7 ms·

"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world techn

"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way." I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.

privatelypublic 1y ago
I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen. Typescript is also Microsoft. So is ONNX.
- gerdesj 1y ago
  "I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen." I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny. How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of? OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shine in and maintain traction - the moat thing. Nothing else apparently. I for one would not miss MS one jot. I wasted so much time with things like autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day. I got good at it - Novell gave me a T shirt on Cool Solutions for a boot floppy image that managed to try several popular NIC drivers (3c595, 3c905, 3c509, ne1000 and a few others) and get you to a network connection for imaging or whatever. Later on I get to ignore SFC /SCANNOW answers to searches. Do you remember WINS? What about the horror of time sync? The PDC emulator FSMO role is basically a NT domain controller. AD was a bodge from day one, tacked onto ... Sorry, got carried away there. Again, Typescript is cared about by whom and what on earth is ONNX?
  - AppleBananaPie 1y ago
    A game engine is often an example of a 'complex beast'. No one is arguing that developing game engines specifically is common.
    - privatelypublic 1y ago
      Thanks for trying to expound on my expounding on the original. But, the response indicates they don't know and actively avoid learning. Thus, nothing would change their mind. PS: to throw some shade- I'm surprised they didn't (mis)spell it M$- after all everything they mentioned is making me nostalgic for phpBB based tech forums in 2004.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    ONNX is a format that allows you to run AI models without Python in any language that implements ONNX, there's even an ONNX implementation in Go, meaning you can churn out even more performance out of AI models and waste drastically less resources (Go, Rust, C++, Zig, C, D etc could be used to squeeze performance). Think of it how Java produces a JAR file, well an ONNX file is a file that could be run by any runtime built for it. Another reasonable analogy would be WebAssembly, but to a degree.
  - boolit 1y ago
    Typescript is used by web developers over the world and ONNX for deploying deep neural networks. Two huge markets.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- ruszki 1y ago
  What makes it better than say IntelliJ? Is there some feature which helps you more with debugging?
  - dagw 1y ago
    It's been a few years since I've used Visual Studio, but for longest time its support for debugging multithreaded and GPU code was unmatched. This is one of the main reasons game developers loved VS. It also had good support for mixed language debugging which is very useful when your C# code calls a C++ library for example.
- OrderlyTiamat 1y ago
  So are LSPs- which by now are everywhere, they're a huge leap forward over previous implementations in (n)vim and emacs imho.
jiggawatts 1y ago
To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app. I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots. It’s just… end-to-end bad. Everything from critical dependencies developed by one Russian kid that’s now getting shot at in Ukraine so “maintenance is paused” to everything being wired up with shell scripts that have fifty variants, no standards, and none of them work. I’ve spent more time just getting the builds and deployments to work (to an acceptable standard) for Node.js than I’ve spent developing entire .NET applications! [1] I have had similar experiences every few years for decades. I touched PHP once and recoiled in horror. I tried to get a stable build going for some Python ML packages and learnt that they have a half-life measured in days or hours after which they become impossible to reproduce. Etc… Keep on assuming “Microsoft is all bad” if you like. You’re tying both hands behind your back and poking the keyboard with your nose. PS: The dotnet SDK is open source and works fine on Linux, and the IntelliJ Rider IDE is generally very good and cross-platform. You're not forced to use Windows. [1] The effort required to get a NestJS app to have barely acceptable performance is significantly greater than the effort to rewrite it in .NET 9 which will immediately be faster and have a far bigger bag of performance tuning tools and technologies available if needed.
- cyberax 1y ago
  I tried developing an MS .NET app and it's indescribably bad. The deployment story is non-existent, monitoring, tracing, alarming is barely there. You have to work with MS libraries that are on life-support with glaring bugs still present.
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    Unless you found yourself in some bizarre dark corner of a huge ecosystem of products, that's just not true. Deployments are just "file copy". You don't even need Docker, because Windows isn't Linux, it has stable user-land APIs so apps are portable. Not to mention that the dotnet sdk can create container images directly without even needing Docker installed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/sdk-publish https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/sdk... There are pre-built Linux and Windows ASP.NET base docker images: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/docker/building-net-docker-images?view=aspnetcore-9.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deplo... Visual Studio's ASP.NET templates all have a literal checkbox for "Docker support" which is all it takes to have a hot-reload debugging/editing experience. The dotnet runtime has very good Docker support, including automatic memory usage tuning to prevent it getting killed by Kubernetes or whatever. The underlying "App Host" below ASP.NET has fantastic support for layered configuration, which by default supports environment variables, command line parameters, named environment configuration files, and "user secrets" in IDEs. All of it is strongly typed and supports runtime refresh instead of Linux style "restart the process and interrupt user file uploads to get a new config". There's plugins for Key Vault, AWS KMS, App Configuration, feature flags, and on-and-on. Open Telemetry is fully supported and now the default: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/observability-with-otel https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/ob... Everything in ASP.NET uses the standard built-in ILogger interface, so wiring up any kind of audit logging or custom observability is a piece of cake: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.extensions.logging.ilogger?view=net-9.0-pp https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.exten... The really fancy logging uses the high-performance ActivitySource APIs, which are used for lower-level tracing of dependencies and the like. Again, these are standardised throughout not just Microsoft libraries but most third-party packages too: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnostics.activitysource?view=net-9.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnost... Aspire.NET can orchestrate multiple cloud emulators, multiple apps, Node.js front-end apps, and wire up the whole thing with Open Telemetry and a free local trace viewer (with span support) with zero config: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/dashboard/explore https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals... Windows GUI App deployments use standardised installer packages (MSI) that have simple devops pipeline tooling: https://github.com/wixtoolset https://github.com/wixtoolset Now... name the one package format that you can use to distribute client apps to all Linux distros! When you run "dotnet build", the result is built, unlike Node.js where you end up with 150K tiny little files that need to be rebuilt again "in production" because oh-my-god it's a scripting language with C code blended in randomly, so it doesn't... actually... build. I just had the fun of trying to figure out why PM2 doesn't like musl or running under non-root user accounts, why starting a Node.js app takes frigging minutes whereas ASP.NET starts in milliseconds, and on and on.
mamcx 1y ago
Well. this is clearly just a example of a hard problem where MS tools are good for. The MOST common developer that work on MS stack is in business apps and web, data, integration stuff. There is much better fit for MS and there is NO good counterpart in OSX or Linux. One of the major shocks I get when starting to work on OSX is how much less developed EVERYTHING is outside the ms stack. The only good reason you have a life working in OSX and less in Linux is because the web lower the playing field. But if this were a contest of "native" vs "native" is clear MS stack is ahead. (Much more before, because of course the web change the equation so you can claim things FOR THE WEB are better on linux and even osx)
thefz 1y ago
Bah, leaving out .NET like this is ignorance, considering the amount of custom applications every company has written on it. RAD was a game changer and I think you don't know the extent and penetration of .NET in the enterprise
whatevaa 1y ago
Factorio, with a custom engine and totally not a AAA game company, develops on Windows too, because of great tooling.

privatelypublic 1y ago

I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen. Typescript is also Microsoft. So is ONNX.

gerdesj 1y ago
"I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen." I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny. How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of? OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shine in and maintain traction - the moat thing. Nothing else apparently. I for one would not miss MS one jot. I wasted so much time with things like autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day. I got good at it - Novell gave me a T shirt on Cool Solutions for a boot floppy image that managed to try several popular NIC drivers (3c595, 3c905, 3c509, ne1000 and a few others) and get you to a network connection for imaging or whatever. Later on I get to ignore SFC /SCANNOW answers to searches. Do you remember WINS? What about the horror of time sync? The PDC emulator FSMO role is basically a NT domain controller. AD was a bodge from day one, tacked onto ... Sorry, got carried away there. Again, Typescript is cared about by whom and what on earth is ONNX?
- AppleBananaPie 1y ago
  A game engine is often an example of a 'complex beast'. No one is arguing that developing game engines specifically is common.
  - privatelypublic 1y ago
    Thanks for trying to expound on my expounding on the original. But, the response indicates they don't know and actively avoid learning. Thus, nothing would change their mind. PS: to throw some shade- I'm surprised they didn't (mis)spell it M$- after all everything they mentioned is making me nostalgic for phpBB based tech forums in 2004.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  ONNX is a format that allows you to run AI models without Python in any language that implements ONNX, there's even an ONNX implementation in Go, meaning you can churn out even more performance out of AI models and waste drastically less resources (Go, Rust, C++, Zig, C, D etc could be used to squeeze performance). Think of it how Java produces a JAR file, well an ONNX file is a file that could be run by any runtime built for it. Another reasonable analogy would be WebAssembly, but to a degree.
- boolit 1y ago
  Typescript is used by web developers over the world and ONNX for deploying deep neural networks. Two huge markets.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
ruszki 1y ago
What makes it better than say IntelliJ? Is there some feature which helps you more with debugging?
- dagw 1y ago
  It's been a few years since I've used Visual Studio, but for longest time its support for debugging multithreaded and GPU code was unmatched. This is one of the main reasons game developers loved VS. It also had good support for mixed language debugging which is very useful when your C# code calls a C++ library for example.
OrderlyTiamat 1y ago
So are LSPs- which by now are everywhere, they're a huge leap forward over previous implementations in (n)vim and emacs imho.

jiggawatts 1y ago

To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app. I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots. It’s just… end-to-end bad. Everything from critical dependencies developed by one Russian kid that’s now getting shot at in Ukraine so “maintenance is paused” to everything being wired up with shell scripts that have fifty variants, no standards, and none of them work. I’ve spent more time just getting the builds and deployments to work (to an acceptable standard) for Node.js than I’ve spent developing entire .NET applications! [1] I have had similar experiences every few years for decades. I touched PHP once and recoiled in horror. I tried to get a stable build going for some Python ML packages and learnt that they have a half-life measured in days or hours after which they become impossible to reproduce. Etc… Keep on assuming “Microsoft is all bad” if you like. You’re tying both hands behind your back and poking the keyboard with your nose. PS: The dotnet SDK is open source and works fine on Linux, and the IntelliJ Rider IDE is generally very good and cross-platform. You're not forced to use Windows. [1] The effort required to get a NestJS app to have barely acceptable performance is significantly greater than the effort to rewrite it in .NET 9 which will immediately be faster and have a far bigger bag of performance tuning tools and technologies available if needed.

cyberax 1y ago
I tried developing an MS .NET app and it's indescribably bad. The deployment story is non-existent, monitoring, tracing, alarming is barely there. You have to work with MS libraries that are on life-support with glaring bugs still present.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  Unless you found yourself in some bizarre dark corner of a huge ecosystem of products, that's just not true. Deployments are just "file copy". You don't even need Docker, because Windows isn't Linux, it has stable user-land APIs so apps are portable. Not to mention that the dotnet sdk can create container images directly without even needing Docker installed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/sdk-publish https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/sdk... There are pre-built Linux and Windows ASP.NET base docker images: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/docker/building-net-docker-images?view=aspnetcore-9.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deplo... Visual Studio's ASP.NET templates all have a literal checkbox for "Docker support" which is all it takes to have a hot-reload debugging/editing experience. The dotnet runtime has very good Docker support, including automatic memory usage tuning to prevent it getting killed by Kubernetes or whatever. The underlying "App Host" below ASP.NET has fantastic support for layered configuration, which by default supports environment variables, command line parameters, named environment configuration files, and "user secrets" in IDEs. All of it is strongly typed and supports runtime refresh instead of Linux style "restart the process and interrupt user file uploads to get a new config". There's plugins for Key Vault, AWS KMS, App Configuration, feature flags, and on-and-on. Open Telemetry is fully supported and now the default: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/observability-with-otel https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/ob... Everything in ASP.NET uses the standard built-in ILogger interface, so wiring up any kind of audit logging or custom observability is a piece of cake: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.extensions.logging.ilogger?view=net-9.0-pp https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.exten... The really fancy logging uses the high-performance ActivitySource APIs, which are used for lower-level tracing of dependencies and the like. Again, these are standardised throughout not just Microsoft libraries but most third-party packages too: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnostics.activitysource?view=net-9.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnost... Aspire.NET can orchestrate multiple cloud emulators, multiple apps, Node.js front-end apps, and wire up the whole thing with Open Telemetry and a free local trace viewer (with span support) with zero config: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/dashboard/explore https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals... Windows GUI App deployments use standardised installer packages (MSI) that have simple devops pipeline tooling: https://github.com/wixtoolset https://github.com/wixtoolset Now... name the one package format that you can use to distribute client apps to all Linux distros! When you run "dotnet build", the result is built, unlike Node.js where you end up with 150K tiny little files that need to be rebuilt again "in production" because oh-my-god it's a scripting language with C code blended in randomly, so it doesn't... actually... build. I just had the fun of trying to figure out why PM2 doesn't like musl or running under non-root user accounts, why starting a Node.js app takes frigging minutes whereas ASP.NET starts in milliseconds, and on and on.

mamcx 1y ago

Well. this is clearly just a example of a hard problem where MS tools are good for. The MOST common developer that work on MS stack is in business apps and web, data, integration stuff. There is much better fit for MS and there is NO good counterpart in OSX or Linux. One of the major shocks I get when starting to work on OSX is how much less developed EVERYTHING is outside the ms stack. The only good reason you have a life working in OSX and less in Linux is because the web lower the playing field. But if this were a contest of "native" vs "native" is clear MS stack is ahead. (Much more before, because of course the web change the equation so you can claim things FOR THE WEB are better on linux and even osx)

thefz 1y ago

Bah, leaving out .NET like this is ignorance, considering the amount of custom applications every company has written on it. RAD was a game changer and I think you don't know the extent and penetration of .NET in the enterprise

whatevaa 1y ago

Factorio, with a custom engine and totally not a AAA game company, develops on Windows too, because of great tooling.