3 ms·

Is .NET still used these days? I've never seen it in the wild, but that's probably just my particular experiences (web dev for small/medium companies). I toyed

Is .NET still used these days? I've never seen it in the wild, but that's probably just my particular experiences (web dev for small/medium companies). I toyed with it back in the day, but Microsoft still felt like it was actively EEEing back then. Their dev tooling was so much better (I really miss Visual Studio), but the FOSS LAMP stack was, well, free. I haven't heard .NET mentioned for decades now. Guess my circles got really small! Glad to know there are still other communities using completely different stacks.

bzzzt 3y ago
Here in the Netherlands it's very big in the financial world. Mostly back-end stuff like mortgage or insurance processing. The question is what else are they going to use? Lots of M2M interactions are done with older protocols like SOAP or, God forbid, EDIFACT. There's zero interest in the community of newer languages like Go, Swift or Rust to implement that kind of legacy making them unsuitable for lots of business cases.
pjmlp 3y ago
On my bubble it has been .NET, Java and nodejs since 2006, naturally nodejs came a bit later to the party.
neonsunset 3y ago
It very much is. It is also prominent in gamedev and the downwards trend has been reversed after the .NET ecosystem gone FOSS. With that said, it’s extremely under-appreciated today still (which is completely unjustified - the market is full of technologies of magnitudes of orders worse like Ruby, Node.js or Go which are afforded truly massive amounts of good will despite their flaws which .NET does not have).
- solardev 3y ago
  Is it popular in game dev because of Unity? And when you say FOSS, is it a truly independent entity controlling and evolving it, or is it more like the Chromium/Chrome model where the FOSS stuff basically exists for the sake of the proprietary product that builds on top of it?
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    Unity but also the legacy of XNA/FNA, all sorts of custom game engines using it for scripting, and now Godot too (despite great resistance from the community that uses other, worse language that it offers). As for the FOSS, the "core" itself is clean (which is pretty much everything you need). As in, just like with Oracle/Java and Google/Go, it is being developed primarily by engineers employed by its respective company, but there aren't really any abstractions that are made to work with specific e.g. Azure products. I would expect the runtime or language teams to actively resist should something like that happen and in fact it was already the case in the past [0]. This is notably where Chromium does so much worse with extremely concerning actions by Google like recent web integrity proposal. C#, F# and .NET are MIT licensed meaning you can do pretty much whatever with the code, which another organization can make significant use of, with good example being aforementioned Unity. The main workhorse frameworks - ASP.NET Core and EF Core are platform and product-agnostic meaning ASP.NET Core today works best on Linux, and does not care which cloud provider you use, and probably the best DB to use EF Core with is PostgreSQL. There is garden variety of other protocols like gRPC and OpenTelemetry which have "first-party" integrations so it works well if you have a polyglot company (and no, if you use primarily Apache Foundation projects, you are a Java shop). The tooling situation is probably closer to Java/Kotlin where you're expected to use a commercial product with free community options available (Visual Studio, Rider or Visual Studio Code - last two work great on both Linux and macOS). Some are using Neovim + LSP (Omnisharp) combo but it's very niche, the good debugger implementation is not OSS hence the remark. [0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/97711 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/97711 here's an example of a request driven by an interest from Azure team which was rejected because it's not something e.g. dotnet/runtime should concern itself with, and was moved to a separate package (it is abstract enough to live as a System.* extensions but nonetheless)
    - solardev 3y ago
      Thanks! It sounds like Microsoft has changed a lot, for the better, since the old days. I'm glad to hear that. I might have to dig into this again!
      - 3y ago
hadlock 3y ago
.net is used widely in enterprise, but the overlap between .net users and hacker news is slight at best. Microsoft is investing heavily in rust these days, but it'll be 5+ years before we see developer level support for it.
Atotalnoob 3y ago
I use .NET everyday. My entire company is primarily a .NET shop. Most companies have stuff in .NET, especially if they were windows based. Modern .net is fun and easy to write. I’d give it another shot!
- solardev 3y ago
  I actually enjoyed it quite a lot when it first came out! But I wasn't a professional programmer then, just a kid who loved tinkering. I don't exactly love the Javascript ecosystem, lol, and was thinking about learning more native languages. Swift was higher on that list, but .NET sounds like a lot of fun too! Do you still need to use Windows to develop for it? And what's the deal with the GUI these days... last I heard, Winforms and WPF were deprecated (right?), and something else came along that nobody used... or something? And then what happened? What's the recommended way to do a UI in .NET today, and does it matter if you're targeting Windows-only vs cross-platform vs web?
  - Atotalnoob 3y ago
    You don’t need windows to develop .NET. Windows and Mac both have full fat visual studio. Linux only has vscode, but with the proper extensions, it’s flawless. Jetbrains rider is also cross platform. Most of the places I worked I develop on windows or Mac, then deploy on Linux containers. Cross platform GUI is a bit of a mess. MAUI is the modern stack for cross platform, but in their big brain Microsoftness they decided to leave Linux to the community… so they only officially support, windows, Mac, IOS, and android… I haven’t used it, but i have heard good things. There is also Avalon.net which is a community gui framework, but I haven’t used it. You can also use electron with a .net backend, or web view with a blazor (web assembly). Winforms and wpf aren’t deprecated, (as far as I know, but things could’ve changed in the last year) but they are feature complete. Essentially no new major features, but I believe they support .Net 6/8… they are windows only, since they use COM heavily. You can’t beat the simplicity of winforms for small windows apps, but I would pick UWP for modern windows only development… UWP was the thing no one used, it uses XAML (similar to android development) like WPF, I believe. If I had to create a cross platform desktop gui for a company I worked at, I would reach for blazor and WASM and use web view or something to present it in a desktop app. For web, i would have a .net web api, then use a SPA framework for the front-end. You could use blazor, but I’ve heard mixed experiences with it, my primary worry is the startup time of web assembly vs JavaScript. Plus I haven’t done blazor in Kubernetes, and I am hesitant due to the web socket stuff… Native AOT is becoming big in .NET (no jit or reflection) so we can finally ship decent cli tools (JIT for cli just seems excessive).
masfoobar 3y ago
.NET is the language that has put food on the table in my near 20 years as a software engineer. I have a love/hate relationship with .NET -- However, it has gotten a lot better as time passed. If I was to look for a job today in my areas.. I am certain there will be a lot of .NET positions going.

bzzzt 3y ago

Here in the Netherlands it's very big in the financial world. Mostly back-end stuff like mortgage or insurance processing. The question is what else are they going to use? Lots of M2M interactions are done with older protocols like SOAP or, God forbid, EDIFACT. There's zero interest in the community of newer languages like Go, Swift or Rust to implement that kind of legacy making them unsuitable for lots of business cases.

pjmlp 3y ago

On my bubble it has been .NET, Java and nodejs since 2006, naturally nodejs came a bit later to the party.

neonsunset 3y ago

It very much is. It is also prominent in gamedev and the downwards trend has been reversed after the .NET ecosystem gone FOSS. With that said, it’s extremely under-appreciated today still (which is completely unjustified - the market is full of technologies of magnitudes of orders worse like Ruby, Node.js or Go which are afforded truly massive amounts of good will despite their flaws which .NET does not have).

solardev 3y ago
Is it popular in game dev because of Unity? And when you say FOSS, is it a truly independent entity controlling and evolving it, or is it more like the Chromium/Chrome model where the FOSS stuff basically exists for the sake of the proprietary product that builds on top of it?
- neonsunset 3y ago
  Unity but also the legacy of XNA/FNA, all sorts of custom game engines using it for scripting, and now Godot too (despite great resistance from the community that uses other, worse language that it offers). As for the FOSS, the "core" itself is clean (which is pretty much everything you need). As in, just like with Oracle/Java and Google/Go, it is being developed primarily by engineers employed by its respective company, but there aren't really any abstractions that are made to work with specific e.g. Azure products. I would expect the runtime or language teams to actively resist should something like that happen and in fact it was already the case in the past [0]. This is notably where Chromium does so much worse with extremely concerning actions by Google like recent web integrity proposal. C#, F# and .NET are MIT licensed meaning you can do pretty much whatever with the code, which another organization can make significant use of, with good example being aforementioned Unity. The main workhorse frameworks - ASP.NET Core and EF Core are platform and product-agnostic meaning ASP.NET Core today works best on Linux, and does not care which cloud provider you use, and probably the best DB to use EF Core with is PostgreSQL. There is garden variety of other protocols like gRPC and OpenTelemetry which have "first-party" integrations so it works well if you have a polyglot company (and no, if you use primarily Apache Foundation projects, you are a Java shop). The tooling situation is probably closer to Java/Kotlin where you're expected to use a commercial product with free community options available (Visual Studio, Rider or Visual Studio Code - last two work great on both Linux and macOS). Some are using Neovim + LSP (Omnisharp) combo but it's very niche, the good debugger implementation is not OSS hence the remark. [0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/97711 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/97711 here's an example of a request driven by an interest from Azure team which was rejected because it's not something e.g. dotnet/runtime should concern itself with, and was moved to a separate package (it is abstract enough to live as a System.* extensions but nonetheless)
  - solardev 3y ago
    Thanks! It sounds like Microsoft has changed a lot, for the better, since the old days. I'm glad to hear that. I might have to dig into this again!
    - 3y ago

hadlock 3y ago

.net is used widely in enterprise, but the overlap between .net users and hacker news is slight at best. Microsoft is investing heavily in rust these days, but it'll be 5+ years before we see developer level support for it.

Atotalnoob 3y ago

I use .NET everyday. My entire company is primarily a .NET shop. Most companies have stuff in .NET, especially if they were windows based. Modern .net is fun and easy to write. I’d give it another shot!

solardev 3y ago
I actually enjoyed it quite a lot when it first came out! But I wasn't a professional programmer then, just a kid who loved tinkering. I don't exactly love the Javascript ecosystem, lol, and was thinking about learning more native languages. Swift was higher on that list, but .NET sounds like a lot of fun too! Do you still need to use Windows to develop for it? And what's the deal with the GUI these days... last I heard, Winforms and WPF were deprecated (right?), and something else came along that nobody used... or something? And then what happened? What's the recommended way to do a UI in .NET today, and does it matter if you're targeting Windows-only vs cross-platform vs web?
- Atotalnoob 3y ago
  You don’t need windows to develop .NET. Windows and Mac both have full fat visual studio. Linux only has vscode, but with the proper extensions, it’s flawless. Jetbrains rider is also cross platform. Most of the places I worked I develop on windows or Mac, then deploy on Linux containers. Cross platform GUI is a bit of a mess. MAUI is the modern stack for cross platform, but in their big brain Microsoftness they decided to leave Linux to the community… so they only officially support, windows, Mac, IOS, and android… I haven’t used it, but i have heard good things. There is also Avalon.net which is a community gui framework, but I haven’t used it. You can also use electron with a .net backend, or web view with a blazor (web assembly). Winforms and wpf aren’t deprecated, (as far as I know, but things could’ve changed in the last year) but they are feature complete. Essentially no new major features, but I believe they support .Net 6/8… they are windows only, since they use COM heavily. You can’t beat the simplicity of winforms for small windows apps, but I would pick UWP for modern windows only development… UWP was the thing no one used, it uses XAML (similar to android development) like WPF, I believe. If I had to create a cross platform desktop gui for a company I worked at, I would reach for blazor and WASM and use web view or something to present it in a desktop app. For web, i would have a .net web api, then use a SPA framework for the front-end. You could use blazor, but I’ve heard mixed experiences with it, my primary worry is the startup time of web assembly vs JavaScript. Plus I haven’t done blazor in Kubernetes, and I am hesitant due to the web socket stuff… Native AOT is becoming big in .NET (no jit or reflection) so we can finally ship decent cli tools (JIT for cli just seems excessive).

masfoobar 3y ago

.NET is the language that has put food on the table in my near 20 years as a software engineer. I have a love/hate relationship with .NET -- However, it has gotten a lot better as time passed. If I was to look for a job today in my areas.. I am certain there will be a lot of .NET positions going.