8 ms·

ASP.NET 5 is dead – Introducing ASP.NET Core 1.0 and .NET Core 1.0

90 points by highmastdon 11y ago

BillinghamJ 11y ago
Sure this makes sense if you've read the explanation behind it, but this type of change is bad for new users - very confusing.
- SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
  The intention seems to be that when the dust settles, it will be easier and simpler for new users to get started. As others have mentioned, the "install and start coding" experience has to compare well to ruby, python, node.js etc. Like this: https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/ https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/
  - AwesomeBean 11y ago
    Indeed - I think this is a welcome change. Might make it confusing for a year - but makes way more sense for the next 14 years.
    - BillinghamJ 11y ago
      As though they're not going to do more name changing during that time :)
merb 11y ago
More confusion. I hope you will soon have a streamlined way of developing .NET Core 1.0 / ASP.NET CORE 5 or whatever. Currently we have dnx/dnu and dotnet, I prefer dotnet but it is still really really buggy and dnx/dnu is somewhat aweful to use. It's really hard to get started / trying stuff out. Other starting languages were a little bit easier to test, I remeber Go 0.7 it also had a tool to replace 0.7 stuff with 1.0 stuff, however It was a whole new ecosystem so maybe it's harder to actually build something on top of something already there.
- cmdkeen 11y ago
  dotnet is replacing dnx/dnu - the dnx concept impressed and so has been more widely adopted within the .Net chain. Having had a play with the RC2 CI build it is considerably more streamlined than ASP 4.X development. I'm really looking forward to starting to use it in anger over the next few months.
- mrweasel 11y ago
  It has become really confusing to get started with .NET. There's a ton of stuff just from Microsoft, and it's kinda hard to understand how everything fits together. I recently did a project where we wanted to a small built in webserver. Understanding how all the OWIN stuff fits together and knowing which libraries to use is hard than doing the actual coding. For a compiled language it's confusing that your code will compile, but not work, because you forgot a "using". Go is younger and therefore doesn't have the baggage of .NET or Java, but it's a good example of how simple a "development environment" can be. It's not alone, Python, Lua and others are also much much easier to get started with, without being bombarded by a ton of acronyms and surrounding infrastructure libraries.
  - sergiotapia 11y ago
    Exlir, also super easy to get started with, and provides testing out of the box. With a sample test included. `mix new foobar` then you can immediately `mix test` and it'll compile and run. I can't see myself going back to .NET ever again (it's been 6 years now) because it's so fragmented and hard to find immediately useful information. Microsoft needs to invest on that front.
    - uptownJimmy 11y ago
      I needed to read this stuff right here. I have been developing happily on a custom-built CSLA-esque .NET platform for almost two years now, and I cannot begin to explain to my OSS buddies what they should do to spin up a .NET project of their own. 1) It's not my job description or my problem domain at work. I'm paid to code the app, not spin up fresh instances of our app framework from scratch. We have maybe a dozen apps in various stages of progress, so it isn't like we need the whole team to know how to outfit a new instance of our app framework on a regular basis, but... 2) ...it's also amazing how difficult it is to even define what .NET is. It's hard to explain to colleagues what's going on behind the scenes when you can't always quite figure it out yourself. And I don't think of myself as simple-minded. I know that this stuff is a corollary to the inherent power/complexity factor that such a stack brings to the table, but MicroSoft could absolutely do a better job of providing clear and human-readable docs for people who are not already wizards.
swalsh 11y ago
As a .NET developer turned rails developer, looking back at .NET core 5 (on osx) I like what they're trying. I feel really at home because i love the rails workflow, but i love C#. It's not quite ready for primetime yet (in my opinion), but I could see myself going back in the future. That said, I feel like my rails experience is helping me understand the new .NET works a lot better than my previous .NET experience. So I think the name change is appropriate. It's different enough.
- Yuioup 11y ago
  I think that .NET Core takes a lot of inspiration from node.js as well. Probably why it feels a bit different from Rails.
andyjohnson0 11y ago
I've been developing on the .net platform for >10 years. Increasingly I get the feeling that I no longer fully understand its extent, how it all fits together, and what is and is not "legacy". Can anyone recommend a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on the platform for someone in my position?
- taspeotis 11y ago
  Yes I share your confusion and I wish there was a guide to all of this, but don't forget DNX/DNU/CoreCLR/CoreFX/new platform targets for NuGet and all that hasn't hit RTM yet. So I am keeping an eye on it, but I will await the release date(s) before committing to learning too much about one thing or the other.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    The other thing is the move toward command lines, away from GUI. I think it's great to make everything scriptable. But a command line is also many order of magnitudes less discoverable than a GUI. I am not sure how much Microsoft realises that a great part of the success of C# is about making it easy and intuitive, and that involves visual feedbacks. Unless the idea is to make it more of an "elite language".
    - insulanian 11y ago
      > Unless the idea is to make it more of an "elite language". When I think of VB, and how being easy and discoverable produced enormous amount of crap in software world, I almost support this idea.
      - cm2187 11y ago
        I can think of two type of crap you are referring to: 1. VB written in the 90s (VB6 and before), which has mostly do to with VB having been around for so long. To be fair, if you look at code written in the 90s in any mainstream language through today's best practice lens, everything will look shit. Today's VB is a superb language that can be very elegant, and actually quite modern too, relying less on special characters and more on an expressive, english syntax. 2. VB written by non programmers (essentially VBA). You can argue that non programmers shouldn't be allowed to code, but from a business user point of view, there is much to say about the lack of productivity of IT departments in large organisations. Enabling users to automate many of their tasks has a massive productivity impact. A user can automate the production of a report in a couple of hours, instead of having to discuss specs, prioritisations, budgets, tests, etc for months with the IT dept. I think it's absurd to hold the quality of the code produced against the language.
zargath 11y ago
I know naming is one of the hardest things in Computer Science, but ".net" always stroke me as the worst name ever. Just like C, C#, Go and Node. You wonder if they sat down and said "Lets take over the internet, what word do people use the most?". I remember when I started using .net when it was in beta 15y ago, searches on "c#" or ".net" simply wielded no results, because of naming and search engine limitations. When .net launched, it introduced vb.net, that gave Visual Basic support. Not a smooth transition, but it gave some developers a bridge to stand on. I wonder why Microsoft didn't just skip the .Net name to signal a new change in both technology and philosophy instead of getting heads blown up by old developers not understanding the switch.
- 50CNT 11y ago
  There's a lot more of those, isn't there. I still remember the time I got on HN and couldn't tell the tech announcements from the news articles. Can't remember any exact titles, but stuff along the lines of "Coffee.net now ships Espresso". Is that a site that sells elixir of life or some kind of javascript and .NET amalgamation shipping a new library? Go, Python, Lisp, C, C#, Java, all these words getting double booked to make them memorable. If I want to find a place to fix my lisp, do I go on stack-overflow or to a speech therapist? Book on Go patterns? "Java island book"? But luckily nowadays we can abuse word connections to get google to spit out the right things. "Python generators" may refer to a machine to generate snakes, but short of living in an xkcd comic, it'll probably return the right results. It just gets a little muddled when developers find just the right collocation to name their pet python [project?]. But then we just heap on more specifiers. Unless you decide to call your library "THE" in a fit of genius. Like Tabasco in your eyes, it just adds spice to your search experience, doesn't it.
  - matt4077 11y ago
    ... off to start the THE project...
    - cafard 11y ago
      A bit late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system .
hudo 11y ago
Looking at the post RTM plan, and I really hope they will de-prioritize VB work and push F# more! It has so big potential to attract wider community and bring back some good OSS devs. Except few big companies that needs to maintain legacy apps, nobody really cares about VB any more, specially in some brand new dev stack like asp.net core. Waste of time and resources IMHO. I was a VB dev, and it really made sense 20y ago. Now, I haven't heard somebody is using VB (excluding some bank maybe - but they're mostly stuck in .net 2 or 3).
- insulanian 11y ago
  Definitely this! I can't remember talking to anyone using VB in last 5 years. And I'm LOB / enterprise app dev.
  - graycat 11y ago
    Can't say that anymore -- I'm using VB .NET. See my post a sibling of yours here.
    - cm2187 11y ago
      And now two VB.Net developers! Though granted I work in the financial sector...
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  Couple of really nice things about F#: - It's multi-paradigm. If you just gotta have classes? Go make some. But if you want to learn and take your game to the next level, you'll soon ditch a lot of them. F# means you can move from OO to (mostly) pure FP without having to change languages or stacks. - You can plug in stuff made in all the other .NET languages. There's a ton of stuff out there that you can just pick up and use. I like F# because the more I use it, the better I get. I know I don't want classes, for loops, mutable state, and the rest -- but sometimes I just can't see how to get around them. So I throw them in there, get the code to work. Then I go back and figure out where I went wrong. Those "going back" moments are like miniature programming lessons tailored just for the things I don't understand well. Very cool.
navd 11y ago
Although I think it's great that Microsoft is moving to oss and cross platform dev, I can't help but still believe that moving from the .net ecosystem to others like go and ruby was the best move I could have made for my sanity and overall developer happiness. I love C# as a language, but the development story is still extremely disappointing. I want Microsoft to stop trying to hold my hand -resulting in cookie cutter applications- and give me the freedom that I experience writing applications in a language like Go. If Microsoft wants a larger set of the developer mind share they need to stop playing catchup (integrating bower and gulp? Who really cares.) and start creating more great tooling I can run from the command line.

90 points by highmastdon 11y ago

Sure this makes sense if you've read the explanation behind it, but this type of change is bad for new users - very confusing.

SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
The intention seems to be that when the dust settles, it will be easier and simpler for new users to get started. As others have mentioned, the "install and start coding" experience has to compare well to ruby, python, node.js etc. Like this: https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/ https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/
- AwesomeBean 11y ago
  Indeed - I think this is a welcome change. Might make it confusing for a year - but makes way more sense for the next 14 years.
  - BillinghamJ 11y ago
    As though they're not going to do more name changing during that time :)

merb 11y ago

More confusion. I hope you will soon have a streamlined way of developing .NET Core 1.0 / ASP.NET CORE 5 or whatever. Currently we have dnx/dnu and dotnet, I prefer dotnet but it is still really really buggy and dnx/dnu is somewhat aweful to use. It's really hard to get started / trying stuff out. Other starting languages were a little bit easier to test, I remeber Go 0.7 it also had a tool to replace 0.7 stuff with 1.0 stuff, however It was a whole new ecosystem so maybe it's harder to actually build something on top of something already there.

cmdkeen 11y ago
dotnet is replacing dnx/dnu - the dnx concept impressed and so has been more widely adopted within the .Net chain. Having had a play with the RC2 CI build it is considerably more streamlined than ASP 4.X development. I'm really looking forward to starting to use it in anger over the next few months.
mrweasel 11y ago
It has become really confusing to get started with .NET. There's a ton of stuff just from Microsoft, and it's kinda hard to understand how everything fits together. I recently did a project where we wanted to a small built in webserver. Understanding how all the OWIN stuff fits together and knowing which libraries to use is hard than doing the actual coding. For a compiled language it's confusing that your code will compile, but not work, because you forgot a "using". Go is younger and therefore doesn't have the baggage of .NET or Java, but it's a good example of how simple a "development environment" can be. It's not alone, Python, Lua and others are also much much easier to get started with, without being bombarded by a ton of acronyms and surrounding infrastructure libraries.
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  Exlir, also super easy to get started with, and provides testing out of the box. With a sample test included. `mix new foobar` then you can immediately `mix test` and it'll compile and run. I can't see myself going back to .NET ever again (it's been 6 years now) because it's so fragmented and hard to find immediately useful information. Microsoft needs to invest on that front.
  - uptownJimmy 11y ago
    I needed to read this stuff right here. I have been developing happily on a custom-built CSLA-esque .NET platform for almost two years now, and I cannot begin to explain to my OSS buddies what they should do to spin up a .NET project of their own. 1) It's not my job description or my problem domain at work. I'm paid to code the app, not spin up fresh instances of our app framework from scratch. We have maybe a dozen apps in various stages of progress, so it isn't like we need the whole team to know how to outfit a new instance of our app framework on a regular basis, but... 2) ...it's also amazing how difficult it is to even define what .NET is. It's hard to explain to colleagues what's going on behind the scenes when you can't always quite figure it out yourself. And I don't think of myself as simple-minded. I know that this stuff is a corollary to the inherent power/complexity factor that such a stack brings to the table, but MicroSoft could absolutely do a better job of providing clear and human-readable docs for people who are not already wizards.

swalsh 11y ago

As a .NET developer turned rails developer, looking back at .NET core 5 (on osx) I like what they're trying. I feel really at home because i love the rails workflow, but i love C#. It's not quite ready for primetime yet (in my opinion), but I could see myself going back in the future. That said, I feel like my rails experience is helping me understand the new .NET works a lot better than my previous .NET experience. So I think the name change is appropriate. It's different enough.

Yuioup 11y ago
I think that .NET Core takes a lot of inspiration from node.js as well. Probably why it feels a bit different from Rails.

andyjohnson0 11y ago

I've been developing on the .net platform for >10 years. Increasingly I get the feeling that I no longer fully understand its extent, how it all fits together, and what is and is not "legacy". Can anyone recommend a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on the platform for someone in my position?

taspeotis 11y ago
Yes I share your confusion and I wish there was a guide to all of this, but don't forget DNX/DNU/CoreCLR/CoreFX/new platform targets for NuGet and all that hasn't hit RTM yet. So I am keeping an eye on it, but I will await the release date(s) before committing to learning too much about one thing or the other.
- cm2187 11y ago
  The other thing is the move toward command lines, away from GUI. I think it's great to make everything scriptable. But a command line is also many order of magnitudes less discoverable than a GUI. I am not sure how much Microsoft realises that a great part of the success of C# is about making it easy and intuitive, and that involves visual feedbacks. Unless the idea is to make it more of an "elite language".
  - insulanian 11y ago
    > Unless the idea is to make it more of an "elite language". When I think of VB, and how being easy and discoverable produced enormous amount of crap in software world, I almost support this idea.
    - cm2187 11y ago
      I can think of two type of crap you are referring to: 1. VB written in the 90s (VB6 and before), which has mostly do to with VB having been around for so long. To be fair, if you look at code written in the 90s in any mainstream language through today's best practice lens, everything will look shit. Today's VB is a superb language that can be very elegant, and actually quite modern too, relying less on special characters and more on an expressive, english syntax. 2. VB written by non programmers (essentially VBA). You can argue that non programmers shouldn't be allowed to code, but from a business user point of view, there is much to say about the lack of productivity of IT departments in large organisations. Enabling users to automate many of their tasks has a massive productivity impact. A user can automate the production of a report in a couple of hours, instead of having to discuss specs, prioritisations, budgets, tests, etc for months with the IT dept. I think it's absurd to hold the quality of the code produced against the language.

zargath 11y ago

I know naming is one of the hardest things in Computer Science, but ".net" always stroke me as the worst name ever. Just like C, C#, Go and Node. You wonder if they sat down and said "Lets take over the internet, what word do people use the most?". I remember when I started using .net when it was in beta 15y ago, searches on "c#" or ".net" simply wielded no results, because of naming and search engine limitations. When .net launched, it introduced vb.net, that gave Visual Basic support. Not a smooth transition, but it gave some developers a bridge to stand on. I wonder why Microsoft didn't just skip the .Net name to signal a new change in both technology and philosophy instead of getting heads blown up by old developers not understanding the switch.

50CNT 11y ago
There's a lot more of those, isn't there. I still remember the time I got on HN and couldn't tell the tech announcements from the news articles. Can't remember any exact titles, but stuff along the lines of "Coffee.net now ships Espresso". Is that a site that sells elixir of life or some kind of javascript and .NET amalgamation shipping a new library? Go, Python, Lisp, C, C#, Java, all these words getting double booked to make them memorable. If I want to find a place to fix my lisp, do I go on stack-overflow or to a speech therapist? Book on Go patterns? "Java island book"? But luckily nowadays we can abuse word connections to get google to spit out the right things. "Python generators" may refer to a machine to generate snakes, but short of living in an xkcd comic, it'll probably return the right results. It just gets a little muddled when developers find just the right collocation to name their pet python [project?]. But then we just heap on more specifiers. Unless you decide to call your library "THE" in a fit of genius. Like Tabasco in your eyes, it just adds spice to your search experience, doesn't it.
- matt4077 11y ago
  ... off to start the THE project...
  - cafard 11y ago
    A bit late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system .

hudo 11y ago

Looking at the post RTM plan, and I really hope they will de-prioritize VB work and push F# more! It has so big potential to attract wider community and bring back some good OSS devs. Except few big companies that needs to maintain legacy apps, nobody really cares about VB any more, specially in some brand new dev stack like asp.net core. Waste of time and resources IMHO. I was a VB dev, and it really made sense 20y ago. Now, I haven't heard somebody is using VB (excluding some bank maybe - but they're mostly stuck in .net 2 or 3).

insulanian 11y ago
Definitely this! I can't remember talking to anyone using VB in last 5 years. And I'm LOB / enterprise app dev.
- graycat 11y ago
  Can't say that anymore -- I'm using VB .NET. See my post a sibling of yours here.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    And now two VB.Net developers! Though granted I work in the financial sector...
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Couple of really nice things about F#: - It's multi-paradigm. If you just gotta have classes? Go make some. But if you want to learn and take your game to the next level, you'll soon ditch a lot of them. F# means you can move from OO to (mostly) pure FP without having to change languages or stacks. - You can plug in stuff made in all the other .NET languages. There's a ton of stuff out there that you can just pick up and use. I like F# because the more I use it, the better I get. I know I don't want classes, for loops, mutable state, and the rest -- but sometimes I just can't see how to get around them. So I throw them in there, get the code to work. Then I go back and figure out where I went wrong. Those "going back" moments are like miniature programming lessons tailored just for the things I don't understand well. Very cool.

navd 11y ago

Although I think it's great that Microsoft is moving to oss and cross platform dev, I can't help but still believe that moving from the .net ecosystem to others like go and ruby was the best move I could have made for my sanity and overall developer happiness. I love C# as a language, but the development story is still extremely disappointing. I want Microsoft to stop trying to hold my hand -resulting in cookie cutter applications- and give me the freedom that I experience writing applications in a language like Go. If Microsoft wants a larger set of the developer mind share they need to stop playing catchup (integrating bower and gulp? Who really cares.) and start creating more great tooling I can run from the command line.