5 ms·

I'm excited about the future of .net core on linux but I'm waiting to hear some success stories. Have you built something significant with it you can point to?

I'm excited about the future of .net core on linux but I'm waiting to hear some success stories. Have you built something significant with it you can point to? This is not snark - I'd really love to hear about it.

manyxcxi 10y ago
I've spent at least the last 10 years (including Uni days) writing mostly Java or .NET in some form or other. I don't mind Java, I generally like using Java 8, but I would happily be writing C# instead if I could run it as easy in as many places. The syntactic sugar, Linq, the latest MVC framework, etc- are generally much faster to get moving in and don't require the configuration hell you can run into w/ Java. However, as a guy who ALSO maintains the servers and deployment process for the things we build, I'll continue avoiding .NET until it can be built, archived, and deployed as easily as we do our Java based applications. I don't think I could even maintain a Windows Server now if I had to.
- UK-AL 10y ago
  What's hard about building and deploying .net applications? Currently use octopus, which probably one of the best deployment experiences. .Net core runs on linux, so you don't even need a windows server.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  We use Octopus Deploy at work to deploy .NET. There's a bit of a learning curve, and it has a few quirks and annoyances, and you might need to write some Powershell scripts to fill in a few gaps (which it can run), but once you've got it in place, it's super simple to deploy everything. Every single deploy used to be a big hullabaloo at our company, now it's super smooth thanks to Octopus. If you're talking about Ant, Maven, Tomcat, etc for Java deployment, it's been about 5 years since I've had to use that, but I'd say Octopus is a much better process than that.
  - manyxcxi 10y ago
    We tried using Octopus (3 years ago) as part of our CI/CD pipeline and ran into a big problem with it choking on file sizes and handling all the bundled dependencies we threw at it. Eventually we just scripted MSBuild and archived them ourselves for retrieval when we needed them.
    - cableshaft 10y ago
      We don't have anything too huge we give it. I think our largest package is like 100MB. But we do have about 40 active projects in its system. Also, I attended something by a guy who worked for Accenture, who talked about using it with thousands of active projects and some of the technical issues they had to overcome (and work directly with Octopus team to help resolve, at some points) with such a massive amount of projects. It was this guy that gave the talk, he has a blog with lots of information about his experience with Octopus. A few of the quirks I encountered when getting everything set up with our company were resolved by reading his blog: http://ianpaullin.com/category/octopus-deploy/ http://ianpaullin.com/category/octopus-deploy/
- holydude 10y ago
  I am a unix a guys that recently moved to a MS wonderland. I have to tell you Windows Server and the tooling feels much more polished than Linux and the mess around it. And powershell...powershell is kind here.
sAbakumoff 10y ago
Not really, at this point of time I just love that it's now possible to write a code, run and debug my project in both of Windows and Mac OS, that's a huge step forward.
caleblloyd 10y ago
I'm in the middle of a project that uses.NET Core. It's been great so far but Microsoft is in the middle of changing the tooling for it, which is a major pain point right now. They are essentially changing the project file format that defines dependencies and build options, and SDK tools and IDEs don't all support both formats yet. .NET Core has almost all of the features of the full .NET framework and C# is a pleasure to work with. My team is very productive and we are able to iterate very quickly. Since it is a compiled language, most errors are caught at build time. Deploying is another pain point. You have to install the framework on Linux and ship all of your dependencies. They make it easy with the `dotnet publish` command. I'm excited for .NET Native which will package everything into a binary.
- sAbakumoff 10y ago
  Do you experience any obstacles with data providers implementation in .NET Core? I heard that they ported SQLDataProvider only.
  - caleblloyd 10y ago
    Yes, we did experience obstacles. I wanted to use MySQL for our project and there was no GA Entity Framework implementation when we started. Oracle is way behind the ball on an official driver and their license (GPLv2) is super restrictive. I found `Pomelo.EntityFrameworkCore.MySql` to be a pretty good implementation and started contributing. We ported it to use `MySqlConnector` as a base MySQL driver. Both libraries have matured a lot, are MIT Licensed, optimized for performance, and are now used in production. I think that PostgreSQL has a similar open source story. There's `Npgsql` for a driver and `Npgsql.EntityFrameworkCore.PostgreSQL` for the Entity Framework implementation. It took some work, but I like that Entity Framework Core allows for it's implementations to be done by the Open Source community. In MySQL's case, we've added lots of MySQL-specific optimizations to the Entity Framework implementation after getting feedback from the community. The new open Microsoft development approach here is great.

manyxcxi 10y ago

I've spent at least the last 10 years (including Uni days) writing mostly Java or .NET in some form or other. I don't mind Java, I generally like using Java 8, but I would happily be writing C# instead if I could run it as easy in as many places. The syntactic sugar, Linq, the latest MVC framework, etc- are generally much faster to get moving in and don't require the configuration hell you can run into w/ Java. However, as a guy who ALSO maintains the servers and deployment process for the things we build, I'll continue avoiding .NET until it can be built, archived, and deployed as easily as we do our Java based applications. I don't think I could even maintain a Windows Server now if I had to.

UK-AL 10y ago
What's hard about building and deploying .net applications? Currently use octopus, which probably one of the best deployment experiences. .Net core runs on linux, so you don't even need a windows server.
cableshaft 10y ago
We use Octopus Deploy at work to deploy .NET. There's a bit of a learning curve, and it has a few quirks and annoyances, and you might need to write some Powershell scripts to fill in a few gaps (which it can run), but once you've got it in place, it's super simple to deploy everything. Every single deploy used to be a big hullabaloo at our company, now it's super smooth thanks to Octopus. If you're talking about Ant, Maven, Tomcat, etc for Java deployment, it's been about 5 years since I've had to use that, but I'd say Octopus is a much better process than that.
- manyxcxi 10y ago
  We tried using Octopus (3 years ago) as part of our CI/CD pipeline and ran into a big problem with it choking on file sizes and handling all the bundled dependencies we threw at it. Eventually we just scripted MSBuild and archived them ourselves for retrieval when we needed them.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    We don't have anything too huge we give it. I think our largest package is like 100MB. But we do have about 40 active projects in its system. Also, I attended something by a guy who worked for Accenture, who talked about using it with thousands of active projects and some of the technical issues they had to overcome (and work directly with Octopus team to help resolve, at some points) with such a massive amount of projects. It was this guy that gave the talk, he has a blog with lots of information about his experience with Octopus. A few of the quirks I encountered when getting everything set up with our company were resolved by reading his blog: http://ianpaullin.com/category/octopus-deploy/ http://ianpaullin.com/category/octopus-deploy/
holydude 10y ago
I am a unix a guys that recently moved to a MS wonderland. I have to tell you Windows Server and the tooling feels much more polished than Linux and the mess around it. And powershell...powershell is kind here.

sAbakumoff 10y ago

Not really, at this point of time I just love that it's now possible to write a code, run and debug my project in both of Windows and Mac OS, that's a huge step forward.

caleblloyd 10y ago

I'm in the middle of a project that uses.NET Core. It's been great so far but Microsoft is in the middle of changing the tooling for it, which is a major pain point right now. They are essentially changing the project file format that defines dependencies and build options, and SDK tools and IDEs don't all support both formats yet. .NET Core has almost all of the features of the full .NET framework and C# is a pleasure to work with. My team is very productive and we are able to iterate very quickly. Since it is a compiled language, most errors are caught at build time. Deploying is another pain point. You have to install the framework on Linux and ship all of your dependencies. They make it easy with the `dotnet publish` command. I'm excited for .NET Native which will package everything into a binary.

sAbakumoff 10y ago
Do you experience any obstacles with data providers implementation in .NET Core? I heard that they ported SQLDataProvider only.
- caleblloyd 10y ago
  Yes, we did experience obstacles. I wanted to use MySQL for our project and there was no GA Entity Framework implementation when we started. Oracle is way behind the ball on an official driver and their license (GPLv2) is super restrictive. I found `Pomelo.EntityFrameworkCore.MySql` to be a pretty good implementation and started contributing. We ported it to use `MySqlConnector` as a base MySQL driver. Both libraries have matured a lot, are MIT Licensed, optimized for performance, and are now used in production. I think that PostgreSQL has a similar open source story. There's `Npgsql` for a driver and `Npgsql.EntityFrameworkCore.PostgreSQL` for the Entity Framework implementation. It took some work, but I like that Entity Framework Core allows for it's implementations to be done by the Open Source community. In MySQL's case, we've added lots of MySQL-specific optimizations to the Entity Framework implementation after getting feedback from the community. The new open Microsoft development approach here is great.