4 ms·

I've been using .NET professionally and for hobby projects since version 1.1. While initially sceptical of this new MS platform, I was quickly sold on C# compa

I've been using .NET professionally and for hobby projects since version 1.1. While initially sceptical of this new MS platform, I was quickly sold on C# compared to Java: The language just seemed so much better. The base class library was easier to use. The tooling was rock solid. In many (but not all) ways it was just a better Java. Since then, I must admit I think Microsoft has handled the platform really well. It has made the Java-platform seem quite literally stagnant. First class functions and lambdas first now? Really? Clearly there's been ups and downs. There was times when Microsoft has seemed dormant and not paying attention to the needs and requests of its developers, happy to have conquered the market for in-house enterprise applications. Some APIs were thrown out as soon as they were delivered to market. There were times when I was about to throw it all out due to Microsoft's best option at the time seeming inferior to pretty much everything else out there (ASP.Net Webforms with AJAX being a particularly frustrating story). But all in all, it seems they've managed to pull through, to react in time. They've gotten better at listening to the community. Now they've even open sourced it "all" and let us in, allowed us to participate and shape the future of .NET, if we want to. Yes. I can list a bunch of imperfections which remain with us today (like the .NET Core launch and migration-strategy not being all that convincing), but I'll leave that for another time. Today, on .NET's 15 birthday, I'll say that I'm happy I invested in .NET those 15 years ago. It's literally paid my house, and I've enjoyed working with it while it did. Keep up the good work, Microsoft. There's a world of developers out there who appreciate what you do.

irontoby 10y ago
>I've been using .NET professionally and for hobby projects since version 1.1. While initially sceptical of this new MS platform, I was quickly sold on C# compared to Java And I'm sure your early inclinations were then confirmed when they released 2.0 and their superb implementation of generics :) I had been a longtime Perl hacker (it was a thing back then) and was still cutting my teeth on the cost/benefit tradeoffs of strongly-typed languages. I remember being quite frustrated in 1.x while attempting to write a data-access layer and having to use lots of casts to write reusable code. It definitely took me longer than I'd like to admit to wrap my head around the usefulness of generics, but I certainly remember the "aha" moment I had when I realized how much cleaner they'd make my codebase. In fact, I ended up completely dropping the code-generation tool I had written -- in Perl, of course :) -- to create the base classes which could work directly with our strongly-typed models. > ASP.Net Webforms with AJAX being a particularly frustrating story Very much agreed; I avoided using .NET for anything in any way web related until MVC came out. Working with those Microsoft black box server controls was just too much. > like the .NET Core launch and migration-strategy not being all that convincing I can forgive that, since it looks like their migration strategy with the upcoming .NET Standard 2.0 will be much more solid.
- hermitdev 10y ago
  > I remember being quite frustrated in 1.x while attempting to write a data-access layer and having to use lots of casts to write reusable code. Yeah, I hated the 1.x days, as well for the same reasons. I ended up using a template tool to generate strongly-typed collections to avoid all of the ugly casts every where. Still, .Net 1.x was better than what I had available before, which was ASP & VBScript. Now that was a horrid environment.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Were you also using OCX for the ASP pages?
    - hermitdev 10y ago
      Nope, honestly dont recognize the OCX TLA. It was pretty much a CRUD app, written in webforms, with a few reports rendered as html/xls. It wouldnt pass as pretty by modern terms, but it was a beautifully cut gem circa 2003.
dustinmoris 10y ago
> There's a world of developers out there who appreciate what you do. Couldn't agree more: https://dusted.codes/thank-you-microsoft-for-being-awesome https://dusted.codes/thank-you-microsoft-for-being-awesome
WayneBro 10y ago
I've been working with Microsoft tech for over 20 years and I absolutely love their style so much more than any other tech company. I'm really glad that they exist and I want to see them succeed. When I try to imagine a world without Microsoft and .NET, I honestly start feeling queasy. My one big complaint about .NET is that they didn't open source it sooner. Maybe then, Silverlight or something really tight like that would have won out over the shit-fest of JavaScript that we've had to deal with for the past decade. JavaScript is finally catching up though and at least Visual Studio is one of the best editors you can use for that too. (Really, with the right extensions installed, I think it is the best.) I have a lot of complaints about Microsoft too, but I always complain about things I love. Take my wife, for instance... :)
- BigChiefSmokem 10y ago
  I have to ask, which extensions do you use for your JavaScript development?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - WayneBro 10y ago
    Web Essentials, EditorConfig, Fix File Encoding and Line Endings Unifier. Also, Node.js tools and Tools for Apache Cordova if you work with those. The reason I think it's the best - I haven't seen better HTML/JS/CSS auto-complete in another IDE. It's also got one of the best Android emulators for working with Cordova/Ionic. WebStorm comes close, but I don't like that I had to setup each new JS library to get auto-complete for it. VSCode comes close, but doesn't support code folding on // #region comments and it can't deal with large files as well as the full VS.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  My first Microsoft product was MS-DOS 3.3. Borland had better language tooling, but they lost their way, and Microsoft got Anders in the process as well, so in a way I consider that Turbo Pascal spirit lives in .NET, to a certain extent. :)
criddell 10y ago
What initially soured me on .NET was how Microsoft branded everything with the .NET moniker. I'm still a little bit skeptical about Microsoft's cross-platform future with .NET. They are saying and doing the right things, but I have a hard time trusting them.
- nikbackm 10y ago
  > What initially soured me on .NET was how Microsoft branded everything with the .NET moniker. Well, they kind of went all in at the time, even planned to base the next Windows version on .NET.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Which on my opinion, failed mostly due to the tension between WinDev (C++) and DevTools (.NET), than anything else. Projects like Singularity and Midori prove that if the willingness was there to actually cooperate, they would have managed it. Now we have .NET Native/UWP, which is basically the original idea of .NET when it was still called COM+ Runtime and AOT compiled.
untog 10y ago
I used .NET for quite a few years, and was very happy with it. As much as people malign VB.NET, it provided the perfect path for me as an amateur-turned-professional developer - Access VBA -> VB.NET -> C#. But over time I switched over to web development, and ASP.NET was just bad. The very nature of it - trying to replicate state with WebForms - was fine for intranets and internal tools, but an absolute disaster when working on a public web site. And it was a long time before ASP.NET MVC came along to try to tidy all of that up. I remember discovering Nancy.fx (http://nancyfx.org http://nancyfx.org), a perfect-looking, light-weight web framework. But I could never persuade anyone to use it - in my experience .NET shops lean heavily on using the accepted MS way of doing things unless you really, really don't have to. You could see that in the .NET community - open source, community-driven libraries just weren't a big thing. That frustration led me to trying out Node, and I never really looked back. I miss working with C# a little, and sometimes wonder what the world would be like if MS had embraced open source earlier. Right now I'm writing TypeScript in Visual Studio Code - it isn't difficult to imagine that I could still be writing C# if MS had worked at creating a community around it, but alas, it never happened.
- douche 10y ago
  NancyFX is fantastic. I started using it a few years ago, after we switched off of IIS to the self-hosted OWIN web server stack for a couple of projects, and MVC was not (maybe still isn't?) supported there.

irontoby 10y ago

>I've been using .NET professionally and for hobby projects since version 1.1. While initially sceptical of this new MS platform, I was quickly sold on C# compared to Java And I'm sure your early inclinations were then confirmed when they released 2.0 and their superb implementation of generics :) I had been a longtime Perl hacker (it was a thing back then) and was still cutting my teeth on the cost/benefit tradeoffs of strongly-typed languages. I remember being quite frustrated in 1.x while attempting to write a data-access layer and having to use lots of casts to write reusable code. It definitely took me longer than I'd like to admit to wrap my head around the usefulness of generics, but I certainly remember the "aha" moment I had when I realized how much cleaner they'd make my codebase. In fact, I ended up completely dropping the code-generation tool I had written -- in Perl, of course :) -- to create the base classes which could work directly with our strongly-typed models. > ASP.Net Webforms with AJAX being a particularly frustrating story Very much agreed; I avoided using .NET for anything in any way web related until MVC came out. Working with those Microsoft black box server controls was just too much. > like the .NET Core launch and migration-strategy not being all that convincing I can forgive that, since it looks like their migration strategy with the upcoming .NET Standard 2.0 will be much more solid.

hermitdev 10y ago
> I remember being quite frustrated in 1.x while attempting to write a data-access layer and having to use lots of casts to write reusable code. Yeah, I hated the 1.x days, as well for the same reasons. I ended up using a template tool to generate strongly-typed collections to avoid all of the ugly casts every where. Still, .Net 1.x was better than what I had available before, which was ASP & VBScript. Now that was a horrid environment.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Were you also using OCX for the ASP pages?
  - hermitdev 10y ago
    Nope, honestly dont recognize the OCX TLA. It was pretty much a CRUD app, written in webforms, with a few reports rendered as html/xls. It wouldnt pass as pretty by modern terms, but it was a beautifully cut gem circa 2003.

dustinmoris 10y ago

> There's a world of developers out there who appreciate what you do. Couldn't agree more: https://dusted.codes/thank-you-microsoft-for-being-awesome https://dusted.codes/thank-you-microsoft-for-being-awesome

WayneBro 10y ago

I've been working with Microsoft tech for over 20 years and I absolutely love their style so much more than any other tech company. I'm really glad that they exist and I want to see them succeed. When I try to imagine a world without Microsoft and .NET, I honestly start feeling queasy. My one big complaint about .NET is that they didn't open source it sooner. Maybe then, Silverlight or something really tight like that would have won out over the shit-fest of JavaScript that we've had to deal with for the past decade. JavaScript is finally catching up though and at least Visual Studio is one of the best editors you can use for that too. (Really, with the right extensions installed, I think it is the best.) I have a lot of complaints about Microsoft too, but I always complain about things I love. Take my wife, for instance... :)

BigChiefSmokem 10y ago
I have to ask, which extensions do you use for your JavaScript development?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- WayneBro 10y ago
  Web Essentials, EditorConfig, Fix File Encoding and Line Endings Unifier. Also, Node.js tools and Tools for Apache Cordova if you work with those. The reason I think it's the best - I haven't seen better HTML/JS/CSS auto-complete in another IDE. It's also got one of the best Android emulators for working with Cordova/Ionic. WebStorm comes close, but I don't like that I had to setup each new JS library to get auto-complete for it. VSCode comes close, but doesn't support code folding on // #region comments and it can't deal with large files as well as the full VS.
pjmlp 10y ago
My first Microsoft product was MS-DOS 3.3. Borland had better language tooling, but they lost their way, and Microsoft got Anders in the process as well, so in a way I consider that Turbo Pascal spirit lives in .NET, to a certain extent. :)

criddell 10y ago

What initially soured me on .NET was how Microsoft branded everything with the .NET moniker. I'm still a little bit skeptical about Microsoft's cross-platform future with .NET. They are saying and doing the right things, but I have a hard time trusting them.

nikbackm 10y ago
> What initially soured me on .NET was how Microsoft branded everything with the .NET moniker. Well, they kind of went all in at the time, even planned to base the next Windows version on .NET.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Which on my opinion, failed mostly due to the tension between WinDev (C++) and DevTools (.NET), than anything else. Projects like Singularity and Midori prove that if the willingness was there to actually cooperate, they would have managed it. Now we have .NET Native/UWP, which is basically the original idea of .NET when it was still called COM+ Runtime and AOT compiled.

untog 10y ago

I used .NET for quite a few years, and was very happy with it. As much as people malign VB.NET, it provided the perfect path for me as an amateur-turned-professional developer - Access VBA -> VB.NET -> C#. But over time I switched over to web development, and ASP.NET was just bad. The very nature of it - trying to replicate state with WebForms - was fine for intranets and internal tools, but an absolute disaster when working on a public web site. And it was a long time before ASP.NET MVC came along to try to tidy all of that up. I remember discovering Nancy.fx (http://nancyfx.org http://nancyfx.org), a perfect-looking, light-weight web framework. But I could never persuade anyone to use it - in my experience .NET shops lean heavily on using the accepted MS way of doing things unless you really, really don't have to. You could see that in the .NET community - open source, community-driven libraries just weren't a big thing. That frustration led me to trying out Node, and I never really looked back. I miss working with C# a little, and sometimes wonder what the world would be like if MS had embraced open source earlier. Right now I'm writing TypeScript in Visual Studio Code - it isn't difficult to imagine that I could still be writing C# if MS had worked at creating a community around it, but alas, it never happened.

douche 10y ago
NancyFX is fantastic. I started using it a few years ago, after we switched off of IIS to the self-hosted OWIN web server stack for a couple of projects, and MVC was not (maybe still isn't?) supported there.