9 ms·

Where Is .Net Headed?

67 points by wubbfindel 13y ago

taternuts 13y ago
They need to open source the CLR and rule the world
- kvb 13y ago
  Why? It's already an ISO/ECMA standard, and there's an existing high quality open source implementation in Mono. Microsoft has open sourced several of their more recent frameworks and languages, including ASP.NET MVC, F#, and TypeScript, and released free-but-not-open-source tools like the express editions of Visual Studio. How would open sourcing the CLR help?
  - orbitur 13y ago
    Exactly. Being closed isn't the problem, it's just effectively unsupported on any platform that's not Windows. Mono's nice and all, but it's not complete, and it never will be.
    - moron4hire 13y ago
      What is it missing that you are missing? Mono is pretty damn complete. The stuff I've found it to be missing are very Windows-centric stuff and wouldn't fit in a Unix environment anyway.
      - cookiecaper 13y ago
        WPF is the replacement of WinForms. Many desktop apps designed by conventional .NET developers in the timeframe between the release of Vista, and probably many now despite MS's deprecation, use WPF as a base library. It's not something you can just easily replace, and Mono does not implement it. Microsoft is using the same business tactics that they've employed since the PC wars in the 90s, since they hit critical mass of market share, just with a bit more finesse. Microsoft allows Mono's existence only because it feeds into their power play, by creating more dependency and familiarity with .NET. They make the basics open and provide some interoperability, but then lay on proprietary extras that eventually become hard dependencies organically (like WPF) as a function of Microsoft's monopolization of the market ("why wouldn't I use this tool that makes things way easier? it will work great in our environment"). It's all EEE. Microsoft's MO, then and now. Then all of the sudden, iPads exist. Xamarin is in a killer market.
        cmircea 13y ago
        It's not as if WPF was the only way to make UIs for apps.
        cookiecaper 13y ago
        But it was the primary, endorsed way for several years. WinForms was deprecated, and WPF was the new thing you were supposed to use.
        moron4hire 13y ago
        Now you're putting words into Microsoft's mouth to make your point stick. WinForms was never deprecated, WPF was never meant as a replacement for it.
        cookiecaper 13y ago
        My mistake, I was under the impression that WinForms had been formally deprecated in favor of WPF. It doesn't appear to be such a rare feeling; there are 1.59 million results in Google for "WinForms deprecated". Regardless of the formal action, the clear message from MS upon release of WPF was: "This is the new official GUI builder, please use it, it should be preferred". Indication of such preferences is relevant. Or do you suggest that MS released WPF with the intention that no one would ever use it?
        moron4hire 13y ago
        I think they released WPF with the understanding that WinForms has very Windows-specific features that were preventing people from adopting .NET for cross-platform development. WinForms is Java AWT, WPF is Java Swing. WinForms is meant to be a basic wrapper around GDI, WPF is a completely different rendering engine separate from Windows. I think they were hoping people would choose appropriately based on their needs.
        moron4hire 13y ago
        That's funny. I've been a .NET developer since it's been a thing. I don't know anyone doing WPF. That's kind of why it's deprecated.
300bps 13y ago
I have moved everything that I host for myself or my clients to Azure. Low cost, rock solid reliability, incredible speed and easy to administer. CPU, memory and disk really are a commodity at this point. I loved Amazon EC2 too but Azure was far cheaper for high use Windows VMs.
- Fizzer 13y ago
  EC2 is indeed very expensive for Windows hosting. A c1.medium instance on EC2 reserved for 3 years is $42/mo Linux and $116/mo Windows - that's nearly triple the cost for the same hardware! Another option is to switch to mono and run your .net apps with EC2's Linux prices. Then it's even cheaper than Azure. This is what I did for my current project.
  - ilaksh 13y ago
    Right so who makes Mono? Is it primarily Microsoft developers? No. Of course not. So where does that leave Windows for internet servers?
at-fates-hands 13y ago
I currently work at a fairly large MS client. No way we're going to abandon .Net right now or in the next few years. We're currently in the process of getting ready for a migration to Sharepoint Server 2013 which will cement the company with .Net for at least the next two to three years. We still have several sites on the old 2007 platform with no hint of moving those over any time soon. I'm wondering what you see as viable open source alternatives to the .Net platform. Also, we have a handful of .Net developers and they've all said a majority of the work they've had in the last year did not involve MVC3 or MVC4 so I'm also wondering what the future of this platform will be.
- yareally 13y ago
  >I'm wondering what you see as viable open source alternatives to the .Net platform. Mono? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) Or going in a different direction with similar goals, Qt.
  - adamnemecek 13y ago
    > Mono? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) You are funny.
  - untog 13y ago
    If you think Mono is a viable alternative to the .NET platform, you don't understand why people choose .NET. Don't get me wrong, Mono is awesome. But it's not about to be adopted by Fortune 500 companies across the world.
    - kmm 13y ago
      To someone with very little understanding of these technologies, could you give a quick word on what the problem is with Mono? Are we talking about performance, completeness, support or something else?
      - 13y ago
rocky1138 13y ago
They should add Java as a CLR-supported language :P
- wslh 13y ago
  You can always use IKVM for running Java under .NET! I used it for adding the boilerpipe Java library to navigate HackerNews by voice! Details at: http://blog.databigbang.com/voice-recognition-content-extraction-tts-innovative-web-browsing/ http://blog.databigbang.com/voice-recognition-content-extrac...
- yareally 13y ago
  They did that once before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Sharp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Sharp
  - joseph_cooney 13y ago
    pretty sure he was being funny (hence the :P ... and the court cases).
- kyllo 13y ago
  I might use the opposite--a JVM implementation of C#--if such a thing existed. A port of Java on the CLR would be useless to me though, because I don't use .NET but if I did, C# has better features than Java as a language.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    You cannot do that, because CLR has pointers, value types, unions and proper tail call optimization. So those features are not mappable to the JVM.
    - kyllo 13y ago
      So that means C/C++, Obj-C, and ML languages (SML, OCaml, F#) are all impossible to implement on the JVM?
cooldeal 13y ago
Great, another .NET is dying post voted up on HN. Didn't we have one of those just this morning? Meanwhile, in the real world, Microsoft posted these earnings: "Server & Tools business reported $5.04 billion of revenue, up 11% from last year" Inspite of competing products like Linux, Apache, Eclipse, Ruby, Java being given away for free, people are willing to pay for Windows Server, Visual Studio and IIS. Does anyone have real data related to ".NET is dying" other than idle conjecture, short sighted "frog in the well" anectodes which sound like they're written and voted up by people sipping on a latte on a Macbook in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley? Like the number of jobs posted? They seem to increasing every day. Sigh, some people here just love these '.NET is dying' posts, perhaps some with a vested interest to scare startups from using it. Again, any hard data will be appreciated that shows .NET is dying instead of the same paragraph upon paragraph of opinion and no links, references or data, we have enough HN comments of that already.
- eduardordm 13y ago
  You couldn't buy the VS licenses + SQL Server + Windows Server with the money YCombinator provides you. So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup.
  - cooldeal 13y ago
    You don't need to buy them: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx Prime example: Stackoverflow/StackExchange is built on the Microsoft stack.
    - eduardordm 13y ago
      BizSpark has rules many startups cannot follow and is only valid for 3 years. This is the same selling scheme used by drug dealers.
      - harryh 13y ago
        If your startup is around 3 years in the cost of paying for the tools won't matter.
orangethirty 13y ago
I've been away from .Net for a while. How has it improved? How is the market for programmers in it? For freelancers?
- bigdubs 13y ago
  ASP.net MVC is pretty awesome, there are some good open source projects like Nancy for more lightweight stuff, Entity Framework isn't great but it's pretty mature and fast for an ORM. Visual Studio continues to be the best IDE on the market.
  - guiomie 13y ago
    "Entity Framework" ... why dont you use Linq instead?
    - qu4z-2 13y ago
      You mean Linq-to-Sql? Entity Framework lets you use Linq and manages your db for you. As long as you use the Code-First approach it's... okay. But it does at least support compiling Linq to Sql mostly alright. (I'm looking at you NHibernate)
  - orangethirty 13y ago
    I did some work with ASP.net MVC. Last time I touched it it was a pretty nice framework to use. Thanks for the feedback
dschiptsov 13y ago
into a dustbin, to meet Clipper, Delphi and Java?)
rbanffy 13y ago
I had to stop at the "1. The success of Windows Azure" part. Will get back to the article as soon as I stop laughing...
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Laugh if you want to, but the point is pretty serious. Azure supposedly racked up more than $1 billion in revenue in 2012 (http://www.zdnet.com/windows-azure-joins-microsofts-billion-dollar-business-club-7000014669/ http://www.zdnet.com/windows-azure-joins-microsofts-billion-...). Amazon's AWS, on the other hand, is estimated to have brought in between $1.5 and $2 billion (http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2013-03-07-what-if-amazon-web-services-were-a-standalone-business-itd-be-big/ http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2013-03-07-what-if-amazon..., http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazons-cloud-revenues-examined/240145741 http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructur...) during the same period. So while Azure is still booking less business than AWS is, it's definitely a major competitor. Maybe the major competitor. And since the market for virtualized platforms is still in early days, there's lots of room for that revenue figure to grow substantially even if Azure ends up stuck at #2 behind AWS forever.
  - guiomie 13y ago
    Would it be a fair assumption to say revenues from Azure are primarly from big entreprise companies (ex fortune 500) amd that amazon is more focused around smaller companies?
  - charlieflowers 13y ago
    I heard this a couple of weeks ago (on Hacker News), and I was SHOCKED! I have worked for years as a .Net consultant, and I had no idea Azure had grown this quickly. A couple of years ago, I thought their entire set of literature was counter-intuitive, and I quit paying attention to them. How on Earth did they grow to be in AWS's league so quickly? Surely just getting the "default Microsoft business" wasn't enough to put them at $1 billion ??
    - 13y ago
ComputerGuru 13y ago
Regardless of where .NET is headed, C# the language (which is an entirely separate beast) has, in my humble opinion, become the most damn awesome all-around language. It's got all the awesome features most of which are very elegantly implemented and accessible in a very streamlined fashion. Obviously if you hate C-syntax, C# isn't going to win any brownie points, but in terms of sheer power and flexibility, C# 5.0 steals the cake by a huge margin. Lambdas, parallelization, anonymous functions, interop with C functions, fast compilation, "fast" execution, awesome bytecode, and more. Constantly iterating, but not breaking with the original design goals. It's borrowed the right features from the right languages, the right syntax from the right languages, and the right design choices from the right languages. (Although I do dislike how the new dynamic keyword is implemented. It throws then catches too many exceptions under the hood and people really need to understand it before they use it. It was primarily designed to convert unknown/random JSON to a C# object on the fly and should not be abused. Many people coming from dynamically-typed, loosely-defined languages might think it's an easy way of adapting to the traditionally statically-typed and statically-defined C#... not so.) (And, like it or not, it really is a cross-platform language. Mono does count and is pretty awesome. Esp. if you think about the compatibility of the language and not the framework.) I'm still a die-hard C/C++ coder, but C# won my heart a long time ago.
- ilaksh 13y ago
  Start with the name, ".NET". What were they referring to when they chose that name very carefully? They were referring to the web. C# 5.0? Take a look at this example code from the MSDN blog which is "showing off" the new features of C# 5.0. (It was formatted this way with no indentation on the blog). This example, not by coincidence, demonstrates how .NET interfaces with the web. private async void btnTest_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { var request = WebRequest.Create(txtUrl.Text.Trim()); var content = new MemoryStream(); Task<WebResponse> responseTask = request.GetResponseAsync(); using (var response = await responseTask) { using (var responseStream = response.GetResponseStream()) { Task copyTask = responseStream.CopyToAsync(content); //await operator to supends the excution of the method until the task is completed. In the meantime, the control is returned the UI thread. await copyTask; } } txtResult.Text = content.Length.ToString(); } What does that code do? It works behind a form running on the desktop, where you press a button to do an async HTTP request and display the content length of the response. First of all, why would I want to create an application that runs on the desktop, rather than build a web application that I can show to people with a link? Especially If I were going to do the same thing with a web application then I would probably do something like this in CoffeeScript: $.get $('#url').val(), (res) -> $('#res').val res.length I'm sorry, but I don't see C# as being the most damn awesome all-around language. I like CoffeeScript, or maybe even better, LiveScript (http://livescript.net http://livescript.net). Or failing that, plain-old JavaScript.
ghuntley 13y ago
Erm. .NET is alive and well, especially on the game and mobile phone development front Xamarin (the monodevs) are doing some really interesting stuff: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013 http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013 Frameworks such as MvvmCross allow you to target iOS, Android, Windows 8 Mobile, Windows 8 Store, WinRT, WPF all using the same codebase using the MVVM Pattern. Write your code business logic in a PCL and share it across all platforms, i.e. 80% code re-use on mobile, write your UI for each platform and link against your shared core business logic PCL. https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross Oh, you can do all of the above, program for all those platforms (iOS included) in Visual Studio with either C# or F# using async/await and linq. Disclaimer: I went to #evolve, if you use .NET and didn't go then sorry to say you missed out ;-) Personal highlights from the conference include: - C# async/await on iOS, Android announced and available in the beta update channel. - Xamarin acquires Calaba.sh (lesspainful), announces the future of automated mobile phone testing: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-xcjpj20d6s http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-xcjpj20d6s - 80% code reuse case study: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-shy07zqsoz http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-shy07zqsoz - Behind the scenes with the award winning game Bastion (monogame): http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-mazw2c15qr http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-mazw2c15qr - (Scott Hanselman) How C# Saved my Marriage, Enhanced my Career and Made Me an Inch Taller: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-umfpnw90c9 http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-umfpnw90c9 - (Josh Collins - @GlobalMoxie) Buttons are a hack: can't wait for vid to be uploaded...
orangethirty 13y ago
One point that is somehow missing in this thread, yet is implicitly made is: Open source is not the solution to every problem. There are businesses that value the support, packaging, and overall completeness of the .NET stack. Yes, they cost money to deploy, but so do open source alternatives. People will argue that MS will lock you down. Yet, if you start developing under Rails or Django, its pretty hard to move away when things get going.

67 points by wubbfindel 13y ago

taternuts 13y ago

They need to open source the CLR and rule the world

kvb 13y ago
Why? It's already an ISO/ECMA standard, and there's an existing high quality open source implementation in Mono. Microsoft has open sourced several of their more recent frameworks and languages, including ASP.NET MVC, F#, and TypeScript, and released free-but-not-open-source tools like the express editions of Visual Studio. How would open sourcing the CLR help?
- orbitur 13y ago
  Exactly. Being closed isn't the problem, it's just effectively unsupported on any platform that's not Windows. Mono's nice and all, but it's not complete, and it never will be.
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    What is it missing that you are missing? Mono is pretty damn complete. The stuff I've found it to be missing are very Windows-centric stuff and wouldn't fit in a Unix environment anyway.
    - cookiecaper 13y ago
      WPF is the replacement of WinForms. Many desktop apps designed by conventional .NET developers in the timeframe between the release of Vista, and probably many now despite MS's deprecation, use WPF as a base library. It's not something you can just easily replace, and Mono does not implement it. Microsoft is using the same business tactics that they've employed since the PC wars in the 90s, since they hit critical mass of market share, just with a bit more finesse. Microsoft allows Mono's existence only because it feeds into their power play, by creating more dependency and familiarity with .NET. They make the basics open and provide some interoperability, but then lay on proprietary extras that eventually become hard dependencies organically (like WPF) as a function of Microsoft's monopolization of the market ("why wouldn't I use this tool that makes things way easier? it will work great in our environment"). It's all EEE. Microsoft's MO, then and now. Then all of the sudden, iPads exist. Xamarin is in a killer market.
      - cmircea 13y ago
        It's not as if WPF was the only way to make UIs for apps.
        cookiecaper 13y ago
        But it was the primary, endorsed way for several years. WinForms was deprecated, and WPF was the new thing you were supposed to use.
        moron4hire 13y ago
        Now you're putting words into Microsoft's mouth to make your point stick. WinForms was never deprecated, WPF was never meant as a replacement for it.
        cookiecaper 13y ago
        My mistake, I was under the impression that WinForms had been formally deprecated in favor of WPF. It doesn't appear to be such a rare feeling; there are 1.59 million results in Google for "WinForms deprecated". Regardless of the formal action, the clear message from MS upon release of WPF was: "This is the new official GUI builder, please use it, it should be preferred". Indication of such preferences is relevant. Or do you suggest that MS released WPF with the intention that no one would ever use it?
        moron4hire 13y ago
        I think they released WPF with the understanding that WinForms has very Windows-specific features that were preventing people from adopting .NET for cross-platform development. WinForms is Java AWT, WPF is Java Swing. WinForms is meant to be a basic wrapper around GDI, WPF is a completely different rendering engine separate from Windows. I think they were hoping people would choose appropriately based on their needs.
      - moron4hire 13y ago
        That's funny. I've been a .NET developer since it's been a thing. I don't know anyone doing WPF. That's kind of why it's deprecated.

300bps 13y ago

I have moved everything that I host for myself or my clients to Azure. Low cost, rock solid reliability, incredible speed and easy to administer. CPU, memory and disk really are a commodity at this point. I loved Amazon EC2 too but Azure was far cheaper for high use Windows VMs.

Fizzer 13y ago
EC2 is indeed very expensive for Windows hosting. A c1.medium instance on EC2 reserved for 3 years is $42/mo Linux and $116/mo Windows - that's nearly triple the cost for the same hardware! Another option is to switch to mono and run your .net apps with EC2's Linux prices. Then it's even cheaper than Azure. This is what I did for my current project.
- ilaksh 13y ago
  Right so who makes Mono? Is it primarily Microsoft developers? No. Of course not. So where does that leave Windows for internet servers?

at-fates-hands 13y ago

I currently work at a fairly large MS client. No way we're going to abandon .Net right now or in the next few years. We're currently in the process of getting ready for a migration to Sharepoint Server 2013 which will cement the company with .Net for at least the next two to three years. We still have several sites on the old 2007 platform with no hint of moving those over any time soon. I'm wondering what you see as viable open source alternatives to the .Net platform. Also, we have a handful of .Net developers and they've all said a majority of the work they've had in the last year did not involve MVC3 or MVC4 so I'm also wondering what the future of this platform will be.

yareally 13y ago
>I'm wondering what you see as viable open source alternatives to the .Net platform. Mono? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) Or going in a different direction with similar goals, Qt.
- adamnemecek 13y ago
  > Mono? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) You are funny.
- untog 13y ago
  If you think Mono is a viable alternative to the .NET platform, you don't understand why people choose .NET. Don't get me wrong, Mono is awesome. But it's not about to be adopted by Fortune 500 companies across the world.
  - kmm 13y ago
    To someone with very little understanding of these technologies, could you give a quick word on what the problem is with Mono? Are we talking about performance, completeness, support or something else?
    - 13y ago

rocky1138 13y ago

They should add Java as a CLR-supported language :P

wslh 13y ago
You can always use IKVM for running Java under .NET! I used it for adding the boilerpipe Java library to navigate HackerNews by voice! Details at: http://blog.databigbang.com/voice-recognition-content-extraction-tts-innovative-web-browsing/ http://blog.databigbang.com/voice-recognition-content-extrac...
yareally 13y ago
They did that once before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Sharp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Sharp
- joseph_cooney 13y ago
  pretty sure he was being funny (hence the :P ... and the court cases).
kyllo 13y ago
I might use the opposite--a JVM implementation of C#--if such a thing existed. A port of Java on the CLR would be useless to me though, because I don't use .NET but if I did, C# has better features than Java as a language.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  You cannot do that, because CLR has pointers, value types, unions and proper tail call optimization. So those features are not mappable to the JVM.
  - kyllo 13y ago
    So that means C/C++, Obj-C, and ML languages (SML, OCaml, F#) are all impossible to implement on the JVM?

cooldeal 13y ago

Great, another .NET is dying post voted up on HN. Didn't we have one of those just this morning? Meanwhile, in the real world, Microsoft posted these earnings: "Server & Tools business reported $5.04 billion of revenue, up 11% from last year" Inspite of competing products like Linux, Apache, Eclipse, Ruby, Java being given away for free, people are willing to pay for Windows Server, Visual Studio and IIS. Does anyone have real data related to ".NET is dying" other than idle conjecture, short sighted "frog in the well" anectodes which sound like they're written and voted up by people sipping on a latte on a Macbook in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley? Like the number of jobs posted? They seem to increasing every day. Sigh, some people here just love these '.NET is dying' posts, perhaps some with a vested interest to scare startups from using it. Again, any hard data will be appreciated that shows .NET is dying instead of the same paragraph upon paragraph of opinion and no links, references or data, we have enough HN comments of that already.

eduardordm 13y ago
You couldn't buy the VS licenses + SQL Server + Windows Server with the money YCombinator provides you. So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup.
- cooldeal 13y ago
  You don't need to buy them: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx Prime example: Stackoverflow/StackExchange is built on the Microsoft stack.
  - eduardordm 13y ago
    BizSpark has rules many startups cannot follow and is only valid for 3 years. This is the same selling scheme used by drug dealers.
    - harryh 13y ago
      If your startup is around 3 years in the cost of paying for the tools won't matter.

orangethirty 13y ago

I've been away from .Net for a while. How has it improved? How is the market for programmers in it? For freelancers?

bigdubs 13y ago
ASP.net MVC is pretty awesome, there are some good open source projects like Nancy for more lightweight stuff, Entity Framework isn't great but it's pretty mature and fast for an ORM. Visual Studio continues to be the best IDE on the market.
- guiomie 13y ago
  "Entity Framework" ... why dont you use Linq instead?
  - qu4z-2 13y ago
    You mean Linq-to-Sql? Entity Framework lets you use Linq and manages your db for you. As long as you use the Code-First approach it's... okay. But it does at least support compiling Linq to Sql mostly alright. (I'm looking at you NHibernate)
- orangethirty 13y ago
  I did some work with ASP.net MVC. Last time I touched it it was a pretty nice framework to use. Thanks for the feedback

dschiptsov 13y ago

into a dustbin, to meet Clipper, Delphi and Java?)

rbanffy 13y ago

I had to stop at the "1. The success of Windows Azure" part. Will get back to the article as soon as I stop laughing...

smacktoward 13y ago
Laugh if you want to, but the point is pretty serious. Azure supposedly racked up more than $1 billion in revenue in 2012 (http://www.zdnet.com/windows-azure-joins-microsofts-billion-dollar-business-club-7000014669/ http://www.zdnet.com/windows-azure-joins-microsofts-billion-...). Amazon's AWS, on the other hand, is estimated to have brought in between $1.5 and $2 billion (http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2013-03-07-what-if-amazon-web-services-were-a-standalone-business-itd-be-big/ http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2013-03-07-what-if-amazon..., http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazons-cloud-revenues-examined/240145741 http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructur...) during the same period. So while Azure is still booking less business than AWS is, it's definitely a major competitor. Maybe the major competitor. And since the market for virtualized platforms is still in early days, there's lots of room for that revenue figure to grow substantially even if Azure ends up stuck at #2 behind AWS forever.
- guiomie 13y ago
  Would it be a fair assumption to say revenues from Azure are primarly from big entreprise companies (ex fortune 500) amd that amazon is more focused around smaller companies?
- charlieflowers 13y ago
  I heard this a couple of weeks ago (on Hacker News), and I was SHOCKED! I have worked for years as a .Net consultant, and I had no idea Azure had grown this quickly. A couple of years ago, I thought their entire set of literature was counter-intuitive, and I quit paying attention to them. How on Earth did they grow to be in AWS's league so quickly? Surely just getting the "default Microsoft business" wasn't enough to put them at $1 billion ??
  - 13y ago

ComputerGuru 13y ago

Regardless of where .NET is headed, C# the language (which is an entirely separate beast) has, in my humble opinion, become the most damn awesome all-around language. It's got all the awesome features most of which are very elegantly implemented and accessible in a very streamlined fashion. Obviously if you hate C-syntax, C# isn't going to win any brownie points, but in terms of sheer power and flexibility, C# 5.0 steals the cake by a huge margin. Lambdas, parallelization, anonymous functions, interop with C functions, fast compilation, "fast" execution, awesome bytecode, and more. Constantly iterating, but not breaking with the original design goals. It's borrowed the right features from the right languages, the right syntax from the right languages, and the right design choices from the right languages. (Although I do dislike how the new dynamic keyword is implemented. It throws then catches too many exceptions under the hood and people really need to understand it before they use it. It was primarily designed to convert unknown/random JSON to a C# object on the fly and should not be abused. Many people coming from dynamically-typed, loosely-defined languages might think it's an easy way of adapting to the traditionally statically-typed and statically-defined C#... not so.) (And, like it or not, it really is a cross-platform language. Mono does count and is pretty awesome. Esp. if you think about the compatibility of the language and not the framework.) I'm still a die-hard C/C++ coder, but C# won my heart a long time ago.

ilaksh 13y ago
Start with the name, ".NET". What were they referring to when they chose that name very carefully? They were referring to the web. C# 5.0? Take a look at this example code from the MSDN blog which is "showing off" the new features of C# 5.0. (It was formatted this way with no indentation on the blog). This example, not by coincidence, demonstrates how .NET interfaces with the web. private async void btnTest_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { var request = WebRequest.Create(txtUrl.Text.Trim()); var content = new MemoryStream(); Task<WebResponse> responseTask = request.GetResponseAsync(); using (var response = await responseTask) { using (var responseStream = response.GetResponseStream()) { Task copyTask = responseStream.CopyToAsync(content); //await operator to supends the excution of the method until the task is completed. In the meantime, the control is returned the UI thread. await copyTask; } } txtResult.Text = content.Length.ToString(); } What does that code do? It works behind a form running on the desktop, where you press a button to do an async HTTP request and display the content length of the response. First of all, why would I want to create an application that runs on the desktop, rather than build a web application that I can show to people with a link? Especially If I were going to do the same thing with a web application then I would probably do something like this in CoffeeScript: $.get $('#url').val(), (res) -> $('#res').val res.length I'm sorry, but I don't see C# as being the most damn awesome all-around language. I like CoffeeScript, or maybe even better, LiveScript (http://livescript.net http://livescript.net). Or failing that, plain-old JavaScript.

ghuntley 13y ago

Erm. .NET is alive and well, especially on the game and mobile phone development front Xamarin (the monodevs) are doing some really interesting stuff: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013 http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013 Frameworks such as MvvmCross allow you to target iOS, Android, Windows 8 Mobile, Windows 8 Store, WinRT, WPF all using the same codebase using the MVVM Pattern. Write your code business logic in a PCL and share it across all platforms, i.e. 80% code re-use on mobile, write your UI for each platform and link against your shared core business logic PCL. https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross Oh, you can do all of the above, program for all those platforms (iOS included) in Visual Studio with either C# or F# using async/await and linq. Disclaimer: I went to #evolve, if you use .NET and didn't go then sorry to say you missed out ;-) Personal highlights from the conference include: - C# async/await on iOS, Android announced and available in the beta update channel. - Xamarin acquires Calaba.sh (lesspainful), announces the future of automated mobile phone testing: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-xcjpj20d6s http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-xcjpj20d6s - 80% code reuse case study: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-shy07zqsoz http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-shy07zqsoz - Behind the scenes with the award winning game Bastion (monogame): http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-mazw2c15qr http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-mazw2c15qr - (Scott Hanselman) How C# Saved my Marriage, Enhanced my Career and Made Me an Inch Taller: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-umfpnw90c9 http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#session-umfpnw90c9 - (Josh Collins - @GlobalMoxie) Buttons are a hack: can't wait for vid to be uploaded...

orangethirty 13y ago

One point that is somehow missing in this thread, yet is implicitly made is: Open source is not the solution to every problem. There are businesses that value the support, packaging, and overall completeness of the .NET stack. Yes, they cost money to deploy, but so do open source alternatives. People will argue that MS will lock you down. Yet, if you start developing under Rails or Django, its pretty hard to move away when things get going.