents/licenses in the .NET ecosystem in such a way as to make that kind of lawsuit unlikely. Can anyone comment if that is true?
  - jongalloway2 11y ago
    There are patent pledges and promises not to assert patents: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecifications https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecifications Portions of .NET are under ECMA and ISO standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure#Standardization_and_licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure... I think the most important part is that the new cross-platform .NET core framework, CLR, and compiler (Roslyn) are under permissive open source licenses (MIT for fx and clr, Apache 2 for Roslyn). You can see licenses and patent pledges here: https://github.com/dotnet/ https://github.com/dotnet/ Disclaimers: 1. Microsoft employee until they notice I'm hanging out on hacker news instead of replying to e-mails and "fix the glitch". 2. Not that smart and definitely not a lawyer.
    - fimoreth 11y ago
      > 1. Microsoft employee until they notice I'm hanging out on hacker news instead of replying to e-mails and "fix the glitch". Shh, they might find us.

edwinnathaniel 11y ago

> Will hard-core Linux users who used Java migrate when it makes sense? Probably only for mobile/desktop app but less likely for back-end/webservice/infrastructure stuff. Take MSBuild. This is pretty much Ant. Sure, there's NuGet but Ant+Ivy or MSBuild+NuGet combo isn't anywhere close to Maven (despite the XML hate). Libraries, communities, tools, frameworks of .NET ecosystem is still behind Java. Unfortunately language features and syntatic sugar alone probably not enough to sway these users. Besides, Java and C# are very similar, technically there's less reward in learning a very similar language.

manigandham 11y ago
Can you/someone give a quick rundown of why maven is really so much better than everything else?
- edwinnathaniel 11y ago
  Maven manage your module/projects from building, dependency management, generating project website (if you want to), deals with packaging, and deployment (if you want to), and many more (via plugins). Maven is essentially NuGet+MSBuild or Ant+Ivy or Bundler+Gem+Rake without having to manage build tasks manually. Those tasks are: 1. Compile code 2. Compile test code 3. Run unit-test 4. Run integration-test (separately from unit-test) 5. Setup paths for running unit-test (say you want to use different config/resource files for your unit-test) 6. Package your artifacts _without_ the unit-test artifacts Maven has these built-in and in a non-disruptive manner. Don't have unit-tests? Maven won't run anything for you. You have unit-tests source code and assets that you don't want to be included in your final build? Maven will handle that out-of-the-box-no-config needed. While people might prefer to use "one tool that does its jobs beautifully/correctly", the reality is that you need at least 2 things to build the project: tool to manage your dependency and tool to build+package your project.
- balefrost 11y ago
  Maven love is far from universal: http://kent.spillner.org/blog/work/2009/11/14/java-build-tools.html http://kent.spillner.org/blog/work/2009/11/14/java-build-too...

tomjen3 11y ago

1 year ago, yes. C# is awesome as a language but I don't see a reason to switch to .net when the JVM has Kotlin, which is nicer than C#, but still super lightweight and thoroughly pragmatic.

tychuz 11y ago
My reason would be: I can choose from a ton of C# positions, meanwhile Kotlin would have what? In my and neigbour countries I can find exactly zero Kotlin job offers.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  That is true. I assumed I would eventually go into business for myself and see no reason to use C# - besides Kotlin is very young, there is still plenty of time to get in on the ground floor so to speak.
CmonDev 11y ago
Cool! How would you build an app for iOS and WinPhone using Kotlin?
- wtetzner 11y ago
  Don't know about Windows Phone, but for iOS you could use RoboVM. http://robovm.com/ http://robovm.com/
- tomjen3 11y ago
  The same way I do in any other language: I don't.
- cptnbob 11y ago
  HTML! And you get to do it once for both...
- yareally 11y ago
  For Windows at least, there's IKVM: http://www.ikvm.net/ http://www.ikvm.net/

ossreality 11y ago

>The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be awesome This is already possible without the bullshit msbuild.

naasking 11y ago

> The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be awesome. Except msbuild can't easily support builds across different version of .NET on the same platform. I hate digging into its needlessly archaic build files.

lmm 11y ago

It's a whole different ecosystem - it's not like Scala where I can sling in one class on an existing Java codebase. .net isn't just its own VM, it's its own IDE, its own build tool, its own packaging model.... For little standalone pieces - the kind that people write in D or OCaml because they want to - I can see .net being used on linux. But I don't see anyone migrating an enterprise Java codebase - it's just too much effort for too little gain.

rbanffy 11y ago

Does building .net projects require MSBuild?

godzilla82 11y ago

Do you have any practical experience of using MSBuild? If you have ever worked on MSBuild and other build tools (e.g. ant, maven, even make for that matter), you would have noticed how difficult it is to write or extend simple build tasks in msbuild. Have you ever tried to use MSBuild to build anything on a machine that doesnt have visual studio installed? If you use any other ide, the separation of IDE and the compiler is very clear. Try figuring out the build parameters that Visual studio uses to compile your code.