25 ms·

A response to “Why you can't be a good .NET developer” (2016)

116 points by douche 9y ago

anton_gogolev 9y ago
Real artists ship (http://wiki.c2.com/?RealArtistsShip http://wiki.c2.com/?RealArtistsShip), and the frowned-upon enterprise .NET developers ship shit. Yes, the code may be disgusting, none of HTML5, CSS3 or Babel were used in a corporate portal, but. They. Ship. Shit. And this alon makes them good programmers.
- guitarbill 9y ago
  Yeah, let's ship some rubbish and let the next guy fix the mess, because by the time it needs maintaining or majorly expanding we'll be long gone. Good job everybody! /s
  - anton_gogolev 9y ago
    Or else we can hand-craft our next isomorphic Node.js/Angular 7/React Redux Native Embedded SPA - of course "with all the <3 in the world" - and in two months (just when we return from the latest and greatest meetupy conference) find out that one third of the dependencies went missing, one third got non-backwards-compatible changes, and the remaining ones were rewritten from the ground up just for the hell of it. And shit does not even start up properly, 90% of the unit tests fail unexplicably and no one wants to touch the codebase with a ten foot pole.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Real artists also improve. Toilets ship. Wouldn't want to make me eat what comes out, no matter how much it's ... shipped.
gd1 9y ago
"I’ll give our own example, of building a high performance database in managed code" I lol'ed. I don't necessarily agree with Rob's post, but the idea of building a high performance database in .NET is hilarious.
pawadu 9y ago
I worked about a year writing desktop software in C#. Probably the most fun period of my carrier, we were getting things done and delivering before schedule while all having a great time. Also, I get this feeling that the original poster (Rob) is the kind of guy who has zero experience outside a few web frameworks. The kind of guy that barely even knows that desktop, server and embedded exist.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Also, I get this feeling that the original poster (Rob) is the kind of guy who has zero experience outside a few web frameworks. The kind of guy that barely even knows that desktop, server and embedded exist. I think these kinds of disparaging remarks about people don't belong in a civil discussion. If you feel that the opinion isn't worth being discussed, you can just not comment.
  - custos 9y ago
    I feel people who generalize others with a certain specialty negatively is a kind of disparaging remark that doesn't belong in civil dicussion, so let's not pretend this is one. The original blog is spewing some pretty stereotypical bullshit you'd expect from some teenager seriously engaged in a which OS or text editor is better holy war.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      so let's not pretend this is one. That's an interesting position. Shouldn't we strive to have a civil discussion despite whatever incivility may have sparked it? Is any discussion irrevocably tainted?
      - rhapsodic 9y ago
        >That's an interesting position. Shouldn't we strive to have a civil discussion despite whatever incivility may have sparked it? Is any discussion irrevocably tainted? I reserve the right to decide that for myself on a case-by-case basis. And FWIW, I don't think lecturing someone else about their civility is a civil thing to do.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
psyc 9y ago
Person 1: Because a lot of .NET teams are like... Person 2: Wrong! Because not all .NET teams are like that.
- egeozcan 9y ago
  The problem is the generalization over the stack instead of the type of company.
  - psyc 9y ago
    Agreed. I'm not aware of any language/stack you can't be a great dev in. Slash has said that although he has favorite guitars, he believes a good guitarist can grab any cheap guitar out of a crate and make it sound amazing. Or, it's a poor craftsperson who blames the tool. Now, it just so happens that as general frameworks go, IMO C#/.NET is the signature Les Paul.
    - dev360 9y ago
      Oh no you did not just go there... :) I thought Java was the one everybody tried to copy :)
icebraining 9y ago
Blogger 1 makes overreaching claim when talking about a general trend. Blogger 2 focuses on the overreaching claim and mostly ignores the overall point. Sigh. This kind of arguments is way too common.
- majewsky 9y ago
  > Blogger 1 makes overreaching claim when talking about a general trend. Blogger 2 focuses on the overreaching claim and mostly ignores the overall point. Commenter uses the opportunity to express his superiority above both sides. FTFY
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    Stack overflow. At least it is tail recursion, though.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      I actually expected someone else to do another FTFY by adding "Second commenter takes discussion to the meta level."
      - teddyh 9y ago
        Last comment in thread compares HN to Reddit.
UK-AL 9y ago
"Tangible examples? I remember well the insistence of one boss that we use TFS because some developers would find it hard to use git. I remember the steadfast committal to ASP.NET web forms because the "new concepts" in ASP.NET MVC were going to take too long for the team to become productive in." I've gotten this on EVERY stack. Not just .net. I thinks it's more do with age of the project your working on. There is tons critical business applications in .net and java and they don't want to break anything and prefer stability. If your developing something new, the technology is up for grabs.
- NoGravitas 9y ago
  Yeah, it's definitely a culture problem, not a platform problem.
  - Deinos 9y ago
    Agreed. The type of culture that gives us classes like "AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean", etc.
    - fishnchips 9y ago
      I never did C# or Enterprise IT but I think that ridiculing explicit naming misses the point.
      - douche 9y ago
        I don't think it's the explicit naming that's being ridiculed, it's the bingeing on design patterns and baroque enterprisey design that Java, especially, is infamous for.
        fishnchips 9y ago
        I don't know the first thing about C#, but in Java, you can't sometimes avoid fancy design patterns - eg. using Observer where in C++ you could just depend on late binding.
lmm 9y ago
> Looking at the kind of directions that people leave .NET for, it traditionally have been to the green green hills of Rails, then it was Node.JS, not I think it is Elixir, although I’m not really paying attention. That means that in the time a .NET developer (assuming that they investing in themselves and continuously learning) invested in their platform, learned a lot on how to make it work properly, the person who left for greener pastures has had to learn multiple new frameworks and platforms. If you think that this doesn’t have an impact on productivity, you are kidding yourself. Vigorously asserted, but I'm guessing with zero evidence? I would certainly expect a productivity difference between someone who stayed in .NET and someone who left and learned something different, but my assumption (and it's nothing more than that) is that it would go in the opposite direction to what the author seems to assume.
- Delmania 9y ago
  Wide versus deep. The person who focused solely on .NET would be the expert that you'd want to look at a set of requirements and determine if .NET is the appropriate platform and then what technologies would be the best to utilize. The latter would be a person you'd want to lead the development efforts. His exposure to different paradigms would be helpful in writing efficient code, someone who can consult the expert on how to do the best practices in the technology.
dev360 9y ago
From the original post: > This is why you can't be a good .NET developer, sooner or later the frustration sets in and you go and do something better. The average ability and desire for something better just keeps on plummetting whilst Microsoft try to chase the brain drain by casting little nuggets of mediocrity at the people left behind scrabbling in the mud. This was exactly my progression when working .NET in 'Derpy Enterprise Shops'. I don't think it necessarily kept me from becoming a good .NET developer.. But eventually I grew cynical and tired and just gave up on the entire stack. That delta between what we were doing vs could be doing felt like it was too big. In the end though, its absolutely about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language.
- mariusmg 9y ago
  >about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language Bingo, no matter which language is , bad culture will still suffocate you. Nothing to do with specific programming language / environment.
- Delmania 9y ago
  I really can't echo this sentiment enough. You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. Did someone build a cross-platform game using Xamarin Forms and Azure Service Fabric? That sounds cool, sign me up! Then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap. Where can one find these .NET shops that strive to make use of the latest developments?
  - alistairSH 9y ago
    Same can be said of any number of shops doing the same thing with Java or php. It's not a the language or framework, it's the work. It just so happens that the types of companies that require "yet another textbox over database site" like to use established, stable frameworks.
  - TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
    >You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. My problem with these kinds of Microsoft technology evangelism articles/videos is that it always seems like Microsoft has juuuust gotten their new hotness to work, and is telling the world that it's awesome, and ready for production. Then you go to implement it, and as soon as you leave the perfect world of their demo, it all falls apart, and THEN you find out the docs were written for the beta version, and no longer apply, so you're left guessing at the right invocation signature for the method you need. My most-recent example of this was their Ruby bindings for Azure blob storage. I wasted DAYS fiddling with the docs, which showed MANY different ways to call the functions, none of which worked for me. I eventually had to have a discussion with one of the people linked to the documentation to get it to work. This sort of thing -- announcing new stuff that isn't ready for prime time -- has happened before (I'm looking at you, EF and WSL), and I expect it will continue to happen, because MS is usually playing catchup with other market hotness. I haven't used them, but I have no problem assuming that, if I were to go startup a project with the bleeding edge of, say, Erlang, or Node.js, I could find enough documentation to get a working prototype up and running without a lot of hassle. I guess it goes both ways, though. Once you muscle through Microsoft's bleeding edge, it really feels like you've accomplished something. My Rails app is sending messages, with JSON payloads, to an Azure blob queue, which is getting picked up by my internal Windows service, to be batch processed by a legacy command-line tool, and I'm having the time of my (development) life.
Niksko 9y ago
I assumed that .NET shops sucked, as did a lot of my peers at university. Then I started working at one, and found that C# is a nice language, Visual Studio + Resharper is a joy, and that if you follow sensible architectural patterns you can write clean and elegant code. Everything sucks if you do it badly.
- sddfd 9y ago
  QFT: Everything sucks if you do it badly.
- eropple 9y ago
  C# is a great language. I should think so--I've been writing it for twelve years, I don't write C# professionally but I pay for ReSharper, and I used to be a huge Mono booster back-in-the-day. I even did Google Summer of Code for them and made friends I've kept ever since. But whole I've consulted for .NET shops, I've very deliberately avoided working for them for a lot of the reasons described in the article to which this one replies. It's not .NET. It's the mentality of so very many of the shops that pick .NET. The stack and the tooling and the nigh-inevitable process pile-on apply what I feel is more or less a band-pass filter on your output. It's relatively hard to write really stinky code. But it's also relatively hard to write great code. That's not a C# thing--you can write great, brilliant, interesting, smart C#! But doing so at a ".NET shop" strikes me as profoundly unlikely. I have yet to see one, parts of Microsoft aside, that seems to actively reward being smart and curious and expansive in your skill set--and I think a lot of it is because you're a .NET shop, the batteries are included, stay in your lane. (The same criticisms apply to Java-not-Kotlin-or-Scala shops; fair is fair.)
  - wvenable 9y ago
    > But it's also relatively hard to write great code. What's the definition of great code? In all the languages and platforms that I know (C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, C#, etc) if someone wanted me to write "great code" without any other qualifiers I'd pick C# for the job. It's just such a nice well designed static language (except for nullable references) with a reasonably well designed framework that producing great code is pretty easy. I'm patiently waiting for Microsoft to get .NET on everything but for now it seems like JavaScript is the king of that goal.
partycoder 9y ago
.NET technologically isn't bad. What is sort of inconvenient is the dependency management, and that has as a consequence many .NET shops reinventing the wheel. Another bad thing is the presence of closed source proprietary libraries, meaning they can't be forked and adapted/improved upon. This has somehow changed lately with Microsoft open sourcing some stuff.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Dependency management is bad on most platforms, it doesn't seem to be a solved problem yet.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    I am not so sure about that. Dependency management in .NET is not as good as let's say, Java, Python, Ruby, node.js. Setting up your project to use Maven, pip, gems or npm respectively is very easy. I have tried nuget, but it is not as nearly as easy to use or reason about as other systems.
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      What exactly is wrong with NuGet? It's very simple, I think you just didn't give it a chance For example a month ago Facebook broke .net's built in social login, all installed with NuGet, so I ran a single command and it was fixed. If you're talking about front end, NuGet can handle it, or the recent versions of VS have a built in task runner that you can easily setup to run Gulp, Grunt, Yarn, Bower, whatever, if you so desire on build/debug/etc. There are things to hate about the .Net ecosystem (TFS, I'm looking at you), but NuGet ain't one of them.
      - partycoder 9y ago
        So far what I have seen with .NET project files is that: people modify them, VS generates code into those files, and they contain a lot of stuff. As a result, they're very painful to manage when trying to troubleshoot issues. Then, because the project files get modified all the time it's a constant source of conflicts in version control.
msimpson 9y ago
Rob Ashton on .NET: "you're working on a platform that is primarily used by derpy enterprise shops, you will continually be held back because those derpy enteprise shops are continually be held back by the derpy enterprise developers that work in the derpy enterprise shops." Can we just ignore this guy now?
- moomin 9y ago
  The irony being, Oren clearly doesn't ignore Rob, since he's paid him a fair bit to work on Raven over the years.
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    Yeah, I also like how he bashed C# because he used inheritence in Raven and now has problems. Like you can't do composition in C#. You can't blame language for your shitty design!
rb808 9y ago
I love C#, .Net for server side work. My old project was C# servers on Windows Servers and it worked great. I much prefer to C# to Java & Python which is what I do now, I'd even go so far to say as our Windows Blades were more reliable and easier to maintain than our current Linux ones. The biggest problem with .NET and why I switched is that Linux is free and now has biggest mindshare. Most free and opensource products really are Linux first platforms. It used to be that you couldn't get fired for choosing Microsoft, but its flipped that free software is so good you feel silly paying for commercial products like Windows. I can't see much future for the Windows platform which is why I changed. So I think the headline is wrong - any good developer can be happy in C# and write great .net apps - so the good .NET developer does exist. But its also kinda true because the balance has shifted and great new applications are now on new platforms.
- pawadu 9y ago
  Isn't .NET Core a viable option on Linux these days?
  - wvenable 9y ago
    It's not viable yet but lets hope it gets that way.
  - oblio 9y ago
    It's getting there. It should be production ready this autumn.
martamoreno 9y ago
Why would anyone even bother to respond to a statement "Why you can't be a good .NET developer."? A person saying this is obviously deranged. And why is it worth having this on hacker news? Someone seems to be boosting this blog lately. Another useless blogpost on top of hacker news.
robodale 9y ago
I've switched to node platform in the last year, but I've done .NET since 2002. I can still build a solid site in wayyyyy less time in .NET/C# than in node. I still think .NET MVC web apps are a modern marvel. I have yet to do/see anything on the node platform that comes close.
- okreallywtf 9y ago
  That has been my observation as well. You can have an express (express was popular at the time I was working with node, not sure whats hot right now) app up in minutes but when it came to adding authentication, dependency injection, unit testing and really making it production ready it took a dozen modules and a lot more of my time. Part of that was just maturity I'm sure but I kind of felt like I was just taking high quality parts and duct taping them together. In .NET (webapi2 that is) it seems like I have a little less choice about what parts to use but they are also made to fit together and do so nicely without a lot of tinkering.
- dagw 9y ago
  Can you point to a good intro to .NET/C# web dev guide. Basically how to go from zero to a minimal REST API that can talk to a database in a modern way. Ideally something that that doesn't assume IIS (or even windows)
  - kirse 9y ago
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/web-api-vsc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/web-a...
_pmf_ 9y ago
It should be below everyone to even respond to this anecdotal crap (the original article, not this response!). I dislike a lot of the ridiculous yak shaving that JS developers of large corporations try to push to the community, but I would never claim that this in any way affects each developer in the community. > It'll not happen because as long as you're working on a platform that is primarily used by derpy enterprise shops, you will continually be held back because those derpy enteprise shops are continually be held back by the derpy enterprise developers that work in the derpy enterprise shops. Some people have real business problems to solve instead of rewriting their complete stack every half year, for fuck's sake!
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  Personally I enjoy knowing my paycheck comes from the sale of products and not ad revenue or investors.
atemerev 9y ago
A counterexample to the original post: Java. It is also all about stability and backwards compatibility, and now owned by Oracle (which is an epitome of enterprisey derpiness), but Java platform still somehow retains its vibrant, innovative community. One might say that Scala and perhaps Clojure are the main innovation drivers, but .NET has F#, which is no less innovative. So, I think it must be something else. Perhaps their years of focus on Windows platform, which is preferred in enterprisey sweatshops, not in the latte-drinking hipster SV community.
JamesBarney 9y ago
Having worked at an enterprise company that used Go, Node, and Scala, let me tell you .Net isn't the problem. The .Net stack is wonderful. The tooling is fantastic. The base libraries are robust, well documented, and broad. And most projects are pretty consistent. And when the enterprise abandoned this for less mature stacks they magnified all of these typical enterprise problems. Because simply trying to debug poorly written C# is orders of magnitude easier than poorly written JavaScript.
dep_b 9y ago
The problem is Enterprise not .Net. I have the freedom to pick whatever technology I please as long as I deliver a product that works within the specifications of my customers and I find there is a place for for example ASP.Net MVC API's written in C# or Windows services written in F# even when given a complete free choice. Sometimes I pick PHP as "must run anywhere" is the requirement. The next day I'll pick Swift or Objective-C because it's something Apple related. But .Net is always a possibility. But yet while nobody really forces me to use a .Net stack I still pick it since the stack is really stable and relatively easy to use (compared to the perpetual change and chaos of a Modern Web Stack for example). Something I've written 4 years ago will still run and compile like yesterday even if I've abandoned it in the mean while. I've been in those soulless Enterprise shops and it's just what happens to places where people go everyday to watch the clock go six about 28 times per month so they'll see the number on their bank account grow with a predictable number every time. But somewhere in the world these places exist full of PHP developers or Java developers. The thing with Java or .Net is that some customers have really old stacks and don't want to change anything. It's the new Cobol for some companies while other companies do really cool cross-platform stuff. It can be both. Take care where you take your resumé since the cool jobs are much harder to find since nobody with a living soul wants that kind of enterprise jobs.
- c0achmcguirk 9y ago
  You made the point I wanted to make. The problem is Enterprise, not a framework. I'll admit--the Microsoft stack is a walled garden. It offers some nice features like Visual Studio integrating with Visual Studio Team Services with its own issue tracker and build server and so on. If Microsoft supports your workflow or integrates with the tooling you like, awesome. If not, well, just wait and hope that it will someday support what you're looking for. That is the frustrating part of the Microsoft stack. It can be overcome with some architecture decisions at the outset of the project. You don't have to stay in the walled garden. But the Enterprise is where innovation dies. The Enterprise is where motivated developers' souls are sucked out as they are told "no" constantly. .NET isn't the problem.
  - lmm 9y ago
sharemywin 9y ago
I'm not sure why there's such a harsh reaction to "developers that just want a job." I used to enjoy programming. I still enjoy learning new things. I have a life outside of work. Why isn't 23.8% of my life not good enough?
NoGravitas 9y ago
It's a culture problem, not a platform problem, and the problem isn't with .NET shops per se, but with enterprise shops that [treat programmers as fungible cogs][0]. Language enters into that to some extent, because this kind of shop wants programmers with a certain baseline of skill in a widely used language with a widely used stack, and Java and .NET fit the bill. But there's no reason you can't do interesting stuff with good methodology in those languages...if you're not trying to do it at one of those shops. [0]: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69
nikon 9y ago
Rob is not wrong in my experience. Contracting in London doing .NET stuff means 9 times out of 10 you're at some enterprise place with stupid rules and processes that ultimately make it less fun than it should be and you end up hating them for it. Nothing to do with the language/framework, but its adopters.
mack73 9y ago
A strong dev team will shine on any platform and in any language. A weak dev team, given the right tools, can at least be productive. Which is why business people who build business and need devs often settle on .net. Microsoft learned long ago how to cater for the needs of these weak teams. Are there lots of weak tems on .net? Sure, I would argue that is true. > you can't be a good .NET developer Really? That is Rob's conslusion? That's laughable. The best programmers I know are extremely strong .net developers. I'm no Jon Skeet but I personaly view myself as a 7-8 (out of ten) irregardless of platform. If you identify with the platform you're on you are doing it wrong.
faragon 9y ago
TL;DR: ad hominem arguments.
sharemywin 9y ago
The biggest problem I see is if you don't like to wield your knowledge over others and act like your way of doing things is the "greatest" way ever like a Nerdy Donald Trumps, non-techies don't take you seriously.
nedsma 9y ago
I'll refer to patio11's legendary blog post [1] (Don't call yourself a programmer) by saying don't be just a .NET developer. C# is a great language, but you know, so are Python, Swift, Go, Elixir to name a few, and are even easier to learn/practice. By staying exclusively committed to a single language/framework, you're missing out on a lot of fun. The initial productivity anxiety usually wears off after a couple weeks. [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Knowing the language grammar and semantics is one thing. Knowing the language grammar and semantics, standard library, good quality third party libraries, database drivers, official build tools, IDE and VIM/Emacs plugins, best practices, main blogs,tooling for native applications, tooling for web applications, backend servers, .... is another matter altogether. Now multiply this per each language. I rather constrain myself to JVM/.NET stacks, with a little C++ on the side for pure native stuff. That is already a lot to keep on my head. Everything else is nice to dabble on rainy weekends, but that is about it.
  - nedsma 9y ago
    Great! I'm talking about experienced developers like you, who know what it takes to be productive/get things done. First you learn grammar and semantics of some new language, then you want to build a product. From your past experience you can tell what's necessary for solution to be successfully created (all the things you mentioned and some more). Make it a list, evaluate, revisit your best choices as you go. Once you find yourself happy in the new environment, you're in a position to more accurately determine which of the tools now is better for the job.
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    I'm curious, as a long time emacs lover now doing C# work in a day job... is there a good way to do C# in emacs? I'm quite happy with VS2015+ReSharper, but I do sometimes long for emacs.
bartread 9y ago
I find it bizarre that the problems of enterprise software development are being blamed on a technology stack. Any technology stack. I'm primarily a small company kind of guy but I've done a couple of big enterprise gigs now. Currently I'm working for a large multi-national retailer and... well, it doesn't bring me a lot of joy. And why is that? Well, not because we're using .NET, although we are, and not because I'm surrounded by "derpy enterprise developers", because I'm not. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest I'm in a derp free zone, yet it's still hard to get anything productive done. Why is that? Well, here are a few issues: - Culture, - Politics and egos, - Legacy - just tons and tons of legacy, - Complex business requirements, often poorly or incompletely understood by everyone involved, - Distributed teams, - Sheer weight of numbers in terms of people and projects (remember Fred Brooks), - Meetings, meetings, meetings, - BAU, - I could go on. The current choice of technology stack doesn't even factor into the equation. Legacy itself is a complex issue that goes way beyond technological concerns and can cut right through to how the business makes money at a fundamental level.
- robashton2 9y ago
  I find it bizarre that the original blog entry was seen to be blaming the technology, quite the inverse in fact.
mannykannot 9y ago
The article being replied to made a common error: attributing a property of the human environment to the technical one instead. It is in the same category of error as thinking that a change in platform or programming language will solve all your problems.
alistproducer2 9y ago
The original article is really a diatribe on enterprise shops disguised as a critique of .NET. Anyone who has ever worked in a large, enterprise company knows that it's all about warm bodies in seats. The environment selects for people that want stability and runs off ambitious people who want to do "cool" things. .NET is actually a pretty good framework for building apps and is certainly no worse than J2EE or stack du joir for building SPAs.
elorant 9y ago
The problem with .NET is that C# is evolving too damn fast. So no matter what you build you can't avoid the feeling of been left behind by progress. I'm still using C# 4.0 for my projects. I can't be bothered to follow every little shinny thing MS decides to publish, or update VS every couple of years. I have shit to build. And one reason I don't bother following the trend is because MS has the tendency of abandoning technologies all too often. Anyone remembers Silverlight? Or how many rendering engines did they change in ASP.NET MVC.
- UK-AL 9y ago
  Compared to the technologies people learn today, .net is a glacier.
- insulanian 9y ago
  > I'm still using C# 4.0 for my projects. I think you're missing out a lot.
AngeloAnolin 9y ago
Progressing to become a good developer, I believe requires for one to go through some StackOverflow questions and postings. Oh, tell those who say that you cannot be a good .NET developer that StackOverflow is built on the .NET platform. <><
smt88 9y ago
I'm using C#/.NET 4.5.2 for the first time at a small startup. The original architect came from a bank. He's a fantastic programmer and he organized the code in a logical, easy-to-maintain way. Still, we spend about 30% of our working time (30%!) fighting the tooling. Visual Studio 2015 is a buggy mess, and 2017 wouldn't even build our projects. Everything happens at a snail's pace and is incredibly complicated. The error messages are opaque to the point of making me laugh out loud at times, and doing even tiny things (like changing the status code of the response in the API) is complicated and hidden away under many layers of magic. Don't even get me started on Entity Framework. What a fucking disaster. When it works, it's amazing! When it doesn't work (or when you need to do something simple, like update a row) it becomes a black swamp of meaningless error messages and trial-and-error frustration. Our most experienced engineers have been working with .NET and EF for many years and still couldn't figure out how to do an update (in one particular case). The solution? Write a raw SQL query with a "TODO: use EF" comment added. Time lost? TEN hours. I'm not even kidding. Maybe people who like .NET have never had a better experience, but I can assure you that even with great engineers at a small shop, it is not even close to the best experience. Comparisons to Java are accurate.
- paulirwin 9y ago
  For anyone that might not be familiar, Entity Framework is an ORM (object-relational mapper). The "blessed" way of doing an update is to retrieve an object from your context, change its properties, and call SaveChanges on the context. Yes, this can be terribly inefficient, particularly if you're trying to update many rows at once. But it works okay for single-row updates in a CRUD app at the expense of having to run the SELECT first plus all the reflection and change tracking. If you want to do fast, single-call updates without first doing a SELECT, or updates on just a few of the row's columns, since that can't easily be done with tracked objects, you're swimming upstream against what ORMs are designed to do and so your best option is to get out of ORM land and do a SQL query. Using context.Database.SqlQuery() or another library for these purposes like Dapper to parameterize your queries via reflection could help here.
  - smt88 9y ago
    > The "blessed" way of doing an update is to retrieve an object from your context, change its properties, and call SaveChanges on the context. Yes, we know. As I said, we had multiple people who had been using .NET and EF for years. > Yes, this can be terribly inefficient I wasn't talking about efficiency. We're not at a stage where we're optimizing our queries. We just want code that works and is inexpensive to maintain. In this case, we just wanted EF to work at all. We never figured out why it wouldn't work. We got a weird, opaque error message. Our code was laughably simple: create the context, update a row, SaveChanges. That's it.
gjmacd 9y ago
It's not C# (as a language), which is benign and a good actor in the set, it's the stack. Ever try running a Windows / IIS and SQL Server stack in the cloud -- do it only if you want to lose sleep nights and spend weekends away from the family. The language is fine... Let's hope the move to Core and Linux will take the language and the .NET technology to a better platform, but right now? It's a disaster as a robust Cloud platform. Windows and IIS is simply a BAD, BAD, BAD server technology as a whole. It's ill-equipped to to be robust and fault tolerant. Its simply the weak part of that .NET narrative, no way around it right now...
- Illniyar 9y ago
  Just tried it a few months ago, deploying a new project to Azure. Best experience I've had deploying to the cloud - maybe 10 minutes of work, mostly getting acquainted with azure cloud. Beats Heroku's plugin/cli/github flow and AWS' configure 50 tools process hands down. It really only works with .net, visual studio and sqlserver. But really that is what you want if you are a .net developer.
  - gjmacd 9y ago
    Azure is built for Windows, I hope it works well. However, I'm sorry... there's no way you're going to convince me of Windows as a "stack" is more reliable and robust, or even as scalable (in concurrent users and cost) than another stack like GoLang, Node, Python, Elixir... nope. Not going to agree with that man, I've been around much too long to see bullshit issues with Windows/IIS take town a whole operation based on SIMPLE issues -- hell IIS alone is a reason not to choose Microsoft as a stack, it's a DOG WITH FLEAS.
- gentleteblor 9y ago
  JobRudder is an ASP.NET/Sql Server app running in the cloud. It works and it works really well (tooling between visual studio and azure is amazing). [1] https://jobrudder.com https://jobrudder.com
vuyani 9y ago
The original author missed a vital viewpoint. He assumed that .net developers would never be good because they reluctant to try new technologies. He then evaluates that as a bad thing. Thats not quite so. This is a testament to how good and mature Microsofts ecosystem is, and the benefits thereof. In business sense. It doesn't make sense to hire a pool of developers who are good at various cutting edge technologies when the current stack can cater for all business needs. Most .net shops are enterprises which have no need for cutting edge technology. In my opinion,that conclusion should then lead to, should we rather not ask "what makes a good developer?". Theres no simple answer. Example, to a business that employees you to ship code, and you constantly maintain good quality and meeting deliverables. Would that not be considered a good developer?
yks 9y ago
When Paul Graham writes about Lisp as a "secret weapon" I often wonder that .NET is that "secret weapon". C# is absolutely powerful and the ecosystem is such that you can actually work on your startup and not on fixing a web of broken NPM packages. Admittedly this doesn't give you GitHub "points", but hey, there is .NET Core for that now, usually as broken as JS stack and just about as fun if getting bogged down in months old but already deprecated functions is your kind of fun. .NET makes a ton of sense to use for a startup but that's the space where it is severely underused mostly for fashion reasons (and because it doesn't run on MacBooks).

116 points by douche 9y ago

Real artists ship (http://wiki.c2.com/?RealArtistsShip http://wiki.c2.com/?RealArtistsShip), and the frowned-upon enterprise .NET developers ship shit. Yes, the code may be disgusting, none of HTML5, CSS3 or Babel were used in a corporate portal, but. They. Ship. Shit. And this alon makes them good programmers.

guitarbill 9y ago
Yeah, let's ship some rubbish and let the next guy fix the mess, because by the time it needs maintaining or majorly expanding we'll be long gone. Good job everybody! /s
- anton_gogolev 9y ago
  Or else we can hand-craft our next isomorphic Node.js/Angular 7/React Redux Native Embedded SPA - of course "with all the <3 in the world" - and in two months (just when we return from the latest and greatest meetupy conference) find out that one third of the dependencies went missing, one third got non-backwards-compatible changes, and the remaining ones were rewritten from the ground up just for the hell of it. And shit does not even start up properly, 90% of the unit tests fail unexplicably and no one wants to touch the codebase with a ten foot pole.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Real artists also improve. Toilets ship. Wouldn't want to make me eat what comes out, no matter how much it's ... shipped.

gd1 9y ago

"I’ll give our own example, of building a high performance database in managed code" I lol'ed. I don't necessarily agree with Rob's post, but the idea of building a high performance database in .NET is hilarious.

pawadu 9y ago

I worked about a year writing desktop software in C#. Probably the most fun period of my carrier, we were getting things done and delivering before schedule while all having a great time. Also, I get this feeling that the original poster (Rob) is the kind of guy who has zero experience outside a few web frameworks. The kind of guy that barely even knows that desktop, server and embedded exist.

icebraining 9y ago
Also, I get this feeling that the original poster (Rob) is the kind of guy who has zero experience outside a few web frameworks. The kind of guy that barely even knows that desktop, server and embedded exist. I think these kinds of disparaging remarks about people don't belong in a civil discussion. If you feel that the opinion isn't worth being discussed, you can just not comment.
- custos 9y ago
  I feel people who generalize others with a certain specialty negatively is a kind of disparaging remark that doesn't belong in civil dicussion, so let's not pretend this is one. The original blog is spewing some pretty stereotypical bullshit you'd expect from some teenager seriously engaged in a which OS or text editor is better holy war.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    so let's not pretend this is one. That's an interesting position. Shouldn't we strive to have a civil discussion despite whatever incivility may have sparked it? Is any discussion irrevocably tainted?
    - rhapsodic 9y ago
      >That's an interesting position. Shouldn't we strive to have a civil discussion despite whatever incivility may have sparked it? Is any discussion irrevocably tainted? I reserve the right to decide that for myself on a case-by-case basis. And FWIW, I don't think lecturing someone else about their civility is a civil thing to do.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

psyc 9y ago

Person 1: Because a lot of .NET teams are like... Person 2: Wrong! Because not all .NET teams are like that.

egeozcan 9y ago
The problem is the generalization over the stack instead of the type of company.
- psyc 9y ago
  Agreed. I'm not aware of any language/stack you can't be a great dev in. Slash has said that although he has favorite guitars, he believes a good guitarist can grab any cheap guitar out of a crate and make it sound amazing. Or, it's a poor craftsperson who blames the tool. Now, it just so happens that as general frameworks go, IMO C#/.NET is the signature Les Paul.
  - dev360 9y ago
    Oh no you did not just go there... :) I thought Java was the one everybody tried to copy :)

icebraining 9y ago

Blogger 1 makes overreaching claim when talking about a general trend. Blogger 2 focuses on the overreaching claim and mostly ignores the overall point. Sigh. This kind of arguments is way too common.

majewsky 9y ago
> Blogger 1 makes overreaching claim when talking about a general trend. Blogger 2 focuses on the overreaching claim and mostly ignores the overall point. Commenter uses the opportunity to express his superiority above both sides. FTFY
- mikekchar 9y ago
  Stack overflow. At least it is tail recursion, though.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    I actually expected someone else to do another FTFY by adding "Second commenter takes discussion to the meta level."
    - teddyh 9y ago
      Last comment in thread compares HN to Reddit.

UK-AL 9y ago

"Tangible examples? I remember well the insistence of one boss that we use TFS because some developers would find it hard to use git. I remember the steadfast committal to ASP.NET web forms because the "new concepts" in ASP.NET MVC were going to take too long for the team to become productive in." I've gotten this on EVERY stack. Not just .net. I thinks it's more do with age of the project your working on. There is tons critical business applications in .net and java and they don't want to break anything and prefer stability. If your developing something new, the technology is up for grabs.

NoGravitas 9y ago
Yeah, it's definitely a culture problem, not a platform problem.
- Deinos 9y ago
  Agreed. The type of culture that gives us classes like "AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean", etc.
  - fishnchips 9y ago
    I never did C# or Enterprise IT but I think that ridiculing explicit naming misses the point.
    - douche 9y ago
      I don't think it's the explicit naming that's being ridiculed, it's the bingeing on design patterns and baroque enterprisey design that Java, especially, is infamous for.
      - fishnchips 9y ago
        I don't know the first thing about C#, but in Java, you can't sometimes avoid fancy design patterns - eg. using Observer where in C++ you could just depend on late binding.

lmm 9y ago

> Looking at the kind of directions that people leave .NET for, it traditionally have been to the green green hills of Rails, then it was Node.JS, not I think it is Elixir, although I’m not really paying attention. That means that in the time a .NET developer (assuming that they investing in themselves and continuously learning) invested in their platform, learned a lot on how to make it work properly, the person who left for greener pastures has had to learn multiple new frameworks and platforms. If you think that this doesn’t have an impact on productivity, you are kidding yourself. Vigorously asserted, but I'm guessing with zero evidence? I would certainly expect a productivity difference between someone who stayed in .NET and someone who left and learned something different, but my assumption (and it's nothing more than that) is that it would go in the opposite direction to what the author seems to assume.

Delmania 9y ago
Wide versus deep. The person who focused solely on .NET would be the expert that you'd want to look at a set of requirements and determine if .NET is the appropriate platform and then what technologies would be the best to utilize. The latter would be a person you'd want to lead the development efforts. His exposure to different paradigms would be helpful in writing efficient code, someone who can consult the expert on how to do the best practices in the technology.

dev360 9y ago

From the original post: > This is why you can't be a good .NET developer, sooner or later the frustration sets in and you go and do something better. The average ability and desire for something better just keeps on plummetting whilst Microsoft try to chase the brain drain by casting little nuggets of mediocrity at the people left behind scrabbling in the mud. This was exactly my progression when working .NET in 'Derpy Enterprise Shops'. I don't think it necessarily kept me from becoming a good .NET developer.. But eventually I grew cynical and tired and just gave up on the entire stack. That delta between what we were doing vs could be doing felt like it was too big. In the end though, its absolutely about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language.

mariusmg 9y ago
>about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language Bingo, no matter which language is , bad culture will still suffocate you. Nothing to do with specific programming language / environment.
Delmania 9y ago
I really can't echo this sentiment enough. You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. Did someone build a cross-platform game using Xamarin Forms and Azure Service Fabric? That sounds cool, sign me up! Then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap. Where can one find these .NET shops that strive to make use of the latest developments?
- alistairSH 9y ago
  Same can be said of any number of shops doing the same thing with Java or php. It's not a the language or framework, it's the work. It just so happens that the types of companies that require "yet another textbox over database site" like to use established, stable frameworks.
- TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
  >You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. My problem with these kinds of Microsoft technology evangelism articles/videos is that it always seems like Microsoft has juuuust gotten their new hotness to work, and is telling the world that it's awesome, and ready for production. Then you go to implement it, and as soon as you leave the perfect world of their demo, it all falls apart, and THEN you find out the docs were written for the beta version, and no longer apply, so you're left guessing at the right invocation signature for the method you need. My most-recent example of this was their Ruby bindings for Azure blob storage. I wasted DAYS fiddling with the docs, which showed MANY different ways to call the functions, none of which worked for me. I eventually had to have a discussion with one of the people linked to the documentation to get it to work. This sort of thing -- announcing new stuff that isn't ready for prime time -- has happened before (I'm looking at you, EF and WSL), and I expect it will continue to happen, because MS is usually playing catchup with other market hotness. I haven't used them, but I have no problem assuming that, if I were to go startup a project with the bleeding edge of, say, Erlang, or Node.js, I could find enough documentation to get a working prototype up and running without a lot of hassle. I guess it goes both ways, though. Once you muscle through Microsoft's bleeding edge, it really feels like you've accomplished something. My Rails app is sending messages, with JSON payloads, to an Azure blob queue, which is getting picked up by my internal Windows service, to be batch processed by a legacy command-line tool, and I'm having the time of my (development) life.

Niksko 9y ago

I assumed that .NET shops sucked, as did a lot of my peers at university. Then I started working at one, and found that C# is a nice language, Visual Studio + Resharper is a joy, and that if you follow sensible architectural patterns you can write clean and elegant code. Everything sucks if you do it badly.

sddfd 9y ago
QFT: Everything sucks if you do it badly.
eropple 9y ago
C# is a great language. I should think so--I've been writing it for twelve years, I don't write C# professionally but I pay for ReSharper, and I used to be a huge Mono booster back-in-the-day. I even did Google Summer of Code for them and made friends I've kept ever since. But whole I've consulted for .NET shops, I've very deliberately avoided working for them for a lot of the reasons described in the article to which this one replies. It's not .NET. It's the mentality of so very many of the shops that pick .NET. The stack and the tooling and the nigh-inevitable process pile-on apply what I feel is more or less a band-pass filter on your output. It's relatively hard to write really stinky code. But it's also relatively hard to write great code. That's not a C# thing--you can write great, brilliant, interesting, smart C#! But doing so at a ".NET shop" strikes me as profoundly unlikely. I have yet to see one, parts of Microsoft aside, that seems to actively reward being smart and curious and expansive in your skill set--and I think a lot of it is because you're a .NET shop, the batteries are included, stay in your lane. (The same criticisms apply to Java-not-Kotlin-or-Scala shops; fair is fair.)
- wvenable 9y ago
  > But it's also relatively hard to write great code. What's the definition of great code? In all the languages and platforms that I know (C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, C#, etc) if someone wanted me to write "great code" without any other qualifiers I'd pick C# for the job. It's just such a nice well designed static language (except for nullable references) with a reasonably well designed framework that producing great code is pretty easy. I'm patiently waiting for Microsoft to get .NET on everything but for now it seems like JavaScript is the king of that goal.

partycoder 9y ago

.NET technologically isn't bad. What is sort of inconvenient is the dependency management, and that has as a consequence many .NET shops reinventing the wheel. Another bad thing is the presence of closed source proprietary libraries, meaning they can't be forked and adapted/improved upon. This has somehow changed lately with Microsoft open sourcing some stuff.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
Dependency management is bad on most platforms, it doesn't seem to be a solved problem yet.
- partycoder 9y ago
  I am not so sure about that. Dependency management in .NET is not as good as let's say, Java, Python, Ruby, node.js. Setting up your project to use Maven, pip, gems or npm respectively is very easy. I have tried nuget, but it is not as nearly as easy to use or reason about as other systems.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    What exactly is wrong with NuGet? It's very simple, I think you just didn't give it a chance For example a month ago Facebook broke .net's built in social login, all installed with NuGet, so I ran a single command and it was fixed. If you're talking about front end, NuGet can handle it, or the recent versions of VS have a built in task runner that you can easily setup to run Gulp, Grunt, Yarn, Bower, whatever, if you so desire on build/debug/etc. There are things to hate about the .Net ecosystem (TFS, I'm looking at you), but NuGet ain't one of them.
    - partycoder 9y ago
      So far what I have seen with .NET project files is that: people modify them, VS generates code into those files, and they contain a lot of stuff. As a result, they're very painful to manage when trying to troubleshoot issues. Then, because the project files get modified all the time it's a constant source of conflicts in version control.

msimpson 9y ago

Rob Ashton on .NET: "you're working on a platform that is primarily used by derpy enterprise shops, you will continually be held back because those derpy enteprise shops are continually be held back by the derpy enterprise developers that work in the derpy enterprise shops." Can we just ignore this guy now?

moomin 9y ago
The irony being, Oren clearly doesn't ignore Rob, since he's paid him a fair bit to work on Raven over the years.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  Yeah, I also like how he bashed C# because he used inheritence in Raven and now has problems. Like you can't do composition in C#. You can't blame language for your shitty design!

rb808 9y ago

I love C#, .Net for server side work. My old project was C# servers on Windows Servers and it worked great. I much prefer to C# to Java & Python which is what I do now, I'd even go so far to say as our Windows Blades were more reliable and easier to maintain than our current Linux ones. The biggest problem with .NET and why I switched is that Linux is free and now has biggest mindshare. Most free and opensource products really are Linux first platforms. It used to be that you couldn't get fired for choosing Microsoft, but its flipped that free software is so good you feel silly paying for commercial products like Windows. I can't see much future for the Windows platform which is why I changed. So I think the headline is wrong - any good developer can be happy in C# and write great .net apps - so the good .NET developer does exist. But its also kinda true because the balance has shifted and great new applications are now on new platforms.

pawadu 9y ago
Isn't .NET Core a viable option on Linux these days?
- wvenable 9y ago
  It's not viable yet but lets hope it gets that way.
- oblio 9y ago
  It's getting there. It should be production ready this autumn.

martamoreno 9y ago

Why would anyone even bother to respond to a statement "Why you can't be a good .NET developer."? A person saying this is obviously deranged. And why is it worth having this on hacker news? Someone seems to be boosting this blog lately. Another useless blogpost on top of hacker news.

robodale 9y ago

I've switched to node platform in the last year, but I've done .NET since 2002. I can still build a solid site in wayyyyy less time in .NET/C# than in node. I still think .NET MVC web apps are a modern marvel. I have yet to do/see anything on the node platform that comes close.

okreallywtf 9y ago
That has been my observation as well. You can have an express (express was popular at the time I was working with node, not sure whats hot right now) app up in minutes but when it came to adding authentication, dependency injection, unit testing and really making it production ready it took a dozen modules and a lot more of my time. Part of that was just maturity I'm sure but I kind of felt like I was just taking high quality parts and duct taping them together. In .NET (webapi2 that is) it seems like I have a little less choice about what parts to use but they are also made to fit together and do so nicely without a lot of tinkering.
dagw 9y ago
Can you point to a good intro to .NET/C# web dev guide. Basically how to go from zero to a minimal REST API that can talk to a database in a modern way. Ideally something that that doesn't assume IIS (or even windows)
- kirse 9y ago
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/web-api-vsc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/web-a...

_pmf_ 9y ago

It should be below everyone to even respond to this anecdotal crap (the original article, not this response!). I dislike a lot of the ridiculous yak shaving that JS developers of large corporations try to push to the community, but I would never claim that this in any way affects each developer in the community. > It'll not happen because as long as you're working on a platform that is primarily used by derpy enterprise shops, you will continually be held back because those derpy enteprise shops are continually be held back by the derpy enterprise developers that work in the derpy enterprise shops. Some people have real business problems to solve instead of rewriting their complete stack every half year, for fuck's sake!

nsxwolf 9y ago
Personally I enjoy knowing my paycheck comes from the sale of products and not ad revenue or investors.

atemerev 9y ago

A counterexample to the original post: Java. It is also all about stability and backwards compatibility, and now owned by Oracle (which is an epitome of enterprisey derpiness), but Java platform still somehow retains its vibrant, innovative community. One might say that Scala and perhaps Clojure are the main innovation drivers, but .NET has F#, which is no less innovative. So, I think it must be something else. Perhaps their years of focus on Windows platform, which is preferred in enterprisey sweatshops, not in the latte-drinking hipster SV community.

JamesBarney 9y ago

Having worked at an enterprise company that used Go, Node, and Scala, let me tell you .Net isn't the problem. The .Net stack is wonderful. The tooling is fantastic. The base libraries are robust, well documented, and broad. And most projects are pretty consistent. And when the enterprise abandoned this for less mature stacks they magnified all of these typical enterprise problems. Because simply trying to debug poorly written C# is orders of magnitude easier than poorly written JavaScript.

dep_b 9y ago

The problem is Enterprise not .Net. I have the freedom to pick whatever technology I please as long as I deliver a product that works within the specifications of my customers and I find there is a place for for example ASP.Net MVC API's written in C# or Windows services written in F# even when given a complete free choice. Sometimes I pick PHP as "must run anywhere" is the requirement. The next day I'll pick Swift or Objective-C because it's something Apple related. But .Net is always a possibility. But yet while nobody really forces me to use a .Net stack I still pick it since the stack is really stable and relatively easy to use (compared to the perpetual change and chaos of a Modern Web Stack for example). Something I've written 4 years ago will still run and compile like yesterday even if I've abandoned it in the mean while. I've been in those soulless Enterprise shops and it's just what happens to places where people go everyday to watch the clock go six about 28 times per month so they'll see the number on their bank account grow with a predictable number every time. But somewhere in the world these places exist full of PHP developers or Java developers. The thing with Java or .Net is that some customers have really old stacks and don't want to change anything. It's the new Cobol for some companies while other companies do really cool cross-platform stuff. It can be both. Take care where you take your resumé since the cool jobs are much harder to find since nobody with a living soul wants that kind of enterprise jobs.

c0achmcguirk 9y ago
You made the point I wanted to make. The problem is Enterprise, not a framework. I'll admit--the Microsoft stack is a walled garden. It offers some nice features like Visual Studio integrating with Visual Studio Team Services with its own issue tracker and build server and so on. If Microsoft supports your workflow or integrates with the tooling you like, awesome. If not, well, just wait and hope that it will someday support what you're looking for. That is the frustrating part of the Microsoft stack. It can be overcome with some architecture decisions at the outset of the project. You don't have to stay in the walled garden. But the Enterprise is where innovation dies. The Enterprise is where motivated developers' souls are sucked out as they are told "no" constantly. .NET isn't the problem.
- lmm 9y ago

sharemywin 9y ago

I'm not sure why there's such a harsh reaction to "developers that just want a job." I used to enjoy programming. I still enjoy learning new things. I have a life outside of work. Why isn't 23.8% of my life not good enough?

NoGravitas 9y ago

It's a culture problem, not a platform problem, and the problem isn't with .NET shops per se, but with enterprise shops that [treat programmers as fungible cogs][0]. Language enters into that to some extent, because this kind of shop wants programmers with a certain baseline of skill in a widely used language with a widely used stack, and Java and .NET fit the bill. But there's no reason you can't do interesting stuff with good methodology in those languages...if you're not trying to do it at one of those shops. [0]: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69

nikon 9y ago

Rob is not wrong in my experience. Contracting in London doing .NET stuff means 9 times out of 10 you're at some enterprise place with stupid rules and processes that ultimately make it less fun than it should be and you end up hating them for it. Nothing to do with the language/framework, but its adopters.

mack73 9y ago

A strong dev team will shine on any platform and in any language. A weak dev team, given the right tools, can at least be productive. Which is why business people who build business and need devs often settle on .net. Microsoft learned long ago how to cater for the needs of these weak teams. Are there lots of weak tems on .net? Sure, I would argue that is true. > you can't be a good .NET developer Really? That is Rob's conslusion? That's laughable. The best programmers I know are extremely strong .net developers. I'm no Jon Skeet but I personaly view myself as a 7-8 (out of ten) irregardless of platform. If you identify with the platform you're on you are doing it wrong.

faragon 9y ago

TL;DR: ad hominem arguments.

sharemywin 9y ago

The biggest problem I see is if you don't like to wield your knowledge over others and act like your way of doing things is the "greatest" way ever like a Nerdy Donald Trumps, non-techies don't take you seriously.

nedsma 9y ago

I'll refer to patio11's legendary blog post [1] (Don't call yourself a programmer) by saying don't be just a .NET developer. C# is a great language, but you know, so are Python, Swift, Go, Elixir to name a few, and are even easier to learn/practice. By staying exclusively committed to a single language/framework, you're missing out on a lot of fun. The initial productivity anxiety usually wears off after a couple weeks. [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

pjmlp 9y ago
Knowing the language grammar and semantics is one thing. Knowing the language grammar and semantics, standard library, good quality third party libraries, database drivers, official build tools, IDE and VIM/Emacs plugins, best practices, main blogs,tooling for native applications, tooling for web applications, backend servers, .... is another matter altogether. Now multiply this per each language. I rather constrain myself to JVM/.NET stacks, with a little C++ on the side for pure native stuff. That is already a lot to keep on my head. Everything else is nice to dabble on rainy weekends, but that is about it.
- nedsma 9y ago
  Great! I'm talking about experienced developers like you, who know what it takes to be productive/get things done. First you learn grammar and semantics of some new language, then you want to build a product. From your past experience you can tell what's necessary for solution to be successfully created (all the things you mentioned and some more). Make it a list, evaluate, revisit your best choices as you go. Once you find yourself happy in the new environment, you're in a position to more accurately determine which of the tools now is better for the job.
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  I'm curious, as a long time emacs lover now doing C# work in a day job... is there a good way to do C# in emacs? I'm quite happy with VS2015+ReSharper, but I do sometimes long for emacs.

bartread 9y ago

I find it bizarre that the problems of enterprise software development are being blamed on a technology stack. Any technology stack. I'm primarily a small company kind of guy but I've done a couple of big enterprise gigs now. Currently I'm working for a large multi-national retailer and... well, it doesn't bring me a lot of joy. And why is that? Well, not because we're using .NET, although we are, and not because I'm surrounded by "derpy enterprise developers", because I'm not. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest I'm in a derp free zone, yet it's still hard to get anything productive done. Why is that? Well, here are a few issues: - Culture, - Politics and egos, - Legacy - just tons and tons of legacy, - Complex business requirements, often poorly or incompletely understood by everyone involved, - Distributed teams, - Sheer weight of numbers in terms of people and projects (remember Fred Brooks), - Meetings, meetings, meetings, - BAU, - I could go on. The current choice of technology stack doesn't even factor into the equation. Legacy itself is a complex issue that goes way beyond technological concerns and can cut right through to how the business makes money at a fundamental level.

robashton2 9y ago
I find it bizarre that the original blog entry was seen to be blaming the technology, quite the inverse in fact.

mannykannot 9y ago

The article being replied to made a common error: attributing a property of the human environment to the technical one instead. It is in the same category of error as thinking that a change in platform or programming language will solve all your problems.

alistproducer2 9y ago

The original article is really a diatribe on enterprise shops disguised as a critique of .NET. Anyone who has ever worked in a large, enterprise company knows that it's all about warm bodies in seats. The environment selects for people that want stability and runs off ambitious people who want to do "cool" things. .NET is actually a pretty good framework for building apps and is certainly no worse than J2EE or stack du joir for building SPAs.

elorant 9y ago

The problem with .NET is that C# is evolving too damn fast. So no matter what you build you can't avoid the feeling of been left behind by progress. I'm still using C# 4.0 for my projects. I can't be bothered to follow every little shinny thing MS decides to publish, or update VS every couple of years. I have shit to build. And one reason I don't bother following the trend is because MS has the tendency of abandoning technologies all too often. Anyone remembers Silverlight? Or how many rendering engines did they change in ASP.NET MVC.

UK-AL 9y ago
Compared to the technologies people learn today, .net is a glacier.
insulanian 9y ago
> I'm still using C# 4.0 for my projects. I think you're missing out a lot.

AngeloAnolin 9y ago

Progressing to become a good developer, I believe requires for one to go through some StackOverflow questions and postings. Oh, tell those who say that you cannot be a good .NET developer that StackOverflow is built on the .NET platform. <><

smt88 9y ago

I'm using C#/.NET 4.5.2 for the first time at a small startup. The original architect came from a bank. He's a fantastic programmer and he organized the code in a logical, easy-to-maintain way. Still, we spend about 30% of our working time (30%!) fighting the tooling. Visual Studio 2015 is a buggy mess, and 2017 wouldn't even build our projects. Everything happens at a snail's pace and is incredibly complicated. The error messages are opaque to the point of making me laugh out loud at times, and doing even tiny things (like changing the status code of the response in the API) is complicated and hidden away under many layers of magic. Don't even get me started on Entity Framework. What a fucking disaster. When it works, it's amazing! When it doesn't work (or when you need to do something simple, like update a row) it becomes a black swamp of meaningless error messages and trial-and-error frustration. Our most experienced engineers have been working with .NET and EF for many years and still couldn't figure out how to do an update (in one particular case). The solution? Write a raw SQL query with a "TODO: use EF" comment added. Time lost? TEN hours. I'm not even kidding. Maybe people who like .NET have never had a better experience, but I can assure you that even with great engineers at a small shop, it is not even close to the best experience. Comparisons to Java are accurate.

paulirwin 9y ago
For anyone that might not be familiar, Entity Framework is an ORM (object-relational mapper). The "blessed" way of doing an update is to retrieve an object from your context, change its properties, and call SaveChanges on the context. Yes, this can be terribly inefficient, particularly if you're trying to update many rows at once. But it works okay for single-row updates in a CRUD app at the expense of having to run the SELECT first plus all the reflection and change tracking. If you want to do fast, single-call updates without first doing a SELECT, or updates on just a few of the row's columns, since that can't easily be done with tracked objects, you're swimming upstream against what ORMs are designed to do and so your best option is to get out of ORM land and do a SQL query. Using context.Database.SqlQuery() or another library for these purposes like Dapper to parameterize your queries via reflection could help here.
- smt88 9y ago
  > The "blessed" way of doing an update is to retrieve an object from your context, change its properties, and call SaveChanges on the context. Yes, we know. As I said, we had multiple people who had been using .NET and EF for years. > Yes, this can be terribly inefficient I wasn't talking about efficiency. We're not at a stage where we're optimizing our queries. We just want code that works and is inexpensive to maintain. In this case, we just wanted EF to work at all. We never figured out why it wouldn't work. We got a weird, opaque error message. Our code was laughably simple: create the context, update a row, SaveChanges. That's it.

gjmacd 9y ago

It's not C# (as a language), which is benign and a good actor in the set, it's the stack. Ever try running a Windows / IIS and SQL Server stack in the cloud -- do it only if you want to lose sleep nights and spend weekends away from the family. The language is fine... Let's hope the move to Core and Linux will take the language and the .NET technology to a better platform, but right now? It's a disaster as a robust Cloud platform. Windows and IIS is simply a BAD, BAD, BAD server technology as a whole. It's ill-equipped to to be robust and fault tolerant. Its simply the weak part of that .NET narrative, no way around it right now...

Illniyar 9y ago
Just tried it a few months ago, deploying a new project to Azure. Best experience I've had deploying to the cloud - maybe 10 minutes of work, mostly getting acquainted with azure cloud. Beats Heroku's plugin/cli/github flow and AWS' configure 50 tools process hands down. It really only works with .net, visual studio and sqlserver. But really that is what you want if you are a .net developer.
- gjmacd 9y ago
  Azure is built for Windows, I hope it works well. However, I'm sorry... there's no way you're going to convince me of Windows as a "stack" is more reliable and robust, or even as scalable (in concurrent users and cost) than another stack like GoLang, Node, Python, Elixir... nope. Not going to agree with that man, I've been around much too long to see bullshit issues with Windows/IIS take town a whole operation based on SIMPLE issues -- hell IIS alone is a reason not to choose Microsoft as a stack, it's a DOG WITH FLEAS.
gentleteblor 9y ago
JobRudder is an ASP.NET/Sql Server app running in the cloud. It works and it works really well (tooling between visual studio and azure is amazing). [1] https://jobrudder.com https://jobrudder.com

vuyani 9y ago

The original author missed a vital viewpoint. He assumed that .net developers would never be good because they reluctant to try new technologies. He then evaluates that as a bad thing. Thats not quite so. This is a testament to how good and mature Microsofts ecosystem is, and the benefits thereof. In business sense. It doesn't make sense to hire a pool of developers who are good at various cutting edge technologies when the current stack can cater for all business needs. Most .net shops are enterprises which have no need for cutting edge technology. In my opinion,that conclusion should then lead to, should we rather not ask "what makes a good developer?". Theres no simple answer. Example, to a business that employees you to ship code, and you constantly maintain good quality and meeting deliverables. Would that not be considered a good developer?

yks 9y ago

When Paul Graham writes about Lisp as a "secret weapon" I often wonder that .NET is that "secret weapon". C# is absolutely powerful and the ecosystem is such that you can actually work on your startup and not on fixing a web of broken NPM packages. Admittedly this doesn't give you GitHub "points", but hey, there is .NET Core for that now, usually as broken as JS stack and just about as fun if getting bogged down in months old but already deprecated functions is your kind of fun. .NET makes a ton of sense to use for a startup but that's the space where it is severely underused mostly for fashion reasons (and because it doesn't run on MacBooks).