7 ms·

I understand that Microsoft has to clean up a lot of legacy baggage around this ecosystem, and it does look like the way forward is much clearer and nicer, but

I understand that Microsoft has to clean up a lot of legacy baggage around this ecosystem, and it does look like the way forward is much clearer and nicer, but man, was there any way this could've been done without another ".NET <foo>"? I'm still figuring out .NET Core/4.5/Framework and all the ASP naming zaniness... and I'm a .NET developer! I do trust Microsoft that this is really, truly the last time this will have to be done, but god it's a headache.

sillysaurus3 10y ago
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
- oblio 10y ago
  That only applies if your ecosystem is the hype-du-jour. .NET is massive, it is entrenched, but I doubt it is growing. So "fire and motion" doesn't apply here.
- pweissbrod 10y ago
  The problem with that is, I feel like by adopting .NET I am the one being fired at by Microsoft
  - btown 10y ago
    Realistically, you are. There's a bit of lock-in that occurs here: you've spent X% of your career learning the ____ stack, and there's a huge opportunity cost to switching stacks... so ____'s incentives are aligned to make sure that that X% stays X% over time, that you're learning new ____ stuff, rather than their tech stagnating and you being able to use your now-free learning time to learn a competitor's stack. I don't mean to be cynical - ____ legitimately want to improve their APIs and the experience of working with their software. But that's what makes the "build an ecosystem" business model so amazing if you can swing it: the crazier your innovations, the more you capture mindshare as people try to keep up, and so you're able to make a great profit while attracting the craziest talent. Insert Microsoft in the ____'s. Now, for all the Angular 2 programmers out there, insert Google.
    - hermitdev 10y ago
      I know I'm going to be reiterating/rephrasing what you've said, but it's true for any closed stack. Especially Java. At least with C# (maybe not .Net as a whole), at least the language is an ECMA spec (ok, not all versions of C#, but several of them): http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-334.htm http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm... I appreciate that MS is working to find a common set of libraries. Eventually this refactoring hopefully leads us to the point where we can all use an open-source common set of libraries and then just add on the Windows, Linux, Android or OSX specific parts. I like the direction MS is heading, in general, with Windows 10, even if there are certain things I don't like. I like that I can run python under WSL because it has a better CLI experience (in my opinion) than the native windows Python build. I also like they are open-sourcing key technologies. I just wish they would do better about naming so to reduce confusion. I'm confused just looking at the tables of which versions support which versions of the Standard. In the one chart, in .NET Framework 4.6.1 supports standard 1.4. 4.6.2 supports 1.5, vNext supports 1.6. Then also 4.6.1 supports standard 2.0. So, .NET Framework 4.6.1 supports Standard 1.4 and 2.0, but 1.5 and 1.6 support different (presumably incompatible) standards? The way the table reads it's 2 steps forward, 1 step back.
    - watermoose 10y ago
      Google didn't intentionally change the world in Angular 2 to make sure that developers were learning new Angular 2 stuff vs. something else. If they wanted to do that, they were too late, because a lot of people had moved to React already. Angular 2 is so different because they were trying to fix all of the problems with Angular 1. In fact, Angular 2 didn't even settle on how to do that after starting early releases of Angular 2. But, that wasn't some secret conspiracy to get people to use it. If anything, a lot of people that were sold on Angular 1 are slower to migrate, but that's what they get for trying to do things right.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        We can also give Android APIs as an example instead of Angular, or the whole IDE and NDK reboot.
    - 10y ago
ep103 10y ago
I agree 100%. So anyone care to take a stab at it? How does this differ from .Net Core?
- wmccullough 10y ago
  The article literally states the difference.
- PercussusVII 10y ago
  It's the API definition that will be shared by .net Core/full framework/asp.net/xamarin.
- ihsw 10y ago
  It's a common API for things like networking, IO, threading, serialization, and so forth. Library authors need to do refactoring to achieve compatibility across .Net Platform (old stuff, Windows-only) and .Net Core (new stuff, cross-platform). This is the bridge for library authors to transition from being Windows-only to cross-platform. Think about library authors that need to write for both Python 2 and Python 3, there needs to be a common API between both, and this is it: .Net Standard. Meanwhile .Net Core is cross-platform build tooling and a minimal API.
- 616c 10y ago
  I believe this was discussed a while back by Scott Hunter in his interview on the .NET Rocks Podcast, who is the PM of all the .NET Platform. He explains, almost apologetically, what all this entails. Needless to say this is not news. I do not follow .NET that much until Core meant Linux, so I listen to things like this. http://dotnetrocks.com/?show=1291 http://dotnetrocks.com/?show=1291 (I apologize in advance for anyone who uses JS blocking like me; open it in your other YOLO browser if you know what's good for you; the .NET Rocks team loves Angular a little too much.)
- terrajobst 10y ago
  .NET Core is a specific .NET platform while .NET Standard is a specification that many .NET platforms, including .NET Core, implement. In other words, .NET Standard is POSIX for .NET.
mbesto 10y ago
Does anyone have a breakdown of how .NET Core/4.5/MVC/etc interact, are different, etc?
- ihsw 10y ago
  .Net Core: cross-platform build tooling, minimal API .Net Standard: cross-platform comprehensive API .Net 4.5: Windows-only build tooling + comprehensive API .Net MVC: Windows-only web framework built on .Net 4+
  - kierenj 10y ago
    Not quite (I think): .NET Standard is an API definition, or rather a versioned set of them. ".NET Framework" (e.g 4.5) "implements" that definition, with some extra features to boot. ".NET Core" also implements it. It's a cut-down (though not very), cross-platform implementation of the .NET Standard. Mono is another implementation of the standard.. cross-platform too, but this time compatible with the actual .NET Framework, i.e. 4.5.
    - yazr 10y ago
      R U saying that (currently) Mono is a superset of Core ? So i am starting with a large and varied Win code base, i will have an easier time porting (as much of it as possible) to Mono rather than Core ?
      - WorldMaker 10y ago
        Mono is not a direct superset of Core, but yes if you have an existing large .NET application you might have an easier time working with Mono than Core. Some of that may change as Core starts to get closer to .NETSTandard 2.0, depending on what sort of a legacy codebase you refer to. (That is, Mono has an okay-not-great emulation library for System.Windows.Forms, but it seems like it may be unlikely for .NET Core to have anything similar.)
      - rodrigokumpera 10y ago
terrajobst 10y ago
I fully share your concerns. I've expressed this problem with a homage to XKCD: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2014/12/04/introducing-net-core/#relationship https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2014/12/04/introduci... Don't think of .NET Standard as another .NET platform. Think of it as the standard that ties them all together. It's similar in spirit to POSIX. It's not another Unix, it's a way to write code that works on multiple Unixes.
- pja 10y ago
  :) As an aside, the content type for that URL is application/octet-stream, so Firefox won’t view the image but insists on downloading it. It needs to be image/png to be viewable in browser I believe.
  - terrajobst 10y ago
    Thanks, replaced with the link to my post. I'm clearly not a web guy ;-)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I think of POSIX as the actual C runtime.
  - iamcreasy 10y ago
    Isn't POSIX just a specification?
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Yes, just like ANSI C is one. The point being that ANSI C didn't took the rest of UNIX APIs to other OSes as part of the specification, but in the end most OSes that adopted C ended up having to support POSIX as well as a means to have some kind of usable C library common across OSes.
jug 10y ago
I know right... I'm also a .NET developer and I wonder in particular how this new move will relate to .NET Framework. I understand that .NET Core is sort of a subset of it, a new "fresh start" with refactoring done as well as platform-specific code cut in order to be able to support multiple platforms. And that .NET Standard covers .NET Core and .NET Framework as an umbrella. However, where is Microsoft's focus now? Is .NET Core the future? What about .NET Framework 5? Will it happen? What about UWP? .NET Framework include a _ton_ of legacy stuff now. Windows Forms. Heck even WPF can be argued to be in the past, now that UWP is the future? UWP isn't directly interchangeable with WPF even though the technologies are confusingly similar. What about ASP .NET vs ASP .NET Core? What about Entity Framework vs Entity Framework Core? Is Microsoft honestly going to move them ALL forward at a good pace? That sounds like an insane undertaking! I'm sure they want Windows devs to develop UWP apps for the Windows Store. Still, are they cannibalizing on that platform with this move? Windows Phone essentially doesn't exist. Xbox? Many wouldn't care about universal Windows apps and suffering by having to follow "weakest link support" due to non-existing smartphone platforms. Many devs would hit a MUCH larger target if developing .NET Core and targeting the web for anything UI related. I wish Microsoft was more clear on this, but maybe the issue here is that they don't know either where they're going since it depends on where the devs are going... This whole .NET ecosystem is becoming extremely large and complex, even when singling out Windows. A whole lot has happened in a short time that it's dazzling.
- cheez 10y ago
  Windows .NET developers won't need to change what they do. If they want to make portable .NET code (between Linux/Mac and Windows) then they need to get familiar with .NET core. This is purely about growing market share (and they have my mind, over Java anyway).
  - nightski 10y ago
    Actually this makes it easier. It expands the subset of the .NET Framework that .NET Core supports. It's the same APIs we have used forever, just more of which are now available on other platforms (.NET Core, Xamarin)
  - 10y ago

sillysaurus3 10y ago

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

oblio 10y ago
That only applies if your ecosystem is the hype-du-jour. .NET is massive, it is entrenched, but I doubt it is growing. So "fire and motion" doesn't apply here.
pweissbrod 10y ago
The problem with that is, I feel like by adopting .NET I am the one being fired at by Microsoft
- btown 10y ago
  Realistically, you are. There's a bit of lock-in that occurs here: you've spent X% of your career learning the ____ stack, and there's a huge opportunity cost to switching stacks... so ____'s incentives are aligned to make sure that that X% stays X% over time, that you're learning new ____ stuff, rather than their tech stagnating and you being able to use your now-free learning time to learn a competitor's stack. I don't mean to be cynical - ____ legitimately want to improve their APIs and the experience of working with their software. But that's what makes the "build an ecosystem" business model so amazing if you can swing it: the crazier your innovations, the more you capture mindshare as people try to keep up, and so you're able to make a great profit while attracting the craziest talent. Insert Microsoft in the ____'s. Now, for all the Angular 2 programmers out there, insert Google.
  - hermitdev 10y ago
    I know I'm going to be reiterating/rephrasing what you've said, but it's true for any closed stack. Especially Java. At least with C# (maybe not .Net as a whole), at least the language is an ECMA spec (ok, not all versions of C#, but several of them): http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-334.htm http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm... I appreciate that MS is working to find a common set of libraries. Eventually this refactoring hopefully leads us to the point where we can all use an open-source common set of libraries and then just add on the Windows, Linux, Android or OSX specific parts. I like the direction MS is heading, in general, with Windows 10, even if there are certain things I don't like. I like that I can run python under WSL because it has a better CLI experience (in my opinion) than the native windows Python build. I also like they are open-sourcing key technologies. I just wish they would do better about naming so to reduce confusion. I'm confused just looking at the tables of which versions support which versions of the Standard. In the one chart, in .NET Framework 4.6.1 supports standard 1.4. 4.6.2 supports 1.5, vNext supports 1.6. Then also 4.6.1 supports standard 2.0. So, .NET Framework 4.6.1 supports Standard 1.4 and 2.0, but 1.5 and 1.6 support different (presumably incompatible) standards? The way the table reads it's 2 steps forward, 1 step back.
  - watermoose 10y ago
    Google didn't intentionally change the world in Angular 2 to make sure that developers were learning new Angular 2 stuff vs. something else. If they wanted to do that, they were too late, because a lot of people had moved to React already. Angular 2 is so different because they were trying to fix all of the problems with Angular 1. In fact, Angular 2 didn't even settle on how to do that after starting early releases of Angular 2. But, that wasn't some secret conspiracy to get people to use it. If anything, a lot of people that were sold on Angular 1 are slower to migrate, but that's what they get for trying to do things right.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      We can also give Android APIs as an example instead of Angular, or the whole IDE and NDK reboot.
  - 10y ago

ep103 10y ago

I agree 100%. So anyone care to take a stab at it? How does this differ from .Net Core?

wmccullough 10y ago
The article literally states the difference.
PercussusVII 10y ago
It's the API definition that will be shared by .net Core/full framework/asp.net/xamarin.
ihsw 10y ago
It's a common API for things like networking, IO, threading, serialization, and so forth. Library authors need to do refactoring to achieve compatibility across .Net Platform (old stuff, Windows-only) and .Net Core (new stuff, cross-platform). This is the bridge for library authors to transition from being Windows-only to cross-platform. Think about library authors that need to write for both Python 2 and Python 3, there needs to be a common API between both, and this is it: .Net Standard. Meanwhile .Net Core is cross-platform build tooling and a minimal API.
616c 10y ago
I believe this was discussed a while back by Scott Hunter in his interview on the .NET Rocks Podcast, who is the PM of all the .NET Platform. He explains, almost apologetically, what all this entails. Needless to say this is not news. I do not follow .NET that much until Core meant Linux, so I listen to things like this. http://dotnetrocks.com/?show=1291 http://dotnetrocks.com/?show=1291 (I apologize in advance for anyone who uses JS blocking like me; open it in your other YOLO browser if you know what's good for you; the .NET Rocks team loves Angular a little too much.)
terrajobst 10y ago
.NET Core is a specific .NET platform while .NET Standard is a specification that many .NET platforms, including .NET Core, implement. In other words, .NET Standard is POSIX for .NET.

mbesto 10y ago

Does anyone have a breakdown of how .NET Core/4.5/MVC/etc interact, are different, etc?

ihsw 10y ago
.Net Core: cross-platform build tooling, minimal API .Net Standard: cross-platform comprehensive API .Net 4.5: Windows-only build tooling + comprehensive API .Net MVC: Windows-only web framework built on .Net 4+
- kierenj 10y ago
  Not quite (I think): .NET Standard is an API definition, or rather a versioned set of them. ".NET Framework" (e.g 4.5) "implements" that definition, with some extra features to boot. ".NET Core" also implements it. It's a cut-down (though not very), cross-platform implementation of the .NET Standard. Mono is another implementation of the standard.. cross-platform too, but this time compatible with the actual .NET Framework, i.e. 4.5.
  - yazr 10y ago
    R U saying that (currently) Mono is a superset of Core ? So i am starting with a large and varied Win code base, i will have an easier time porting (as much of it as possible) to Mono rather than Core ?
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      Mono is not a direct superset of Core, but yes if you have an existing large .NET application you might have an easier time working with Mono than Core. Some of that may change as Core starts to get closer to .NETSTandard 2.0, depending on what sort of a legacy codebase you refer to. (That is, Mono has an okay-not-great emulation library for System.Windows.Forms, but it seems like it may be unlikely for .NET Core to have anything similar.)
    - rodrigokumpera 10y ago

terrajobst 10y ago

I fully share your concerns. I've expressed this problem with a homage to XKCD: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2014/12/04/introducing-net-core/#relationship https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2014/12/04/introduci... Don't think of .NET Standard as another .NET platform. Think of it as the standard that ties them all together. It's similar in spirit to POSIX. It's not another Unix, it's a way to write code that works on multiple Unixes.

pja 10y ago
:) As an aside, the content type for that URL is application/octet-stream, so Firefox won’t view the image but insists on downloading it. It needs to be image/png to be viewable in browser I believe.
- terrajobst 10y ago
  Thanks, replaced with the link to my post. I'm clearly not a web guy ;-)
pjmlp 10y ago
I think of POSIX as the actual C runtime.
- iamcreasy 10y ago
  Isn't POSIX just a specification?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Yes, just like ANSI C is one. The point being that ANSI C didn't took the rest of UNIX APIs to other OSes as part of the specification, but in the end most OSes that adopted C ended up having to support POSIX as well as a means to have some kind of usable C library common across OSes.

jug 10y ago

I know right... I'm also a .NET developer and I wonder in particular how this new move will relate to .NET Framework. I understand that .NET Core is sort of a subset of it, a new "fresh start" with refactoring done as well as platform-specific code cut in order to be able to support multiple platforms. And that .NET Standard covers .NET Core and .NET Framework as an umbrella. However, where is Microsoft's focus now? Is .NET Core the future? What about .NET Framework 5? Will it happen? What about UWP? .NET Framework include a _ton_ of legacy stuff now. Windows Forms. Heck even WPF can be argued to be in the past, now that UWP is the future? UWP isn't directly interchangeable with WPF even though the technologies are confusingly similar. What about ASP .NET vs ASP .NET Core? What about Entity Framework vs Entity Framework Core? Is Microsoft honestly going to move them ALL forward at a good pace? That sounds like an insane undertaking! I'm sure they want Windows devs to develop UWP apps for the Windows Store. Still, are they cannibalizing on that platform with this move? Windows Phone essentially doesn't exist. Xbox? Many wouldn't care about universal Windows apps and suffering by having to follow "weakest link support" due to non-existing smartphone platforms. Many devs would hit a MUCH larger target if developing .NET Core and targeting the web for anything UI related. I wish Microsoft was more clear on this, but maybe the issue here is that they don't know either where they're going since it depends on where the devs are going... This whole .NET ecosystem is becoming extremely large and complex, even when singling out Windows. A whole lot has happened in a short time that it's dazzling.

cheez 10y ago
Windows .NET developers won't need to change what they do. If they want to make portable .NET code (between Linux/Mac and Windows) then they need to get familiar with .NET core. This is purely about growing market share (and they have my mind, over Java anyway).
- nightski 10y ago
  Actually this makes it easier. It expands the subset of the .NET Framework that .NET Core supports. It's the same APIs we have used forever, just more of which are now available on other platforms (.NET Core, Xamarin)
- 10y ago