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This might be the most exciting news I've heard in a long time. Being able to use Visual Studio and .NET for web development while using zsh and all the other L
by typon 11y ago
This might be the most exciting news I've heard in a long time. Being able to use Visual Studio and .NET for web development while using zsh and all the other Linux tools? Dreamland.
- ebbv 11y agoDifferent strokes.. that sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. .NET is not a good web development framework, and Visual Studio is totally overkill for web development.
- alimbada 11y agoI'd like to know what kind of web applications you've built and what tech stack you've used for them for you to make such an uninformed statement like that.
- ebbv 11y agoI'm not really interested in posting my CV to HN. Suffice to say I've been the lead web developer at several companies and have been doing that for ~13 years now. I've used all the popular web development languages, and written everything from small applications to web sites with hundreds of thousands of users. I personally think .NET is much worse than any of the more common web languages (even PHP or Perl) for the web. If I were writing a Windows application then I'd probably write it in .NET using Visual Studio, but not a web application. As I said in my original comment "Different strokes.", you may like .NET. That's fine. It might be the right choice for you and the wrong one for me. I was more commenting that it was amazing to me that someone would think it was awesome because it sounds like the complete opposite to me. I guess I should have asked what you find compelling about writing web applications in .NET.
- 0xFFC 11y agoI think technical reason is much better than bringing up your CV.
- ebbv 11y agoHey read the comment I was responding to. He asked for my CV, that's why I responded like that. .NET is overkill for web application development, IMHO. But I tend to eschew large frameworks in general. YMMV.
- hudo 11y agoI would like hear arguments, what you don't like particularly? I'm not saying .net is the best web dev platform, not at all, but i wouldn't say it's worse than most. It has it's own set of pros/cons, like every other, but generally, to me it looks quite decent, despite heavyweight VS/IIS, which is another story. Looking at mvc, rest, looks pretty much like any other modern dev stack:/
- ebbv 11y agoIt has a reasonable MVC model, it mostly boils down to it's just way overkill. Using t for web development to me is like using a 27 foot truck to get groceries. The beauty, to me, of even "large" web applications is that they can still be light weight.
- Someone1234 11y agoWhat is "overkill?" The framework? The language? The UI? The CLR? I have issues with Microsoft's MVC (mostly that there is no official way of splitting it across several solutions and keeping working routing) but I've never found it overkill for enterprise-style webapp development. We used MVC/Entity Framework. It works well as a RAD for the backend with full HTML/CSS/JS for the front end that we can get creative with. Reminds me a lot of Java development.
- ebbv 11y agoVisual Studio is overkill for web development IMHO (and again, different strokes. I know some people like to write PHP in Eclipse.) The MVC model itself is not overkill, sorry that sentence was not clear. I should know better than make contentious comments on HN that are going to spawn a bunch of aggressive responses when I'm trying to start my day.
- Delmania 11y agoMaking contentious comments is fine, the problem is you have to back them up with anything solid. The basis of your argument is that Visual Studio is overkill for writing web applications. That has nothing to do with ASP.NET and more to do with the desire for simpler developer environment. This can be solved by using VSCode, or setting up Omnisharp for the various text editors out there. You have not given any solid technical reason as to why ASP.NET is a bad framework. In my experiences, it's more or less as capable as Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Java, etc. You've stated it's overkill, meaning what exactly? Are you even aware of the changes being made to ASP.NET vNext? The dotnet cli tool? The only complaint you seem to have is that the tight coupling of ASP.NET to various Windows platforms is a little much for people who are used to Go or RoR.
- nbevans 11y agoBeing stuck in "lead web developer" roles for 13 years probably rules you out of being an influencer though.
- ebbv 11y agoI'm not interested in being a manager, executive or a founder. I've had opportunities and pass. I like being a developer. It's not stuck. As far as being an "influencer"; do you see any links on my profile? Again, that's something other people find appealing, not me.
- swalsh 11y agoI'm guessing its been a few years since you've touched web development in .NET? A lot has changed...
- zxcvcxz 11y agoIf you can't develop with it on all platforms it sucks. Not to mention the job market for .NET devs is pretty shit and I don't know a single person who actually enjoys it.
- skrowl 11y agoASP.NET is a great. I've used it since it's existed (coming from what is now called "Classic ASP"). I think the HN intolerance towards Microsoft / zealousness for Apple is showing here. Certainly .NET isn't for everyone, but I don't think "is not a good web development framework" is justified. Check out http://nancyfx.org/ http://nancyfx.org/ if you're looking for something more lightweight than the full ASP.NET / IIS stack.
- bananaboy 11y agoNancyFX is pretty great! Nice and lightweight.
- typon 11y agoI like using F# for web development. Check out Websharper. It's like Elm or Purescript but comes with all the amazing tools MS has developed for non-web-dev F# for free.
- eggy 11y agoYes, I agree, F# and Websharper are a whole different breed than the ASP.NET, C# apps I used to create. F# is a lot of fun too for more than just Web dev.
- Karunamon 11y agoSerious, non-snarky question: What does this give you that you would not already have with cygwin? The latter installs .exe versions of the usual command line utils, and I'm almost certain ZSH and the others you speak of are included. I do not understand the practical implications of this move by Canonical/MS other than PR - what's actually changing from a user/dev standpoint?
- 0xCMP 11y agoI would assume much better stability and integration. If this works as I expect, I will be able to do things like apt-get install which is a huge improvement over cygwin. Another benefit is that since it's Ubuntu tools and projects will support it vs cygwin which is usually "we don't use it, so figure it out and then we'll post it here for all the other poor saps using cygwin"
- metafex 11y agoCygwin is and always will be only an emulation-layer, never the real deal. For most day-to-day things it works perfectly, but when you run into some corner-case, most of the time you are out of luck. My only real problem with Cygwin is, that it misses a command-line package manager. If they could adopt pacman for package management like MSYS2 does, I'd be a happy camper. edit: To deploy Cygwin based applications you need to get a commercial license from RedHat (if it's not FOSS). Which could be a deal-breaker.
- typon 11y agoThis is a good answer. I always feel limited in Cygwin, it doesn't feel quite right. And it takes quite a bit of tweaking to get working correctly. Case in point: Try getting gvim to work properly from Cygwin.
- tavert 11y agoYou realize cygwin's setup.exe package manager has a CLI, right? The issue with pacman in msys2 is that it's posix dependent, which fails badly at updating the core posix layer itself. Cygwin's setup.exe is a native Windows executable and doesn't have this self hosting problem.
- sfilipov 11y agoThe only reason I can't really use Windows as development OS are the inferior terminal emulators. As good as ConEmu is, it is still worse than Terminator etc. Unless I can run a native Linux terminal emulator, it doesn't make much of a difference to me. Also, the filesystem differences don't help. I was also running into Haskell compilation problems that were fixed by running Ubuntu in a Vagrant environment but speed was slow. There isn't good NFS support on Windows either (there is some).
- dogma1138 11y agoI would call powershell anything but inferior.
- ljani 11y agoI'm always put off by the ~five second startup time when I open PS to start learning it. Any tips for speeding it up?