7 ms·

The future of .NET Standard

134 points by flipchart 6y ago

Someone 6y ago
Earlier articles in this ongoing series of “how to name things”: - September 2016: Introducing .NET Standard (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-standard/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-standa...) - May 2019: .NET Core is the Future of .NET (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-core-is-the-future-of-net/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-core-is-the-future...) - May 2019: Introducing .NET 5 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/) (Yes, the last two are from the same month, even day. The second one is consistent with this article) I may have missed a few episodes.
- nightski 6y ago
  I don't see the problem with the last two you listed, seeing as right near the top of the article it says - .NET 5 = .NET Core vNext They are basically taking .NET Core and getting rid of the Core aspect of the name since it will be the only actively developed version of .NET going forward.
- grezql 6y ago
  this is so confusing. .net core .net (before core) .netstandard 2.1 .net 5 what a joke. This coming from someone who used to work as dev in .NET
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    It's not THAT bad. You're conflating a bunch of stuff. If you're interested just take some time and read up on it. The roadmap is clearly explained on docs.microsoft.com.
  - juststeve 6y ago
    i would also like to get off the bus
- SloopJon 6y ago
  Speaking of "how to name things," how is target framework name abbreviated to TFM? Edit: found it--the "M" is for moniker.
  - andybak 6y ago
    So we can mentally translate "TFM" as "name" in nearly all realistic contexts: "To better reflect this, we’ve updated the target framework names (TFMs)" becomes "To better reflect this, we’ve updated the names"
- jimbob45 6y ago
  What’s so weird is that DirectX has an entirely terrestrial naming system and .NET refuses to follow its example.
  - oceanswave 6y ago
    .net ultimate incoming
    - mlvljr 6y ago
      NET Last. NET Eternal. Dot Nyet :/
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    With .NET 5 things are going back to a "check the version number" naming system though. 5 is greater than .NET Core 3.x, .NET Framework 4.x, and .NET Standard 2.x, you can pretty much forget what Core/Framework/Standard entirely mean as soon as you can upgrade to 5. (And the next version is .NET 6.) It's one version number left now. (Also, DirectX tried to version number individual components at various points in its history so even DirectX "naming" isn't that straightforward at certain points in time in the past.)
- daxfohl 6y ago
  Omfg, the hours I've wasted searching for netframework answers, and all the search results are netcore. Because search engines prefer newer, and nobody adds "framework" to their questions.
  - tracker1 6y ago
    I've had the opposite problem more than once. ;-) When .Net Core 3.x was in development, OMG was it hard to actually find examples of how to do certain things. At least .Net Core (soon 5) is easier to target containers (Docker) with.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- addicted 6y ago
  This whole .net stuff is actually fairly simple. People could easily grasp something like: .Net framework (the same thing that MS always had) A new named cross platform framework. Not just another .Net derivative. And a new name for the standard. Something like the Common .Net API. That would have pretty much eliminated all confusion. Instead they went with .Net Framework .Net Core .Net standard .Net {version_num}
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    Unless you're old enough to remember when everything was named .NET (e.g. Office.NET, Windows.NET).
    - kyberias 6y ago
      It was a very very short time.
      - cptskippy 6y ago
        It was a few years, but that's MS pattern. Now days everything is either o365 or Azure branded.
akmittal 6y ago
Microsoft is making lots of performance improvements on .Net Core side. It seem to be lot faster than Java now. With .net core being open source and Cross Platform I think it is still not able to take Javas marketshare. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/csharp.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
- samfisher83 6y ago
  Plus Oracle is being shady with their licensing terms.
  - kasperni 6y ago
    Shady in what way? OpenJDK is licensed under GPL2 with linking exception.
    - karianna 6y ago
      MSFT Employee here who came in via last year’s jClarity acquisition (yes Microsoft now has a Java Engineering Group!). Oracle change the licensing terms on its Oracle JDK (which was the default JDK most of the world used) to something more commercial which some folks thought was it communicated well enough. There are a ton of free in beer and free in use options. You can look at adoptopenjdk.net for the broadest community led one or azul Zulu for the one that’s been around since even before Oracle made their change
- kasperni 6y ago
  Some of the .Net examples literal calls into native code. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/program/regexredux-csharpcore-8.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... vs https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/program/regexredux-java-3.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... That is hardly a fair comparison.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
qz2 6y ago
This is the most schizophrenic platform I've ever worked on. I've just spent an hour trying to make something work across the five different variants and web pipelines doing things underneath. Edit: to be clear we have completely hung legacy stuff which is waiting resources (lots of $$$$ wasted) to port it to later versions of the frameworks because huge chunks of the ecosystem got abandoned by MS and the OSS developers who were supporting it. On the positive side I'm getting paid danger money now.
- goto11 6y ago
  Web forms?
  - qz2 6y ago
    Nope. An ASP.Net MVC project dragged through since CTP versions.
- golergka 6y ago
  > most schizophrenic platform > danger money In my experience, these often go hand-in-hand. Also, never heard 'danger money' and absolutely love it, thanks.
- bookshelf976 6y ago
  What do you mean by five different variants? Also, what are the chunks of the ecosystem that were abandoned? Web Forms? Silverlight? UWP? Microsoft has shown an amazing ability to modernize and improve the platform without dragging baggage around from one version to the next. We just took an ASP.NET MVC web app developed in 2005 for Windows/IIS and shipped it on linux using .NET core— the conversion took 1 developer just 2 days.
  - qz2 6y ago
    Trivial projects yeah. This is not a trivial project. As for different variants. Two different http pipelines (classic, integrated), OWIN, one obsolete variant of OWIN, whatever is lurking inside .Net core now. WebAPI, MVC, bits of the remains of WCF floating around. Abandoned bits: WCF, WWF, older OWIN pipelines, SignalR and a huge chunk of open source projects and commercial CLR packages. It's a shit show it really is.
stomatomot 6y ago
the future of .net? the cemetery lol they still playing catchup with java when the real threat was GO, now they are behind, and far far behind
- UK-Al05 6y ago
  Catch up with java? C# .net was always ahead. The advantage java had was the ecosystem.
  - JohnL4 6y ago
    "the ecosystem" The truly great thing about java is sun somehow created an ecosystem, a community. Probably by leading with specs, always, and not implementing anything but the core. So, you wind up with a real marketplace and a collaborative development effort. The variety of widely-accepted non-Sun solutions is an indicator. Meanwhile, in microsoft-land... no spec, no standard. It's just "whatever MS does, that's the Thing." Nothing 3rd party is implemented because (a) no spec, and (b) MS has a nasty habit of cutting 3rd parties off at the knees. (Maybe because they're not happy with what 3rd parties develop, because... no spec.) The result? Microsoft blinders. "If MS didn't invent it or publicize it at Build, it's no good." So, you get the absolute ferment of java (and python, same factors, really) or... solutions by MS or MS vendors, which is more limited because a profitability case has to be made to lenders. MS really did play catch-up with Java, which they were able to do because of the MS tax. Don't make any arguments based on technological superiority, 'cause there ain't none. Java (and the entire web, really) caught MS flat-footed. Bottomless pockets saved them.
- apta 6y ago
  golang isn't really a threat. It's a weak language with a very messy ecosystem. They don't even have proper versioning figured out, not to mention a proper package manager.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    Sounds an awful lot like C#.
MikeTheGreat 6y ago
"net5.0-windows (and later net6.0-android and net6.0-ios). These TFMs represent OS-specific flavors of .NET 5 that include net5.0 plus OS-specific functionality." Wait - net6.0-<platform> is actually net5.0?
- yAak 6y ago
  I read that to mean: .NET won't get OS-specific functionality on Android and iOS until .NET 6.
- nxc18 6y ago
  I was surprised by this, too. I've spent the last 20 minutes researching; it seems every time I look away for more than a few minutes, Microsoft changes things up (then leaves nasty comments like didn't you read the FAQ or 'it was explained clearly, .net 5 is a separate language together and individually' https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/177951/future-of-xamarin-and-net-5 https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/177951/future-of-xamar...). My reading of this is that Xamarin has been dropped from .NET 5 and moved to .NET 6, and Microsoft is hoping you don't notice.
  - MarkSweep 6y ago
    Here is where they announced that Xamerian will not ship as part of .NET 5. 4th paragraph, starting with “Last year,”: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-5-preview-4-and-our-journey-to-one-net/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-5-previ... This announcement was made in a post announcing a preview release instead of its own post, so I can see why people missed it.
- cdash 6y ago
  Sounds more like net5.0-android and net5.0-ios doesn't exist and they will come in net6.0
- conscion 6y ago
  There's a table further down in the article that shows more clearly that net6.0-android is part of .NET 6 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-future-of-net-standard/#net-versioning https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-future-of-net-stan...
yAak 6y ago
As a primarily native-client dev who has developed for most major desktop and mobile platforms, I hope MS achieves it's goal of .NET being a truly solid cross-platform option, but in a way that enables clean and efficient native-code interop. Having used C++, some insane hand-rolled solutions, PhoneGap/Cordova, Unity, and now Kotlin MPP, I know that the "cross-platform" dream is messy and fraught with disaster, but I've come to really appreciate C# and .NET for day-to-day client dev.
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  What do you mean by "native-client"? Google Native Client?
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    I guess the opposite of Electron: a client written with the official framework of the platform (UWP for Windows, Cocoa for Mac, GTK or QT for Linux etc).
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  Did you try QT while using C++? If yes, what do you think of it?
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  Xamarin.Native is equivalent to Kotlin MPP but much more mature. Give it a look if you haven't, its a great option for sticking with .net
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Also, a lot of the Xamarin stuff will be merging directly "out of the box" with .NET 6 next year. In particular, what used to be called Xamarin.Forms will be called MAUI [Multi-platform Application UI] starting with .NET 6, and the MAUI name and new namespaces (Xamarin.Forms => System.Maui, Xamarin.Essentials => System.Devices) seem to show greater investment/interest from Microsoft in making it first class moving forward.
Todd 6y ago
This is good news for experienced .NET developers and newcomers alike. It marks the end of the journey from legacy .NET Framework to fully open source cross-platform .NET. .NET Standard was confusing, and the ubiquitous TFMs in the early days were even more so. But all of those struggles where made to achieve a cross-runtime compatibility layer to make it easier to support both ecosystems. It was a Herculean effort by Microsoft, and they achieved it. Now it's purpose has been served and as we move forward we can all just use the simple name of netX.Y, unless we're library authors that want to continue to support legacy .NET Framework as well.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  I am not sure about the end of the journey. Lots of legacy .NET Framework code means I will continue targeting .NET Standard 2.0. That's why nobody used 2.1 - it did not support legacy framework. .NET 5 does not solve this problem. Just renaming .NET Core (3+1) to .NET 5 won't magically make legacy code portable. Also, there is still very popular Unity 3D, that can target later framework, but will continue to run on the legacy one itself for a while.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    My understanding is that Unity is hoping to catch up as soon as some of the final AOT stuff merges from Mono into .NET 6, so "for a while" in the case of Unity is now supposed to be a year or less (given Preview versions).
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Unity already has their own AOT, two implementations actually.
- goto11 6y ago
  I fear it marks the beginning of a very long dark journey, where .net developers are forced to work on more and more obsolete software while looking with envy towards other platforms which are actually maintained. The "core" migration is not a problem for short-lived startups, but .net is used a lot in business and enterprises. They don't rewrite their whole stack every two years but prefer an incremental approach. Since a lot of libraries will never be ported to core, a lot of enterprises will never migrate, since there will always be this critical internal app on web forms or whatever. It is amazing that .net now runs on Linux, but it is a disaster that this platform change is tightly coupled to completely unrelated components like the C# compiler version. Developers on the framework now is stuck on an obsolete version of C# forever, cannot upgrade entity framework and so on. C# attracted a lot of Java developers back when it got lambdas and Linq and async and whatnot, and Java seemed stuck in last century. Is it going to be the other way around in the future?
whoisthemachine 6y ago
I agree with others that the fast changing story on modularization (first everything comes as one package with .Net framework, then it's different packages, then it's all together again with .Net core 3), standardization (.Net framework -> .Net standard -> .Net core), makes it hard to feel like this is a stable platform, in the sense that you can understand the basic architecture of the platform and it will stay that way for some time, decades even... I personally felt .Net standard was a great investment in making a standard platform that the community could contribute to, that would, of course, move slower than the giant monolith controlled by Microsoft... but nothing about .Net standard didn't mean you couldn't choose to use the giant monolith instead, it just guaranteed some semblance of stability if that was your preference.
infogulch 6y ago
.NET Series N
Hickfang 6y ago
The future of the .NET “Standard” .. it'll be a continously moving target, making it near impossible to clone ;] Of course that'll mean developers are for ever playing catch-up, rewriting code at more expence.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  Compared to Javascript devs, I don't think we should complain ;)
kerng 6y ago
Maybe Microsoft should give this whole thing a reboot. After many years working with .net but not following it closely last 2-4 years I'm hopelessly lost what's going on....
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  This is the "reboot announcement". Starting with .NET 5 there's only one .NET again that matters (though you'll hear lots of legacy support complaints for years to come). 5 is now the highest version number and the next version number is 6 like you would expect. There's no other versions you need to know unless you have to support legacy code (and there, it's probably time to reboot if you are supporting certain types of legacy code).
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Well you missed a whole bunch of commotion. .Net 5 is the new .Net and you don’t need to worry about standard or core or 2.0, 2.1, 3.x, backward compatibility, etc. If you start a new project after .Net5 is released in November, there will be little to nothing to worry about and you won’t have missed much of anything.
  - kerng 6y ago
    That sounds great! Will this have good VS Code support? Being a .net developer having used VS before mostly, I had lots of trouble a little over a year back building and referencing things with VS Code. It was easier to use Go and Python with VS code actually.
    - cwhiz 6y ago
      Yup. For everything except winform designers. I’ve been exclusively using VS Code for .Net Core 2.1/3.1 for over a year now.
teh_klev 6y ago
As someone who was somewhat out of the loop for a couple of years with regards to .NET/Core etc and the "Standard" thing, I had kind of wondered what all these new "Standard" options in Visual Studio meant and after a couple of hours of Googling it made sense. I think there's a few folks out there who make a wee bit of a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to this "unification" effort by Microsoft to deliver I guess "the one .NET to rule them all". Now sure it's been a wee bit painful (no less probably than for those working on .NET itself) to get to this stage, but .NET has been around for a lot of years, welded for most of its life to Windows and this transformation wasn't going to happen overnight. But having the "Standard" TFM bits has gone some way during this time to mostly ensure your code can be compiled an deployed to "any platform" albeit with some caveats and some warts. I think .NET-5 is a reasonable step in the right direction. And for those of us working on .NET 4.x projects that still need to be looked after (I work on a pretty sizeable .NET 4.7 app) well MS will be supporting the "Windows .NET" for a good few years to come. I should say that whilst .NET and Windows are my rent-paying tools-of-the-trade, I'm not a fanboi and have my own beefs and criticisms about MS's tooling decisions. Don't get me started about EF, especially Enum handling from back in the day. And yes, sometimes (in fact many times) MS do somewhat cack-handedly mess up naming things which doesn't help.
- nullsense 6y ago
  In my experience it has become a Python 2 vs. Python 3 situation. For those projects stuck on .NET 4x it's getting progressively harder to Google for relevant info on .NET Framework. With the switch back you will be trying to find info on .NET 5 and you'll turn up stuff for .NET 4.5 and you'll have to go out of your way to additionally search for .NET Core. I feel like MS backtracked on what they initially said when they said .NET and .NET Core would continue to both be developed. Instead they sort of invented this loophole of saying well .NET Core is .NET now so we are continuing to develop .NET.

134 points by flipchart 6y ago

Earlier articles in this ongoing series of “how to name things”: - September 2016: Introducing .NET Standard (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-standard/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-standa...) - May 2019: .NET Core is the Future of .NET (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-core-is-the-future-of-net/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-core-is-the-future...) - May 2019: Introducing .NET 5 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/) (Yes, the last two are from the same month, even day. The second one is consistent with this article) I may have missed a few episodes.

nightski 6y ago
I don't see the problem with the last two you listed, seeing as right near the top of the article it says - .NET 5 = .NET Core vNext They are basically taking .NET Core and getting rid of the Core aspect of the name since it will be the only actively developed version of .NET going forward.
grezql 6y ago
this is so confusing. .net core .net (before core) .netstandard 2.1 .net 5 what a joke. This coming from someone who used to work as dev in .NET
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  It's not THAT bad. You're conflating a bunch of stuff. If you're interested just take some time and read up on it. The roadmap is clearly explained on docs.microsoft.com.
- juststeve 6y ago
  i would also like to get off the bus
SloopJon 6y ago
Speaking of "how to name things," how is target framework name abbreviated to TFM? Edit: found it--the "M" is for moniker.
- andybak 6y ago
  So we can mentally translate "TFM" as "name" in nearly all realistic contexts: "To better reflect this, we’ve updated the target framework names (TFMs)" becomes "To better reflect this, we’ve updated the names"
jimbob45 6y ago
What’s so weird is that DirectX has an entirely terrestrial naming system and .NET refuses to follow its example.
- oceanswave 6y ago
  .net ultimate incoming
  - mlvljr 6y ago
    NET Last. NET Eternal. Dot Nyet :/
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  With .NET 5 things are going back to a "check the version number" naming system though. 5 is greater than .NET Core 3.x, .NET Framework 4.x, and .NET Standard 2.x, you can pretty much forget what Core/Framework/Standard entirely mean as soon as you can upgrade to 5. (And the next version is .NET 6.) It's one version number left now. (Also, DirectX tried to version number individual components at various points in its history so even DirectX "naming" isn't that straightforward at certain points in time in the past.)
daxfohl 6y ago
Omfg, the hours I've wasted searching for netframework answers, and all the search results are netcore. Because search engines prefer newer, and nobody adds "framework" to their questions.
- tracker1 6y ago
  I've had the opposite problem more than once. ;-) When .Net Core 3.x was in development, OMG was it hard to actually find examples of how to do certain things. At least .Net Core (soon 5) is easier to target containers (Docker) with.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
addicted 6y ago
This whole .net stuff is actually fairly simple. People could easily grasp something like: .Net framework (the same thing that MS always had) A new named cross platform framework. Not just another .Net derivative. And a new name for the standard. Something like the Common .Net API. That would have pretty much eliminated all confusion. Instead they went with .Net Framework .Net Core .Net standard .Net {version_num}
- cptskippy 6y ago
  Unless you're old enough to remember when everything was named .NET (e.g. Office.NET, Windows.NET).
  - kyberias 6y ago
    It was a very very short time.
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      It was a few years, but that's MS pattern. Now days everything is either o365 or Azure branded.

akmittal 6y ago

Microsoft is making lots of performance improvements on .Net Core side. It seem to be lot faster than Java now. With .net core being open source and Cross Platform I think it is still not able to take Javas marketshare. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/csharp.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

samfisher83 6y ago
Plus Oracle is being shady with their licensing terms.
- kasperni 6y ago
  Shady in what way? OpenJDK is licensed under GPL2 with linking exception.
  - karianna 6y ago
    MSFT Employee here who came in via last year’s jClarity acquisition (yes Microsoft now has a Java Engineering Group!). Oracle change the licensing terms on its Oracle JDK (which was the default JDK most of the world used) to something more commercial which some folks thought was it communicated well enough. There are a ton of free in beer and free in use options. You can look at adoptopenjdk.net for the broadest community led one or azul Zulu for the one that’s been around since even before Oracle made their change
kasperni 6y ago
Some of the .Net examples literal calls into native code. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/program/regexredux-csharpcore-8.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... vs https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/program/regexredux-java-3.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... That is hardly a fair comparison.
- philliphaydon 6y ago

qz2 6y ago

This is the most schizophrenic platform I've ever worked on. I've just spent an hour trying to make something work across the five different variants and web pipelines doing things underneath. Edit: to be clear we have completely hung legacy stuff which is waiting resources (lots of $$$$ wasted) to port it to later versions of the frameworks because huge chunks of the ecosystem got abandoned by MS and the OSS developers who were supporting it. On the positive side I'm getting paid danger money now.

goto11 6y ago
Web forms?
- qz2 6y ago
  Nope. An ASP.Net MVC project dragged through since CTP versions.
golergka 6y ago
> most schizophrenic platform > danger money In my experience, these often go hand-in-hand. Also, never heard 'danger money' and absolutely love it, thanks.
bookshelf976 6y ago
What do you mean by five different variants? Also, what are the chunks of the ecosystem that were abandoned? Web Forms? Silverlight? UWP? Microsoft has shown an amazing ability to modernize and improve the platform without dragging baggage around from one version to the next. We just took an ASP.NET MVC web app developed in 2005 for Windows/IIS and shipped it on linux using .NET core— the conversion took 1 developer just 2 days.
- qz2 6y ago
  Trivial projects yeah. This is not a trivial project. As for different variants. Two different http pipelines (classic, integrated), OWIN, one obsolete variant of OWIN, whatever is lurking inside .Net core now. WebAPI, MVC, bits of the remains of WCF floating around. Abandoned bits: WCF, WWF, older OWIN pipelines, SignalR and a huge chunk of open source projects and commercial CLR packages. It's a shit show it really is.

stomatomot 6y ago

the future of .net? the cemetery lol they still playing catchup with java when the real threat was GO, now they are behind, and far far behind

UK-Al05 6y ago
Catch up with java? C# .net was always ahead. The advantage java had was the ecosystem.
- JohnL4 6y ago
  "the ecosystem" The truly great thing about java is sun somehow created an ecosystem, a community. Probably by leading with specs, always, and not implementing anything but the core. So, you wind up with a real marketplace and a collaborative development effort. The variety of widely-accepted non-Sun solutions is an indicator. Meanwhile, in microsoft-land... no spec, no standard. It's just "whatever MS does, that's the Thing." Nothing 3rd party is implemented because (a) no spec, and (b) MS has a nasty habit of cutting 3rd parties off at the knees. (Maybe because they're not happy with what 3rd parties develop, because... no spec.) The result? Microsoft blinders. "If MS didn't invent it or publicize it at Build, it's no good." So, you get the absolute ferment of java (and python, same factors, really) or... solutions by MS or MS vendors, which is more limited because a profitability case has to be made to lenders. MS really did play catch-up with Java, which they were able to do because of the MS tax. Don't make any arguments based on technological superiority, 'cause there ain't none. Java (and the entire web, really) caught MS flat-footed. Bottomless pockets saved them.
apta 6y ago
golang isn't really a threat. It's a weak language with a very messy ecosystem. They don't even have proper versioning figured out, not to mention a proper package manager.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  Sounds an awful lot like C#.

MikeTheGreat 6y ago

"net5.0-windows (and later net6.0-android and net6.0-ios). These TFMs represent OS-specific flavors of .NET 5 that include net5.0 plus OS-specific functionality." Wait - net6.0-<platform> is actually net5.0?

yAak 6y ago
I read that to mean: .NET won't get OS-specific functionality on Android and iOS until .NET 6.
nxc18 6y ago
I was surprised by this, too. I've spent the last 20 minutes researching; it seems every time I look away for more than a few minutes, Microsoft changes things up (then leaves nasty comments like didn't you read the FAQ or 'it was explained clearly, .net 5 is a separate language together and individually' https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/177951/future-of-xamarin-and-net-5 https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/177951/future-of-xamar...). My reading of this is that Xamarin has been dropped from .NET 5 and moved to .NET 6, and Microsoft is hoping you don't notice.
- MarkSweep 6y ago
  Here is where they announced that Xamerian will not ship as part of .NET 5. 4th paragraph, starting with “Last year,”: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-5-preview-4-and-our-journey-to-one-net/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-5-previ... This announcement was made in a post announcing a preview release instead of its own post, so I can see why people missed it.
cdash 6y ago
Sounds more like net5.0-android and net5.0-ios doesn't exist and they will come in net6.0
conscion 6y ago
There's a table further down in the article that shows more clearly that net6.0-android is part of .NET 6 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-future-of-net-standard/#net-versioning https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-future-of-net-stan...

yAak 6y ago

As a primarily native-client dev who has developed for most major desktop and mobile platforms, I hope MS achieves it's goal of .NET being a truly solid cross-platform option, but in a way that enables clean and efficient native-code interop. Having used C++, some insane hand-rolled solutions, PhoneGap/Cordova, Unity, and now Kotlin MPP, I know that the "cross-platform" dream is messy and fraught with disaster, but I've come to really appreciate C# and .NET for day-to-day client dev.

iso8859-1 6y ago
What do you mean by "native-client"? Google Native Client?
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  I guess the opposite of Electron: a client written with the official framework of the platform (UWP for Windows, Cocoa for Mac, GTK or QT for Linux etc).
jmnicolas 6y ago
Did you try QT while using C++? If yes, what do you think of it?
JamesSwift 6y ago
Xamarin.Native is equivalent to Kotlin MPP but much more mature. Give it a look if you haven't, its a great option for sticking with .net
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Also, a lot of the Xamarin stuff will be merging directly "out of the box" with .NET 6 next year. In particular, what used to be called Xamarin.Forms will be called MAUI [Multi-platform Application UI] starting with .NET 6, and the MAUI name and new namespaces (Xamarin.Forms => System.Maui, Xamarin.Essentials => System.Devices) seem to show greater investment/interest from Microsoft in making it first class moving forward.

Todd 6y ago

This is good news for experienced .NET developers and newcomers alike. It marks the end of the journey from legacy .NET Framework to fully open source cross-platform .NET. .NET Standard was confusing, and the ubiquitous TFMs in the early days were even more so. But all of those struggles where made to achieve a cross-runtime compatibility layer to make it easier to support both ecosystems. It was a Herculean effort by Microsoft, and they achieved it. Now it's purpose has been served and as we move forward we can all just use the simple name of netX.Y, unless we're library authors that want to continue to support legacy .NET Framework as well.

lostmsu 6y ago
I am not sure about the end of the journey. Lots of legacy .NET Framework code means I will continue targeting .NET Standard 2.0. That's why nobody used 2.1 - it did not support legacy framework. .NET 5 does not solve this problem. Just renaming .NET Core (3+1) to .NET 5 won't magically make legacy code portable. Also, there is still very popular Unity 3D, that can target later framework, but will continue to run on the legacy one itself for a while.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  My understanding is that Unity is hoping to catch up as soon as some of the final AOT stuff merges from Mono into .NET 6, so "for a while" in the case of Unity is now supposed to be a year or less (given Preview versions).
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Unity already has their own AOT, two implementations actually.
goto11 6y ago
I fear it marks the beginning of a very long dark journey, where .net developers are forced to work on more and more obsolete software while looking with envy towards other platforms which are actually maintained. The "core" migration is not a problem for short-lived startups, but .net is used a lot in business and enterprises. They don't rewrite their whole stack every two years but prefer an incremental approach. Since a lot of libraries will never be ported to core, a lot of enterprises will never migrate, since there will always be this critical internal app on web forms or whatever. It is amazing that .net now runs on Linux, but it is a disaster that this platform change is tightly coupled to completely unrelated components like the C# compiler version. Developers on the framework now is stuck on an obsolete version of C# forever, cannot upgrade entity framework and so on. C# attracted a lot of Java developers back when it got lambdas and Linq and async and whatnot, and Java seemed stuck in last century. Is it going to be the other way around in the future?

whoisthemachine 6y ago

I agree with others that the fast changing story on modularization (first everything comes as one package with .Net framework, then it's different packages, then it's all together again with .Net core 3), standardization (.Net framework -> .Net standard -> .Net core), makes it hard to feel like this is a stable platform, in the sense that you can understand the basic architecture of the platform and it will stay that way for some time, decades even... I personally felt .Net standard was a great investment in making a standard platform that the community could contribute to, that would, of course, move slower than the giant monolith controlled by Microsoft... but nothing about .Net standard didn't mean you couldn't choose to use the giant monolith instead, it just guaranteed some semblance of stability if that was your preference.

infogulch 6y ago

.NET Series N

Hickfang 6y ago

The future of the .NET “Standard” .. it'll be a continously moving target, making it near impossible to clone ;] Of course that'll mean developers are for ever playing catch-up, rewriting code at more expence.

jmnicolas 6y ago
Compared to Javascript devs, I don't think we should complain ;)

kerng 6y ago

Maybe Microsoft should give this whole thing a reboot. After many years working with .net but not following it closely last 2-4 years I'm hopelessly lost what's going on....

WorldMaker 6y ago
This is the "reboot announcement". Starting with .NET 5 there's only one .NET again that matters (though you'll hear lots of legacy support complaints for years to come). 5 is now the highest version number and the next version number is 6 like you would expect. There's no other versions you need to know unless you have to support legacy code (and there, it's probably time to reboot if you are supporting certain types of legacy code).
cwhiz 6y ago
Well you missed a whole bunch of commotion. .Net 5 is the new .Net and you don’t need to worry about standard or core or 2.0, 2.1, 3.x, backward compatibility, etc. If you start a new project after .Net5 is released in November, there will be little to nothing to worry about and you won’t have missed much of anything.
- kerng 6y ago
  That sounds great! Will this have good VS Code support? Being a .net developer having used VS before mostly, I had lots of trouble a little over a year back building and referencing things with VS Code. It was easier to use Go and Python with VS code actually.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    Yup. For everything except winform designers. I’ve been exclusively using VS Code for .Net Core 2.1/3.1 for over a year now.

teh_klev 6y ago

As someone who was somewhat out of the loop for a couple of years with regards to .NET/Core etc and the "Standard" thing, I had kind of wondered what all these new "Standard" options in Visual Studio meant and after a couple of hours of Googling it made sense. I think there's a few folks out there who make a wee bit of a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to this "unification" effort by Microsoft to deliver I guess "the one .NET to rule them all". Now sure it's been a wee bit painful (no less probably than for those working on .NET itself) to get to this stage, but .NET has been around for a lot of years, welded for most of its life to Windows and this transformation wasn't going to happen overnight. But having the "Standard" TFM bits has gone some way during this time to mostly ensure your code can be compiled an deployed to "any platform" albeit with some caveats and some warts. I think .NET-5 is a reasonable step in the right direction. And for those of us working on .NET 4.x projects that still need to be looked after (I work on a pretty sizeable .NET 4.7 app) well MS will be supporting the "Windows .NET" for a good few years to come. I should say that whilst .NET and Windows are my rent-paying tools-of-the-trade, I'm not a fanboi and have my own beefs and criticisms about MS's tooling decisions. Don't get me started about EF, especially Enum handling from back in the day. And yes, sometimes (in fact many times) MS do somewhat cack-handedly mess up naming things which doesn't help.

nullsense 6y ago
In my experience it has become a Python 2 vs. Python 3 situation. For those projects stuck on .NET 4x it's getting progressively harder to Google for relevant info on .NET Framework. With the switch back you will be trying to find info on .NET 5 and you'll turn up stuff for .NET 4.5 and you'll have to go out of your way to additionally search for .NET Core. I feel like MS backtracked on what they initially said when they said .NET and .NET Core would continue to both be developed. Instead they sort of invented this loophole of saying well .NET Core is .NET now so we are continuing to develop .NET.