3 ms·

I agree that many of MS’s “open source” libraries (eg EF, OData) are half-assed, badly run projects. I’m also still mad at them for competing against amazing s

I agree that many of MS’s “open source” libraries (eg EF, OData) are half-assed, badly run projects. I’m also still mad at them for competing against amazing stuff like ServiceStack (a real OSS project from the community, and the best way to run REST APIs I’ve ever seen) with “official” but worse stuff like ASP.NET Web API. They do this a lot, some OSS gets popular but instead of embracing it, they make a half-assed ripoff, proudly proclaim it “official” on conferences and all the C# devs jump off the cliff like lemmings, and the original OSS project dies/stagnates. MS might have officially embraced Open Source but they’re absolutely awful at fostering an OSS community. But .NET itself is amazing! There’s this weird misconception in Microsoft land that if you choose .NET you must also use all MS’s half-assed libraries. Just use Postgres! Use a lean ORM like Dapper, use Redis, use whatever you want from the wider OSS ecosystem. There’s nothing about C# that forces you onto Entity Framework. Get out of that red polo shirt and look around, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there.

fullstackchris 3y ago
to be fair though, using Entity Framework at least for migrations has worked really well in my experience (and doesnt prevent you from using any of those other OSS tools you mentioned!) still have yet to learn / try dapper
efdee 3y ago
Calling ServiceStack OSS is disingenuous since it comes with quite a heavy price tag for commercial use.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  Not back in the day. IIRC it was mostly FOSS and the author gradually shifted to a more commercial model when MS waltzed all over it with ASP.NET Web API. I’m quite impressed he made it through actually, and I can’t fault someone for going full commercial when a giant moloch whose ecosystem you’re supporting pulls the rug under you like that.
  - efdee 3y ago
    To be fair ASP.NET Web API was just the natural progression of ASP.NET MVC which is based on Monorail more than anything else. You're making it sound like the community was set on ServiceStack and then MS reeled them back in, but the truth is not many people were using ServiceStack back then, they were using ASP.NET MVC which had things like JsonResult and whatnot that would get you a long way. That said, ServiceStack has transitioned to payware a long, long time ago and I'm pretty sure that is what's caused its demise, not ASP.NET Web API. As a single anecdotal data point, it's definitely the reason I'm not using it.
pjmlp 3y ago
Yeah and they don't get how that is damaging for the ecosystem, regardless of how many marketing posts get written, like the recent ones about the value of .NET. I have had two projects where the customer paid to rewrite their .NET Framework applications into Java, instead of the more sensible idea to migrate to .NET Core, as they saw it was more valuable to them to move completely away from Microsoft stack.
devjab 3y ago
I agree with everything you said, except for this part: > There’s this weird misconception in Microsoft land that if you choose .NET you must also use all MS’s half-assed libraries. The way I see it, it's more the opposite really. People chose .NET (or more specifically C#), because, they want to use it's tooling and if you're not going to use it, then why would you pick C#? .NET on it's own is excellent, I'm not sure if I think it's as good as the JVM, but it's definitely gotten very good in the recent years, but why would you pick it if you didn't plan on using the "official" tooling? I'm sure there are some good answers to that question. We just haven't found any.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  > why would you pick C#? Because it’s a great language with amazing tooling. It’s fast, robust, easy to debug, easy to refactor, and so on. It’s also very easy to learn for novices and experienced programmers alike because it’s kind of the middle ground between many popular programming paradigms, and it has few surprising gotchas. It’s a fast way to get a heterogeneous team productive.
  - devjab 3y ago
    > Because it’s a great language with amazing tooling. It’s fast, robust, easy to debug, easy to refactor, and so on. I agree but I also think the main issue with this is that you could've said it in reference to most programming languages in 2023. I'm sure people can have a lot of debate on that, but aside from the fast bit, most programming languages are frankly in excellent places today, and fast is sort of irrelevant for us specifically as we tend to use c/c++ for that.
    - skrebbel 3y ago
      I see your point and I agree. At the same time, our current backend is Elixir because the BEAM is a fantastic match to our product. It’s been the right choice but I miss C# every day. Never having typos, point and click debugging, renaming stuff in a second instead of 15 minutes of careful grepping, etc. I recognize eg the JVM has all this too but plenty other popular languages do not.
supertron 3y ago
> I agree that many of MS’s “open source” libraries (eg EF, OData) are half-assed, badly run projects. Just as a counterpoint to this, I have found Entity Framework (Core) to be an extremely nice and very productive dev experience, with a lot of constant improvements in every release. MS don't always get it right, but I definitely wouldn't call EF a "half-assed, badly run project" by a long stretch. (Though there are probably other MS projects I might be more inclined to describe as such!) That said, they were pretty brutal in cutting off legacy support for those still using .NET Framework and trying to migrate. Through luck, I didn't have to suffer too much pain, but the migration story from .NET Framework to the new world of .NET (including EF to EF Core) has not been the smoothest for some scenarios.
- biglyburrito 3y ago
  OData is particularly atrocious, even the latest version (8.x). Entity Framework is getting better... EF8 may be the first version that achieves feature parity with (legacy) Entity Framework 6.x. If you're still using .NET Framework at this point, that's your own fault (or, more likely, your org's). They have been communicating for _YEARS_ that .NET Framework was on its way out, and provided support for .NET Standard 2.0 as a stepping stone to .NET Core & beyond (i.e. .NET 5+). There are some apps & frameworks that don't really have a modern .NET equivalent, but you won't find me shedding any tears over the lack of a direct upgrade path for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). =P
torginus 3y ago
I think .NET-s unique strength comes from its batteries-included approach, very useful in enterprise environments where every piece of software needs to be audited. That means Microsoft strives to provide a first-party library for every business case. That said, you can still use ServiceStack and Newtonsoft.JSON if you wish to.
- supertron 3y ago
  This is a great point actually. It's amazing how far you can get in a .NET project these days without a single third-party (Nuget) dependency. Compared to my projects that (begrudgingly) use Node.js...
  - metaltyphoon 3y ago
    If you have done any Gov work, it is God given stack because audits are so much simpler.

fullstackchris 3y ago

to be fair though, using Entity Framework at least for migrations has worked really well in my experience (and doesnt prevent you from using any of those other OSS tools you mentioned!) still have yet to learn / try dapper

efdee 3y ago

Calling ServiceStack OSS is disingenuous since it comes with quite a heavy price tag for commercial use.

skrebbel 3y ago
Not back in the day. IIRC it was mostly FOSS and the author gradually shifted to a more commercial model when MS waltzed all over it with ASP.NET Web API. I’m quite impressed he made it through actually, and I can’t fault someone for going full commercial when a giant moloch whose ecosystem you’re supporting pulls the rug under you like that.
- efdee 3y ago
  To be fair ASP.NET Web API was just the natural progression of ASP.NET MVC which is based on Monorail more than anything else. You're making it sound like the community was set on ServiceStack and then MS reeled them back in, but the truth is not many people were using ServiceStack back then, they were using ASP.NET MVC which had things like JsonResult and whatnot that would get you a long way. That said, ServiceStack has transitioned to payware a long, long time ago and I'm pretty sure that is what's caused its demise, not ASP.NET Web API. As a single anecdotal data point, it's definitely the reason I'm not using it.

pjmlp 3y ago

Yeah and they don't get how that is damaging for the ecosystem, regardless of how many marketing posts get written, like the recent ones about the value of .NET. I have had two projects where the customer paid to rewrite their .NET Framework applications into Java, instead of the more sensible idea to migrate to .NET Core, as they saw it was more valuable to them to move completely away from Microsoft stack.

devjab 3y ago

I agree with everything you said, except for this part: > There’s this weird misconception in Microsoft land that if you choose .NET you must also use all MS’s half-assed libraries. The way I see it, it's more the opposite really. People chose .NET (or more specifically C#), because, they want to use it's tooling and if you're not going to use it, then why would you pick C#? .NET on it's own is excellent, I'm not sure if I think it's as good as the JVM, but it's definitely gotten very good in the recent years, but why would you pick it if you didn't plan on using the "official" tooling? I'm sure there are some good answers to that question. We just haven't found any.

skrebbel 3y ago
> why would you pick C#? Because it’s a great language with amazing tooling. It’s fast, robust, easy to debug, easy to refactor, and so on. It’s also very easy to learn for novices and experienced programmers alike because it’s kind of the middle ground between many popular programming paradigms, and it has few surprising gotchas. It’s a fast way to get a heterogeneous team productive.
- devjab 3y ago
  > Because it’s a great language with amazing tooling. It’s fast, robust, easy to debug, easy to refactor, and so on. I agree but I also think the main issue with this is that you could've said it in reference to most programming languages in 2023. I'm sure people can have a lot of debate on that, but aside from the fast bit, most programming languages are frankly in excellent places today, and fast is sort of irrelevant for us specifically as we tend to use c/c++ for that.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    I see your point and I agree. At the same time, our current backend is Elixir because the BEAM is a fantastic match to our product. It’s been the right choice but I miss C# every day. Never having typos, point and click debugging, renaming stuff in a second instead of 15 minutes of careful grepping, etc. I recognize eg the JVM has all this too but plenty other popular languages do not.

supertron 3y ago

> I agree that many of MS’s “open source” libraries (eg EF, OData) are half-assed, badly run projects. Just as a counterpoint to this, I have found Entity Framework (Core) to be an extremely nice and very productive dev experience, with a lot of constant improvements in every release. MS don't always get it right, but I definitely wouldn't call EF a "half-assed, badly run project" by a long stretch. (Though there are probably other MS projects I might be more inclined to describe as such!) That said, they were pretty brutal in cutting off legacy support for those still using .NET Framework and trying to migrate. Through luck, I didn't have to suffer too much pain, but the migration story from .NET Framework to the new world of .NET (including EF to EF Core) has not been the smoothest for some scenarios.

biglyburrito 3y ago
OData is particularly atrocious, even the latest version (8.x). Entity Framework is getting better... EF8 may be the first version that achieves feature parity with (legacy) Entity Framework 6.x. If you're still using .NET Framework at this point, that's your own fault (or, more likely, your org's). They have been communicating for _YEARS_ that .NET Framework was on its way out, and provided support for .NET Standard 2.0 as a stepping stone to .NET Core & beyond (i.e. .NET 5+). There are some apps & frameworks that don't really have a modern .NET equivalent, but you won't find me shedding any tears over the lack of a direct upgrade path for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). =P

torginus 3y ago

I think .NET-s unique strength comes from its batteries-included approach, very useful in enterprise environments where every piece of software needs to be audited. That means Microsoft strives to provide a first-party library for every business case. That said, you can still use ServiceStack and Newtonsoft.JSON if you wish to.

supertron 3y ago
This is a great point actually. It's amazing how far you can get in a .NET project these days without a single third-party (Nuget) dependency. Compared to my projects that (begrudgingly) use Node.js...
- metaltyphoon 3y ago
  If you have done any Gov work, it is God given stack because audits are so much simpler.