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I used .NET Core for an application. It was the worst experience I've ever had with a framework in seventeen years. We had switch off it about four months in.

I used .NET Core for an application. It was the worst experience I've ever had with a framework in seventeen years. We had switch off it about four months in. Performance was terrible, critical strange bugs were everywhere, and documentation was awful. But most importantly they would completely change important APIs every month. I'd have update almost every file in my project. And they would change the same API again the next month... Rails, Django, Sinatra, Express, all started with a clear vision of what they wanted to be. This made all the little details support the frameworks big idea. You could use prerelease and beta versions and be fine. .NET Core, though, hasn't decided yet whether it wants to be baboon or a firetruck.

pionar 10y ago
Wait, you're complaining about things that are so because it was a very early preview version? You should never rely on early versions of something for critical, production projects without recognizing the risk.
- tacos 10y ago
  It was labelled Release Candidate 1. They really did make a mess of this one.
  - cmdkeen 10y ago
    And it was a valid Release Candidate, they could have gone live with it. A bigger strategic decision was made to take various concepts from it and apply them to .Net in general not just web specific things. At the same time it gave the ASP team more time to tidy things up and be more consistent in terms of new patterns in a few places. Microsoft was open very quickly that they were making big changes and that RC1 was going to look very different from 1.0. There has been some chaos but it means we are all going to end up with a 1.0 release that is much better, rather than getting a breaking 2.0 release in short order afterwards. It should never be assumed that a Release Candidate is going to make it into production, especially from an enterprise software vendor launching a new product. If the lasting legacy of this is more people taking that on board then that will be a good thing.
    - spriggan3 10y ago
      > And it was a valid Release Candidate I think they messed up calling it a RC1 and leaving it as it is for so long. People started writing drivers and what not and were confident that the stack wouldn't change too much, now they are going to wait the official release (i.e. at least a year) because the trust is broken. They should have called it a beta and not let it live for like a year. You don't do that. > It should never be assumed that a Release Candidate is going to make it into production Of course, but release candidate also means that there wont be any significant change in the tooling or philosophy. RC2 has completely different tooling and the code is completely incompatible. It doesn't build up trust.
- ygra 10y ago
  ... or at least ask the developers how the roadmap looks like and what they intend to break, overhaul, etc. For example, working with Roslyn was a great experience even though we started our project when it was still in beta. Simply because the developers noted that even though it's beta the API is already fairly stable. There were a few things that still changed, but nothing that wasn't fixed in our code ten minutes later.
- danielvf 10y ago
  I know, right! However I've shipped a Rails application that's started from a zip file I begged off DHH before Rails was even publicly available, and maintained it for years. I've used Django for a real app within a month or two of the first available Django release, and maintained to this day. Etc. .NET Core goes beyond bleeding edge to point at which you start to wonder in your more crazed hours if it's actually just a parody of a poorly developed node.js library.
adamclifford 10y ago
If you have been using the .Net Core for more than getting a handle on it right now, you shouldn't be. They clearly stated that it is in development and would drastically change as the development went on.
- danielvf 10y ago
  And this is essentially the answer to the OP's question.
tacos 10y ago
Previous discussion (with input from MS) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646343 Aside from the ServiceStack dude making an extended sales pitch for his overwrought schlocky toolkit, the most disturbing thing in there is the massive dissonance between the experience of professional programmers and what really appears to be an endless throng of happy hobbyists who are excited to "follow the ride" of this thing through clumsy (but Open--yay!) development. You get the impression that people at Microsoft are being rewarded for the number of issues being raised on GitHub for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology ecosystem--under the guise of "building a community." It's... odd.
- spriggan3 10y ago
  > the massive dissonance between the experience of professional programmers and what really appears to be an endless throng of chipper hobbyists who are excited to "follow the ride" of this thing through clumsy (but Open, yay!) development. Do you think hobbyists would really waste their time with Linux and Command Line tools when they can just download Visual Studio on Windows ? You seem to misunderstand why asp.net chose to go open source at first place. > You get the impression that people at Microsoft are being rewarded for the number of issues being raised on GitHub for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology ecosystem, in the guise of "building a community." It's... odd. They basically had to rewrite the entire framework + .net to run it on Linux. I'm pretty sure they are working quite hard and not wasting their time on Github social gimmicks to try to deliver the product in time. Why are you so angry against MS ? Because they break stuff? they always did that. Except now it's open source so if you don't like where it is going you can fork it.
  - tacos 10y ago
    Look at the way they're approaching Bash on Windows (which was also defended by shanselman in that thread). This is a brain dead, check-off-the-boxes compatibility exercise. Instead they threw some half-baked crap on Github and said "Hey community, let us know what doesn't work!" They pulled the same nonsense with C99 support. I know it's dark and rainy and lonely in your office, but just do the work, m'kay? Instead they got Redis limping on it and so decided to release everything as part of an extended tradeshow demo. But months later they realized that it can't handle files that end in a period -- after the community alerted them. This is an absurd way to approach building a critical compatibility layer. It's a waste of everyone's time. But they're over-excited about community input now. They said they were listening with Windows 8, too -- and now Sinofsky's new career is writing LinkedIn articles all day, pretending he didn't drive a $100 billion ecosystem into the ground for three years. Likewise does the OneDrive team really need a UserVoice site to tell them the thing simply doesn't work? A terabyte an hour of error logs and telemetry isn't enough I guess.
cmdkeen 10y ago
What were you using? RC1 came with a go live licence and should not have been having constantly breaking changes. From what you're saying it sounds like you were hooking up to the MyGet streams for the RC2 work which has never been announced as production ready and the dev team have repeatedly said is only for those who really want to live on the bleeding edge. When RC2 is released in the near future the upgrade path from RC1 currently isn't that bad as a one off process. That they produced something good enough that the rest of the .Net team wanted to make use of it as well is a good thing and is going to be of benefit to .Net devs in general. As for upgrades looking back through things like Rails early release notes there were plenty of "you'll need to do these things to upgrade" notices.
- danielvf 10y ago
  Yup! I've lived through upgrading multiple apps in the Early Rails Period. It was indeed painful. But working with .NET core was about an early rails year's worth of breakage every month.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
j_s 10y ago
Thank you for sticking your neck out and actually sharing your real-life practical experience, something that seems to be exactly what the submitter was looking for!

pionar 10y ago

Wait, you're complaining about things that are so because it was a very early preview version? You should never rely on early versions of something for critical, production projects without recognizing the risk.

tacos 10y ago
It was labelled Release Candidate 1. They really did make a mess of this one.
- cmdkeen 10y ago
  And it was a valid Release Candidate, they could have gone live with it. A bigger strategic decision was made to take various concepts from it and apply them to .Net in general not just web specific things. At the same time it gave the ASP team more time to tidy things up and be more consistent in terms of new patterns in a few places. Microsoft was open very quickly that they were making big changes and that RC1 was going to look very different from 1.0. There has been some chaos but it means we are all going to end up with a 1.0 release that is much better, rather than getting a breaking 2.0 release in short order afterwards. It should never be assumed that a Release Candidate is going to make it into production, especially from an enterprise software vendor launching a new product. If the lasting legacy of this is more people taking that on board then that will be a good thing.
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    > And it was a valid Release Candidate I think they messed up calling it a RC1 and leaving it as it is for so long. People started writing drivers and what not and were confident that the stack wouldn't change too much, now they are going to wait the official release (i.e. at least a year) because the trust is broken. They should have called it a beta and not let it live for like a year. You don't do that. > It should never be assumed that a Release Candidate is going to make it into production Of course, but release candidate also means that there wont be any significant change in the tooling or philosophy. RC2 has completely different tooling and the code is completely incompatible. It doesn't build up trust.
ygra 10y ago
... or at least ask the developers how the roadmap looks like and what they intend to break, overhaul, etc. For example, working with Roslyn was a great experience even though we started our project when it was still in beta. Simply because the developers noted that even though it's beta the API is already fairly stable. There were a few things that still changed, but nothing that wasn't fixed in our code ten minutes later.
danielvf 10y ago
I know, right! However I've shipped a Rails application that's started from a zip file I begged off DHH before Rails was even publicly available, and maintained it for years. I've used Django for a real app within a month or two of the first available Django release, and maintained to this day. Etc. .NET Core goes beyond bleeding edge to point at which you start to wonder in your more crazed hours if it's actually just a parody of a poorly developed node.js library.

adamclifford 10y ago

If you have been using the .Net Core for more than getting a handle on it right now, you shouldn't be. They clearly stated that it is in development and would drastically change as the development went on.

danielvf 10y ago
And this is essentially the answer to the OP's question.

tacos 10y ago

Previous discussion (with input from MS) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646343 Aside from the ServiceStack dude making an extended sales pitch for his overwrought schlocky toolkit, the most disturbing thing in there is the massive dissonance between the experience of professional programmers and what really appears to be an endless throng of happy hobbyists who are excited to "follow the ride" of this thing through clumsy (but Open--yay!) development. You get the impression that people at Microsoft are being rewarded for the number of issues being raised on GitHub for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology ecosystem--under the guise of "building a community." It's... odd.

spriggan3 10y ago
> the massive dissonance between the experience of professional programmers and what really appears to be an endless throng of chipper hobbyists who are excited to "follow the ride" of this thing through clumsy (but Open, yay!) development. Do you think hobbyists would really waste their time with Linux and Command Line tools when they can just download Visual Studio on Windows ? You seem to misunderstand why asp.net chose to go open source at first place. > You get the impression that people at Microsoft are being rewarded for the number of issues being raised on GitHub for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology ecosystem, in the guise of "building a community." It's... odd. They basically had to rewrite the entire framework + .net to run it on Linux. I'm pretty sure they are working quite hard and not wasting their time on Github social gimmicks to try to deliver the product in time. Why are you so angry against MS ? Because they break stuff? they always did that. Except now it's open source so if you don't like where it is going you can fork it.
- tacos 10y ago
  Look at the way they're approaching Bash on Windows (which was also defended by shanselman in that thread). This is a brain dead, check-off-the-boxes compatibility exercise. Instead they threw some half-baked crap on Github and said "Hey community, let us know what doesn't work!" They pulled the same nonsense with C99 support. I know it's dark and rainy and lonely in your office, but just do the work, m'kay? Instead they got Redis limping on it and so decided to release everything as part of an extended tradeshow demo. But months later they realized that it can't handle files that end in a period -- after the community alerted them. This is an absurd way to approach building a critical compatibility layer. It's a waste of everyone's time. But they're over-excited about community input now. They said they were listening with Windows 8, too -- and now Sinofsky's new career is writing LinkedIn articles all day, pretending he didn't drive a $100 billion ecosystem into the ground for three years. Likewise does the OneDrive team really need a UserVoice site to tell them the thing simply doesn't work? A terabyte an hour of error logs and telemetry isn't enough I guess.

cmdkeen 10y ago

What were you using? RC1 came with a go live licence and should not have been having constantly breaking changes. From what you're saying it sounds like you were hooking up to the MyGet streams for the RC2 work which has never been announced as production ready and the dev team have repeatedly said is only for those who really want to live on the bleeding edge. When RC2 is released in the near future the upgrade path from RC1 currently isn't that bad as a one off process. That they produced something good enough that the rest of the .Net team wanted to make use of it as well is a good thing and is going to be of benefit to .Net devs in general. As for upgrades looking back through things like Rails early release notes there were plenty of "you'll need to do these things to upgrade" notices.

danielvf 10y ago
Yup! I've lived through upgrading multiple apps in the Early Rails Period. It was indeed painful. But working with .NET core was about an early rails year's worth of breakage every month.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

j_s 10y ago

Thank you for sticking your neck out and actually sharing your real-life practical experience, something that seems to be exactly what the submitter was looking for!