13 ms·

C# and .NET get a bad rap for being created by Microsoft. But one thing that can't be ignored is how polished their development tools are. I absolutely love c

by maresca 13y ago

C# and .NET get a bad rap for being created by Microsoft. But one thing that can't be ignored is how polished their development tools are. I absolutely love coding in Visual Studio.

jmspring 13y ago
The dev tools are good, though I think some of the documentation on msdn needs a lot of cleanup/improvement. It is not uncommon to get routed to older API versions or different languages. That said, it is getting better over time. This tool definitely helps with C#. One thing I like about Apple developer docs (on developer.apple.com) that MSDN doesn't have (at least didn't last time I looked) is the ability to get a PDF covering specific topics. These are useful when I would rather have not deal with a browser while developing.
- magic_haze 13y ago
  You need to click on the "Export" button, at the top right corner of the page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/export/help/?returnUrl=%2fen-us%2flibrary%2fxfhwa508.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/export/help/?returnU...
  - jmspring 13y ago
    I've seen that, a page at a time. If I do the following google search "developer.apple.com keychain", it gives me a web browsable version with a pdf link in the upper right. If I click the PDF link, I get the content for "every page" which means, in this case, the "keychain services programming guide". I have yet to be able to do the same under msdn.
    - de90 13y ago
      In visual studio go to Help -> "Add and remove help content" and that will allow you to download entire topics like .net 4.5 docs. You can even throw whatever you download on a network, and anyone can access it from there rather than individually needing to download it. That requires setting something in the registry though to access from the network (let me know if you want to know though).
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > One thing I like about Apple developer docs (on developer.apple.com) that MSDN doesn't have (at least didn't last time I looked) is the ability to get a PDF covering specific topics. These are useful when I would rather have not deal with a browser while developing. Visual Studio still has an option to install all MSDN content on your hard drive, for offline access. It's the traditional Help Viewer model. This only covers language and SDK documentation -- not the magazine articles and other random stuff.
chrislomax 13y ago
It pains me if I am honest. Our CMS is built on .NET and it's like an uphill battle selling it as it's on IIS and it's .NET. I have played around with the idea of reworking it into an open source language and open source database but I would miss Visual Studio and the language a lot. I don't get all the hate?
- blibble 13y ago
  I'd guess it's because a lot of techies remember how 10 years ago MS exploited their monopoly to force their products onto the entire world? fortunately those days are over and they've become mostly irrelevant, but everyone knows that given half a chance they'd do it again...
  - vowelless 13y ago
    I was a kid back then so I don't know the details of the story. Can you give me a primer?
    - jongalloway2 13y ago
      s/10/20 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Hist...
      - blibble 13y ago
        don't forget this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compet...
        tlarkworthy 13y ago
        also don't forget the gazillions of viruses in that era. Business networks paralysed by out of control worms on the internet. Good times.
        13y ago
Touche 13y ago
But F# is so much better that I can't think of a single reason for choosing C# over it.
- codereflection 13y ago
  I wish F# had first class support from ReSharper.
  - profquail 13y ago
    F# tooling has been improving like crazy over the last ~6 months; most of that work has been focused on refactoring tools, compiler-as-a-service (aka "Foslyn"), and compiler-development tools, so it's not totally out of the question that someone could implement an F# language service for ReSharper in the semi-near future.
    - codereflection 13y ago
      What gets me is that CodeRush has had first class support for F# for years now, and JetBrains still hasn't given it any love in ReSharper. Perhaps it's already underway and JetBrains is just waiting to reveal.
- _random_ 13y ago
  I would say moderately better. E.g. "C# is so much better than assembly language".
- Locke1689 13y ago
  I agree that F# is a great language, but there are a couple projects in which I favor C#. One reason to favor C# is that it just has better IDE support, hands down. In addition, if I'm working with C# devs it's just nicer to use something everyone already knows. As far as the language goes, though, perf sensitive stuff often makes more sense for me to do in C#. This is a combination of reasons: 1) I generally have a better sense of the IL that a given C# program will generate. This is both because I am a C# compiler dev and because C# is closer in form to the .NET IL than F#. 2) I have a better sense of the actual machine code that will be generated for C# code by the JIT. This is almost entirely because I am a dev on the C# compiler. 3) The language/framework teams are very data driven. The population of F# developers and F# code in comparison with C# developers and C# code is like a drop in the bucket. There are hundreds if not thousands of C# developers for every F# dev. It is almost a statistical certainty that C# JIT hot spots will get optimized before F#. 4) The fastest F# is usually very imperative and is essentially the same as the C# code.
rkuykendall-com 13y ago
Personally, it's because Microsoft development locks you in, and costs a lot of money. The OS costs money, the server OS costs money, the database costs money, the IDE costs money, everything costs money, and you have to use it, for the life of your app. To many young developers these days, and IIS server is the thing your company keeps in the closet to some sluggish legacy monstrosity which has been replaced for years with a better open source solution, but can't be put out of it's misery because it still holds some data that might be useful sometime. Is any of this true? I have no idea. I'm just letting you know the rap it has, and the perceived reasons for that rap.
- benologist 13y ago
  It's not very true that you're locked into anything anymore. See Mono, Xamarin, Sharpdevelop, etc.
  - gisenberg 13y ago
    That's an optimistic world view. Getting a web app built on .NET/MVC4/IIS running on mono isn't a trivial endeavor, and the open source implementations rightfully tend to lag behind the closed implementations.
  - kevinskii 13y ago
    We stopped using Mono after a few months. With .NET's Task Parallel Libraries we saw an enormous performance difference between Mono/Redhat vs. .NET/Windows, with the latter often running many times faster. Tuning the GC and heap size didn't make much of a difference. .NET seems to be well worth the cost of running Windows, but the consequent platform and vendor lock-in is still a concern for us.
    - kevingadd 13y ago
      Mono's parallel implementation is really bad, yes. I've had similar problems with it (despite the fact that the Mono SGen GC is usually pretty decent at keeping up) Maybe you should contribute a better one. ;)
cl8ton 13y ago
Agreed, MS Visual Studio 2013 must have been written by space aliens for their advanced features and openness to third-party platforms and languages. The one thing that bugs me when these types of threads start is the hatefulness of others to bash MS for trying to make a profit and lock in when everyone else here is trying to earn a profit on their must have technology. Why single MS out on this? Isn’t this what your trying to do?
balladeer 13y ago
Agreed and I tell you, pay that kind of money to Eclipse Foundation and you might be in for a pleasant surprise in a year or so.
sireat 13y ago
Coming from Eclipse and Jetbrains world(Webstorm rocks), I have a pretty hard time adjusting to Visual Studio. For example, I am used to having a class information(methods, variables, etc) or similarly Javascript function information in Structure window updated whenever my cursor moves in the code window. In Visual Studio this apparently is not possible automatically, and you have to make a custom hotkey to force this behaviour. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/546113/visual-studio-automatically-refresh-class-view-when-changing-class?rq=1 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/546113/visual-studio-auto... How do people work through someone's else's code in VS? Do they really read every single line or use Object Browser? I understand that Jetbrains Resharper fixes many of these issues, but that is not vanilla VS then.

by maresca 13y ago

C# and .NET get a bad rap for being created by Microsoft. But one thing that can't be ignored is how polished their development tools are. I absolutely love coding in Visual Studio.

jmspring 13y ago

The dev tools are good, though I think some of the documentation on msdn needs a lot of cleanup/improvement. It is not uncommon to get routed to older API versions or different languages. That said, it is getting better over time. This tool definitely helps with C#. One thing I like about Apple developer docs (on developer.apple.com) that MSDN doesn't have (at least didn't last time I looked) is the ability to get a PDF covering specific topics. These are useful when I would rather have not deal with a browser while developing.

magic_haze 13y ago
You need to click on the "Export" button, at the top right corner of the page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/export/help/?returnUrl=%2fen-us%2flibrary%2fxfhwa508.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/export/help/?returnU...
- jmspring 13y ago
  I've seen that, a page at a time. If I do the following google search "developer.apple.com keychain", it gives me a web browsable version with a pdf link in the upper right. If I click the PDF link, I get the content for "every page" which means, in this case, the "keychain services programming guide". I have yet to be able to do the same under msdn.
  - de90 13y ago
    In visual studio go to Help -> "Add and remove help content" and that will allow you to download entire topics like .net 4.5 docs. You can even throw whatever you download on a network, and anyone can access it from there rather than individually needing to download it. That requires setting something in the registry though to access from the network (let me know if you want to know though).
tanzam75 13y ago
> One thing I like about Apple developer docs (on developer.apple.com) that MSDN doesn't have (at least didn't last time I looked) is the ability to get a PDF covering specific topics. These are useful when I would rather have not deal with a browser while developing. Visual Studio still has an option to install all MSDN content on your hard drive, for offline access. It's the traditional Help Viewer model. This only covers language and SDK documentation -- not the magazine articles and other random stuff.

chrislomax 13y ago

It pains me if I am honest. Our CMS is built on .NET and it's like an uphill battle selling it as it's on IIS and it's .NET. I have played around with the idea of reworking it into an open source language and open source database but I would miss Visual Studio and the language a lot. I don't get all the hate?

blibble 13y ago
I'd guess it's because a lot of techies remember how 10 years ago MS exploited their monopoly to force their products onto the entire world? fortunately those days are over and they've become mostly irrelevant, but everyone knows that given half a chance they'd do it again...
- vowelless 13y ago
  I was a kid back then so I don't know the details of the story. Can you give me a primer?
  - jongalloway2 13y ago
    s/10/20 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Hist...
    - blibble 13y ago
      don't forget this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compet...
      - tlarkworthy 13y ago
        also don't forget the gazillions of viruses in that era. Business networks paralysed by out of control worms on the internet. Good times.
      - 13y ago

Touche 13y ago

But F# is so much better that I can't think of a single reason for choosing C# over it.

codereflection 13y ago
I wish F# had first class support from ReSharper.
- profquail 13y ago
  F# tooling has been improving like crazy over the last ~6 months; most of that work has been focused on refactoring tools, compiler-as-a-service (aka "Foslyn"), and compiler-development tools, so it's not totally out of the question that someone could implement an F# language service for ReSharper in the semi-near future.
  - codereflection 13y ago
    What gets me is that CodeRush has had first class support for F# for years now, and JetBrains still hasn't given it any love in ReSharper. Perhaps it's already underway and JetBrains is just waiting to reveal.
_random_ 13y ago
I would say moderately better. E.g. "C# is so much better than assembly language".
Locke1689 13y ago
I agree that F# is a great language, but there are a couple projects in which I favor C#. One reason to favor C# is that it just has better IDE support, hands down. In addition, if I'm working with C# devs it's just nicer to use something everyone already knows. As far as the language goes, though, perf sensitive stuff often makes more sense for me to do in C#. This is a combination of reasons: 1) I generally have a better sense of the IL that a given C# program will generate. This is both because I am a C# compiler dev and because C# is closer in form to the .NET IL than F#. 2) I have a better sense of the actual machine code that will be generated for C# code by the JIT. This is almost entirely because I am a dev on the C# compiler. 3) The language/framework teams are very data driven. The population of F# developers and F# code in comparison with C# developers and C# code is like a drop in the bucket. There are hundreds if not thousands of C# developers for every F# dev. It is almost a statistical certainty that C# JIT hot spots will get optimized before F#. 4) The fastest F# is usually very imperative and is essentially the same as the C# code.

rkuykendall-com 13y ago

Personally, it's because Microsoft development locks you in, and costs a lot of money. The OS costs money, the server OS costs money, the database costs money, the IDE costs money, everything costs money, and you have to use it, for the life of your app. To many young developers these days, and IIS server is the thing your company keeps in the closet to some sluggish legacy monstrosity which has been replaced for years with a better open source solution, but can't be put out of it's misery because it still holds some data that might be useful sometime. Is any of this true? I have no idea. I'm just letting you know the rap it has, and the perceived reasons for that rap.

benologist 13y ago
It's not very true that you're locked into anything anymore. See Mono, Xamarin, Sharpdevelop, etc.
- gisenberg 13y ago
  That's an optimistic world view. Getting a web app built on .NET/MVC4/IIS running on mono isn't a trivial endeavor, and the open source implementations rightfully tend to lag behind the closed implementations.
- kevinskii 13y ago
  We stopped using Mono after a few months. With .NET's Task Parallel Libraries we saw an enormous performance difference between Mono/Redhat vs. .NET/Windows, with the latter often running many times faster. Tuning the GC and heap size didn't make much of a difference. .NET seems to be well worth the cost of running Windows, but the consequent platform and vendor lock-in is still a concern for us.
  - kevingadd 13y ago
    Mono's parallel implementation is really bad, yes. I've had similar problems with it (despite the fact that the Mono SGen GC is usually pretty decent at keeping up) Maybe you should contribute a better one. ;)

cl8ton 13y ago

Agreed, MS Visual Studio 2013 must have been written by space aliens for their advanced features and openness to third-party platforms and languages. The one thing that bugs me when these types of threads start is the hatefulness of others to bash MS for trying to make a profit and lock in when everyone else here is trying to earn a profit on their must have technology. Why single MS out on this? Isn’t this what your trying to do?

balladeer 13y ago

Agreed and I tell you, pay that kind of money to Eclipse Foundation and you might be in for a pleasant surprise in a year or so.

sireat 13y ago

Coming from Eclipse and Jetbrains world(Webstorm rocks), I have a pretty hard time adjusting to Visual Studio. For example, I am used to having a class information(methods, variables, etc) or similarly Javascript function information in Structure window updated whenever my cursor moves in the code window. In Visual Studio this apparently is not possible automatically, and you have to make a custom hotkey to force this behaviour. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/546113/visual-studio-automatically-refresh-class-view-when-changing-class?rq=1 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/546113/visual-studio-auto... How do people work through someone's else's code in VS? Do they really read every single line or use Object Browser? I understand that Jetbrains Resharper fixes many of these issues, but that is not vanilla VS then.