9 ms·

I don't have any .NET background or anything even particularly MS specific. However, I spent most of 2020 just playing tourist between different development / d

by mhoad 5y ago

I don't have any .NET background or anything even particularly MS specific. However, I spent most of 2020 just playing tourist between different development / devops communities to get a feel for what are the main ideas, challenges, core truths etc in each. I looked into Java, Ruby, C#, Dart, Kubernetes, Bazel, TypeScript, Flutter, Node, lots of CNCF stuff etc. I have a bunch of interesting observations that I should probably write down somewhere at some point because I haven't seen people talk about them much yet. However, one thing that kept coming up repeatedly is Microsoft is actually doing a much better job of thinking "beyond Windows" than I would have anticipated otherwise. .NET is making its way into front end web apps now with Blazor, Microsoft has also just recently released something that they 100% do not market this way but I look at as almost a successor to .NET in some ways. The big difference is that it's language agnostic and it's entirely built around the concept of "distributed" applications. That came out of the Azure team I think and was based on everything they had learned about writing distributed / cloud native apps in the last 5-10 years. The project is called Dapr and was one of the cooler things I saw in 2020.

manigandham 5y ago
Link to Dapr: https://dapr.io/ https://dapr.io/
mattmanser 5y ago
Given their history of abandoning front-end frameworks, I wouldn't put too much faith into Blazor. And the Azure team is, frankly, grossly incompetent. I've never used a worse application than the Azure dashboards. It is by far the absolute worst piece of software I have ever had to endure. Pathetically slow, shockingly bad UX and incredibly inconsistent.
- manigandham 5y ago
  What did they abandon? Silverlight? That went the same way as Flash because plugins were killed by browsers and mobile. Blazor is much different and a core part of the web stack. Considering you can still run WebForms apps written in C# 2.0 today, support and backwards compatibility is actually a strength of this ecosystem. But yes the Azure dashboard isn't great, however that's not relevant to .NET.
  - dharmaturtle 5y ago
    FWIW Silverlight is _still_ being supported. EOL is October 12, 2021. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/silverlight-end-of-support https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/sil... As context, AngularJS EOL's December 31st 2021. Silverlight debuted 2007, AngularJS 2010.
  - fuzzy2 5y ago
    Everything. There isn't a single first-party desktop GUI framework left that is actively supported and developed. UWP is of course still available but modern apps have failed. You can still use WPF and WinForms, but they have serious limitations and feel old. WPF for example makes G-SYNC switch to 60 Hz.
    - dharmaturtle 5y ago
      https://github.com/dotnet/wpf https://github.com/dotnet/wpf https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms https://github.com/dotnet/winforms https://github.com/dotnet/winforms >There isn't a single first-party desktop GUI framework left that is actively supported and developed. This is demonstrably false...
      - WorldMaker 5y ago
        Also both in very active development: https://github.com/dotnet/maui https://github.com/dotnet/maui https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml (WinUI 3) WinUI 3 includes all of what used to the the UWP controls and Renderer but "lifted and shifted" out of OS updates and also made accessible to non-UWP (primarily Win32) applications in Project Reunion (and techniques such as "XAML Islands").
      - fuzzy2 5y ago
        Well, yes and no. We can certainly agree that neither WPF nor WinForms are dead. How could they be? There’s simply no alternative. However, they sure aren’t alive either. Development has been stalled for many years and both are very old. I’m pretty sure it’s no longer feasible to modernize even WPF. I just checked: It still has its G-SYNC issues, even on .NET 5. Totally forgot about Xamarin too because it’s so irrelevant. But maybe MAUI will change that, who knows. I’ll believe it when I see it I guess.
- mhoad 5y ago
  I'm going to ignore the "Shit HN says" vibes on this one for the most part, but I suspect that Microsoft and the Azure team specifically might have some relevant thoughts about building distributed systems regardless of if you like their dashboards or not. As for Blazor, I think you might be missing the larger point here that I am trying to make. But .NET is still this Windows thing in the minds of most people. That hasn't officially been true for a couple of years now but the .NET crowd are coming to things like Linux and Front End now for the first time. There are about to be a lot more conversations between say the React crowd and the Enterprise app development crowd, I am actually excited to see what they can all learn from one another.
  - gjhr 5y ago
    I'd agree with them that the portal is terrible. Multiple times a day I get blank page errors, where the page is completely blank except for a single non-sensical error message in black text. However their actual services are also pretty terrible. Pretty much everything takes significantly longer to deploy than the AWS couterpart. There are so many preview and deprecated features that it is often hard to judge exactly what feature set you are getting, this is often compounded by the fact that almost everything has multiple SKUs which also change available features. Azure AD RBAC is a bit of a mess, although its conceptually simpler than AWS IAM policies its just a pain to use in practice, and its often slow for changes in permissions to actually reflect. Azure VM disks are annoying to use too, you can't set the size of the OS drive at creation and extra data disks come unformatted. "Grossly incompetent" is probably an overstep though, Azure is very impressive, just not as impressive as its competitors right now. Having said all that their are a couple places where Azure really shines in my opinion: * Resource groups (GCP has a similar feature) allow you to more easily keep track of related resources across services. * Price transparency. Many (not all) services tell you up front hourly/monthly costs as you are deploying them through the portal. You don't have to track down a pricing page or calculator yourself. * Azure functions are amazing when using C#/.Net. A huge amount of the regular boilerplate is abstracted away into simple C# annotations so you can get a large % of business logic.
    - MisterKent 5y ago
- lbriner 5y ago
  I think I might agree that the Azure portal is slow, has bad UX and is somewhat inconsistent but I very much suspect that with the pace of change in cloud systems, it is very likely to be driven by some database so that it is easy to create new config pages for each new product without having to write an entire new web app. It is a web app though and I wouldn't see that AWS is necessarily ahead. The IAM setup is still very head scratching, although some things like SES setup with DNS are very easy. Like someone else said, not really related to .Net
  - MisterKent 5y ago
    What specifically do you find slow? I work on the portal team and would love to hear specifics that we can go chase down.
    - mattmanser 5y ago
      Here are some random things I clicked on: Dashboard takes 12s An app service takes 40s The deployment centre takes 22s Opening a single deployment log takes 4.5s Opening process explorer takes 30s Opening kudu took 12s And this is on a saturday morning, obviously during the week it's much worse.

by mhoad 5y ago

manigandham 5y ago

Link to Dapr: https://dapr.io/ https://dapr.io/

mattmanser 5y ago

Given their history of abandoning front-end frameworks, I wouldn't put too much faith into Blazor. And the Azure team is, frankly, grossly incompetent. I've never used a worse application than the Azure dashboards. It is by far the absolute worst piece of software I have ever had to endure. Pathetically slow, shockingly bad UX and incredibly inconsistent.

manigandham 5y ago
What did they abandon? Silverlight? That went the same way as Flash because plugins were killed by browsers and mobile. Blazor is much different and a core part of the web stack. Considering you can still run WebForms apps written in C# 2.0 today, support and backwards compatibility is actually a strength of this ecosystem. But yes the Azure dashboard isn't great, however that's not relevant to .NET.
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  FWIW Silverlight is _still_ being supported. EOL is October 12, 2021. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/silverlight-end-of-support https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/sil... As context, AngularJS EOL's December 31st 2021. Silverlight debuted 2007, AngularJS 2010.
- fuzzy2 5y ago
  Everything. There isn't a single first-party desktop GUI framework left that is actively supported and developed. UWP is of course still available but modern apps have failed. You can still use WPF and WinForms, but they have serious limitations and feel old. WPF for example makes G-SYNC switch to 60 Hz.
  - dharmaturtle 5y ago
    https://github.com/dotnet/wpf https://github.com/dotnet/wpf https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms https://github.com/dotnet/winforms https://github.com/dotnet/winforms >There isn't a single first-party desktop GUI framework left that is actively supported and developed. This is demonstrably false...
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      Also both in very active development: https://github.com/dotnet/maui https://github.com/dotnet/maui https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml (WinUI 3) WinUI 3 includes all of what used to the the UWP controls and Renderer but "lifted and shifted" out of OS updates and also made accessible to non-UWP (primarily Win32) applications in Project Reunion (and techniques such as "XAML Islands").
    - fuzzy2 5y ago
      Well, yes and no. We can certainly agree that neither WPF nor WinForms are dead. How could they be? There’s simply no alternative. However, they sure aren’t alive either. Development has been stalled for many years and both are very old. I’m pretty sure it’s no longer feasible to modernize even WPF. I just checked: It still has its G-SYNC issues, even on .NET 5. Totally forgot about Xamarin too because it’s so irrelevant. But maybe MAUI will change that, who knows. I’ll believe it when I see it I guess.
mhoad 5y ago
I'm going to ignore the "Shit HN says" vibes on this one for the most part, but I suspect that Microsoft and the Azure team specifically might have some relevant thoughts about building distributed systems regardless of if you like their dashboards or not. As for Blazor, I think you might be missing the larger point here that I am trying to make. But .NET is still this Windows thing in the minds of most people. That hasn't officially been true for a couple of years now but the .NET crowd are coming to things like Linux and Front End now for the first time. There are about to be a lot more conversations between say the React crowd and the Enterprise app development crowd, I am actually excited to see what they can all learn from one another.
- gjhr 5y ago
  I'd agree with them that the portal is terrible. Multiple times a day I get blank page errors, where the page is completely blank except for a single non-sensical error message in black text. However their actual services are also pretty terrible. Pretty much everything takes significantly longer to deploy than the AWS couterpart. There are so many preview and deprecated features that it is often hard to judge exactly what feature set you are getting, this is often compounded by the fact that almost everything has multiple SKUs which also change available features. Azure AD RBAC is a bit of a mess, although its conceptually simpler than AWS IAM policies its just a pain to use in practice, and its often slow for changes in permissions to actually reflect. Azure VM disks are annoying to use too, you can't set the size of the OS drive at creation and extra data disks come unformatted. "Grossly incompetent" is probably an overstep though, Azure is very impressive, just not as impressive as its competitors right now. Having said all that their are a couple places where Azure really shines in my opinion: * Resource groups (GCP has a similar feature) allow you to more easily keep track of related resources across services. * Price transparency. Many (not all) services tell you up front hourly/monthly costs as you are deploying them through the portal. You don't have to track down a pricing page or calculator yourself. * Azure functions are amazing when using C#/.Net. A huge amount of the regular boilerplate is abstracted away into simple C# annotations so you can get a large % of business logic.
  - MisterKent 5y ago
lbriner 5y ago
I think I might agree that the Azure portal is slow, has bad UX and is somewhat inconsistent but I very much suspect that with the pace of change in cloud systems, it is very likely to be driven by some database so that it is easy to create new config pages for each new product without having to write an entire new web app. It is a web app though and I wouldn't see that AWS is necessarily ahead. The IAM setup is still very head scratching, although some things like SES setup with DNS are very easy. Like someone else said, not really related to .Net
- MisterKent 5y ago
  What specifically do you find slow? I work on the portal team and would love to hear specifics that we can go chase down.
  - mattmanser 5y ago
    Here are some random things I clicked on: Dashboard takes 12s An app service takes 40s The deployment centre takes 22s Opening a single deployment log takes 4.5s Opening process explorer takes 30s Opening kudu took 12s And this is on a saturday morning, obviously during the week it's much worse.