6 ms·

It's only "wed to GDI+" because the current implementation is. Nothing's preventing them from implementing a cross-platform System.Drawing. There's no magic inv

It's only "wed to GDI+" because the current implementation is. Nothing's preventing them from implementing a cross-platform System.Drawing. There's no magic involved in what it does that requires GDI+. I find it unbelievable that they would even consider releasing this without System.Drawing or equivalent being available.

jamessouth 10y ago
I've been working on a solution to that. github.com/JimBobSquarePants/ImageProcessor
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  That's great, but it belongs in the framework. I'm incredibly disappointed by that decision.
  - jamessouth 10y ago
    I do agree. When I spoke to one of the guys there a while back though they said they simply had too much on their plate at the time and were hoping the community would kick in and help.
    - sjellis 10y ago
      Yes, I'm hugely impressed by how much the teams at Microsoft have accomplished in the time, and how they have managed to change the direction of the platform without making a big mess. .NET Core could never be feature-complete on version 1, and I think that the folks involved have been very candid about the fact that it may take a while longer before it is able to support everything that many real-world projects need.
    - blakeyrat 10y ago
      Look. People are voting me down, probably because they disagree with me. Let me explain where I'm coming from. There's two types of programming ecosystem: 1) The wild west world. where there's no good tooling (IDEs, debuggers, etc), all libraries are provided by hundreds of random individual developers and of varying quality, vital tools (such as build systems) are a constant juggle of whatever's trendy at the moment, etc. 2) The world where there's a single comprehensive framework of extremely high compatibility managed by a single party, where tooling is excellent, where backwards compatibility is of paramount importance, and where everything you write is on a solid foundation that's not going to move out from underneath you. If you want environment 1), you have a ton of choices. You can use Node.JS, you can use Python, you can use Ruby, you can use GoLang, Java, etc. If you want environment 2), you have exactly one choice: .Net. And in a year, based on everything I'm reading about .Net Core, you'll have zero. The only saving grace is, being Microsoft, I can be confident that the .Net 4.5 stuff will work for at least another decade. Even if it's not the "trendy new hotness". Maybe I'm a freak outlier, but I much much prefer the old Microsoft that wouldn't even think about releasing the product until it was 100% complete, tested, stable. I think they're moving in the exactly wrong direction, and driving full speed away from everything that made .Net such a great platform in the first place. ----- Every time I've had to use a language where a lot of functionality is provided by "the community", it's been a constant cascade of buggy and badly-designed libraries. "The community" doesn't test their stuff before releasing it. Or the library works for the one tiny purpose it was written for, but isn't generic enough to be useful to anybody else. It's nobody's job to ensure quality or completeness, so it simply does not happen. I'd rather have good code, even if I have to wait longer, than code from "the community".
      - cartman82 10y ago
        > If you want environment 2), you have exactly one choice: .Net. A JAVA guy could probably make a good selection of corporate-supported frameworks that work as seamlessly as .NET. And then, there's the Apple world, with their well designed mobile and desktop libraries, and a hot new C#-like language... Just saying.
        blakeyrat 10y ago
        Java might have the framework(s), but where's the tooling? Java doesn't have a single decent IDE. The thought that Apple's Swift might actually come the closest to what I want after .Net occurred to me, also. Ugh.
        cartman82 10y ago
        https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ Seriously, at this point, Jetbrains IDE-s are better than Visual Studio.
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    I disagree, there is too much in the framework which ends up stuck there for ever, bloating the whole system. System.Drawing is a good example, if you read the msdn docs it is clearly not supported on ASP.Net or from a Windows Service. Libraries like imaging should be a nuget package.
    - blakeyrat 10y ago
      The fix to "System.Drawing is not cross-platform" isn't just deleting it. It's to rewrite it so it is cross-platform.
taspeotis 10y ago
.NET Core has neither WinForms nor WPF. It's very much focused on web applications. System.Drawing might be useful for ... one in ten? web applications. And they have released it, and it's getting plenty of traction. Take a quick scroll through here: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Drawing/commonui/System/Drawing/Advanced/Gdiplus.cs http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Drawing/commonu... To re-use System.Drawing Microsoft would need to re-implement all those methods in a cross-platform, bug-compatible way. And there's a lot of code behind those methods. In my opinion they made a reasonable decision to leave it out of v1.
- cm2187 10y ago
  No, my understanding of .Net core is that this is also the way they want to get back on devices. I think Xamarin will ultimately be based on .net Core. And for a mobile app, you bet you need a way to manipulate images. Even for websites, depends on what sort of websites you do, but I often need to display charts, so being able to generate images on the fly.
  - eberkund 10y ago
    Why are you generating images on the fly to display a chart? Why not send the data points and render a chart clientside using JavaScript? There are plenty of libraries for that.
    - cm2187 10y ago
      I am sure there are other ways but I found using the native datavisualization library very useful and simple to use. I am one of these guys who do as little javascript as necessary.
    - moron4hire 10y ago
      A lot of clients want native PDF output for their reports. None of the PDF generating libraries I know of support running JS. So if you want the same charts in both, you need to generate the images server side.
  - 10y ago
zubspace 10y ago
I'm confused. Didn't Microsoft purchase Xamarin lately? There's http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/drawing/ http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/drawing/ and https://github.com/mono/mono/tree/master/mcs/class/System.Drawing https://github.com/mono/mono/tree/master/mcs/class/System.Dr... all waiting to be integrated. But I guess, this won't happen. So many people would embrace a truly cross platform framework will all bells and whistles. But instead we have this disturbing split between .NET, .NET Core and Mono.
- oblio 10y ago
  .NET Core is slowly reimplementing/integrating all truly cross platform .NET classic APIs (https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/roadmap.md https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/roadmap.md). My guess is that at this point they didn't have the bandwidth to include what you're talking about in the first version but they will include it later on. Long term Mono is probably just going to become a sort of .NET "distribution" on top of .NET Core, it will include things which Microsoft deprecated such as Winform. And it will probably be not maintained at the same level .NET Core itself is. I don't think there will be any reason to use Mono in the future, except for legacy Mono apps...
  - sjellis 10y ago
    In the last presentation that I saw, the line was that Mono would continue to exist as a full .NET implementation to support Xamarin mobile apps. The reason given was that .NET Core was scoped as a run-time for server applications, so no work had been done on making it run on mobile devices, whilst Mono has been used in production on those platforms for some time.
    - oblio 10y ago
      That seems valid now. But developing two runtimes in parallel doesn't seem that great of an investment. Plus there are already dotnet core contributions regarding portability, for example from Samsung, it seems reasonable to think that 2-3-5 years from now dotnet core will power Mono as well.

jamessouth 10y ago

I've been working on a solution to that. github.com/JimBobSquarePants/ImageProcessor

blakeyrat 10y ago
That's great, but it belongs in the framework. I'm incredibly disappointed by that decision.
- jamessouth 10y ago
  I do agree. When I spoke to one of the guys there a while back though they said they simply had too much on their plate at the time and were hoping the community would kick in and help.
  - sjellis 10y ago
    Yes, I'm hugely impressed by how much the teams at Microsoft have accomplished in the time, and how they have managed to change the direction of the platform without making a big mess. .NET Core could never be feature-complete on version 1, and I think that the folks involved have been very candid about the fact that it may take a while longer before it is able to support everything that many real-world projects need.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    Look. People are voting me down, probably because they disagree with me. Let me explain where I'm coming from. There's two types of programming ecosystem: 1) The wild west world. where there's no good tooling (IDEs, debuggers, etc), all libraries are provided by hundreds of random individual developers and of varying quality, vital tools (such as build systems) are a constant juggle of whatever's trendy at the moment, etc. 2) The world where there's a single comprehensive framework of extremely high compatibility managed by a single party, where tooling is excellent, where backwards compatibility is of paramount importance, and where everything you write is on a solid foundation that's not going to move out from underneath you. If you want environment 1), you have a ton of choices. You can use Node.JS, you can use Python, you can use Ruby, you can use GoLang, Java, etc. If you want environment 2), you have exactly one choice: .Net. And in a year, based on everything I'm reading about .Net Core, you'll have zero. The only saving grace is, being Microsoft, I can be confident that the .Net 4.5 stuff will work for at least another decade. Even if it's not the "trendy new hotness". Maybe I'm a freak outlier, but I much much prefer the old Microsoft that wouldn't even think about releasing the product until it was 100% complete, tested, stable. I think they're moving in the exactly wrong direction, and driving full speed away from everything that made .Net such a great platform in the first place. ----- Every time I've had to use a language where a lot of functionality is provided by "the community", it's been a constant cascade of buggy and badly-designed libraries. "The community" doesn't test their stuff before releasing it. Or the library works for the one tiny purpose it was written for, but isn't generic enough to be useful to anybody else. It's nobody's job to ensure quality or completeness, so it simply does not happen. I'd rather have good code, even if I have to wait longer, than code from "the community".
    - cartman82 10y ago
      > If you want environment 2), you have exactly one choice: .Net. A JAVA guy could probably make a good selection of corporate-supported frameworks that work as seamlessly as .NET. And then, there's the Apple world, with their well designed mobile and desktop libraries, and a hot new C#-like language... Just saying.
      - blakeyrat 10y ago
        Java might have the framework(s), but where's the tooling? Java doesn't have a single decent IDE. The thought that Apple's Swift might actually come the closest to what I want after .Net occurred to me, also. Ugh.
        cartman82 10y ago
        https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ Seriously, at this point, Jetbrains IDE-s are better than Visual Studio.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  I disagree, there is too much in the framework which ends up stuck there for ever, bloating the whole system. System.Drawing is a good example, if you read the msdn docs it is clearly not supported on ASP.Net or from a Windows Service. Libraries like imaging should be a nuget package.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    The fix to "System.Drawing is not cross-platform" isn't just deleting it. It's to rewrite it so it is cross-platform.

taspeotis 10y ago

.NET Core has neither WinForms nor WPF. It's very much focused on web applications. System.Drawing might be useful for ... one in ten? web applications. And they have released it, and it's getting plenty of traction. Take a quick scroll through here: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Drawing/commonui/System/Drawing/Advanced/Gdiplus.cs http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Drawing/commonu... To re-use System.Drawing Microsoft would need to re-implement all those methods in a cross-platform, bug-compatible way. And there's a lot of code behind those methods. In my opinion they made a reasonable decision to leave it out of v1.

cm2187 10y ago
No, my understanding of .Net core is that this is also the way they want to get back on devices. I think Xamarin will ultimately be based on .net Core. And for a mobile app, you bet you need a way to manipulate images. Even for websites, depends on what sort of websites you do, but I often need to display charts, so being able to generate images on the fly.
- eberkund 10y ago
  Why are you generating images on the fly to display a chart? Why not send the data points and render a chart clientside using JavaScript? There are plenty of libraries for that.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    I am sure there are other ways but I found using the native datavisualization library very useful and simple to use. I am one of these guys who do as little javascript as necessary.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    A lot of clients want native PDF output for their reports. None of the PDF generating libraries I know of support running JS. So if you want the same charts in both, you need to generate the images server side.
- 10y ago

zubspace 10y ago

I'm confused. Didn't Microsoft purchase Xamarin lately? There's http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/drawing/ http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/drawing/ and https://github.com/mono/mono/tree/master/mcs/class/System.Drawing https://github.com/mono/mono/tree/master/mcs/class/System.Dr... all waiting to be integrated. But I guess, this won't happen. So many people would embrace a truly cross platform framework will all bells and whistles. But instead we have this disturbing split between .NET, .NET Core and Mono.

oblio 10y ago
.NET Core is slowly reimplementing/integrating all truly cross platform .NET classic APIs (https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/roadmap.md https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/roadmap.md). My guess is that at this point they didn't have the bandwidth to include what you're talking about in the first version but they will include it later on. Long term Mono is probably just going to become a sort of .NET "distribution" on top of .NET Core, it will include things which Microsoft deprecated such as Winform. And it will probably be not maintained at the same level .NET Core itself is. I don't think there will be any reason to use Mono in the future, except for legacy Mono apps...
- sjellis 10y ago
  In the last presentation that I saw, the line was that Mono would continue to exist as a full .NET implementation to support Xamarin mobile apps. The reason given was that .NET Core was scoped as a run-time for server applications, so no work had been done on making it run on mobile devices, whilst Mono has been used in production on those platforms for some time.
  - oblio 10y ago
    That seems valid now. But developing two runtimes in parallel doesn't seem that great of an investment. Plus there are already dotnet core contributions regarding portability, for example from Samsung, it seems reasonable to think that 2-3-5 years from now dotnet core will power Mono as well.