My favorite .NET 10 feature so far is not within the .NET library itself, but `dotnet tool exec` to run C# files as scripts without a build step. This has been available in F# for a long time via `dotnet fsi`, and for C# also via the third party cs-script tool. It took a surprisingly long time to officially reach the primary .NET language!
I only really wish C# would’ve been directly integrated as an alternative scripting language in PowerShell. You may balk at the idea for causing a ton of cruft for people who don’t need it; ”a whole new scripting language!” But the thing is — PowerShell already builds upon .NET so supporting a new language is a rather small effort (relatively speaking) if it happens to be a .NET language. And C# just feels so much better for me to code in when the scripts grow in size. I’m not sure I’ll ever become friends with the implicit returns. C# has become particularly suitable for scripting with the recent developments in the language: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...
"dotnet tool exec" is so you can run third party command line tools like csharpier that previously required "dotnet tool install" before you could use them. For example, in https://csharpier.com/docs/Installation you can now simply do "dotnet tool exec csharpier". This is like "npx" in the JavaScript world.
F# has been a third class citizen for a long time... Last I heard the entire f# team was ~10 people. Pretty sure "find references" still doesn't work across c# and f# (if you call a c# method from f# or vise versa). That also means symbol renames don't work correctly.
Now I'm curious if C#/.Net 10 is smart enough to ignore the shebang line. Personally, I've tended to use Deno/TS for my more advanced shell scripting... the main runtime is a single executable that works fine in user context, and dependencies can be loaded/cached at first run.
Of course, with C# as a shell script, you'd likely be limited to just in the box libraries or have to setup a project for sake of running a script, like I've had to do with Node or Python stuff.
I've wanted this for a long time. After reading this link, and the MS release announcement, I still don't understand what a "tool" is, or how you can use `tool exec` to run a single *.cs file. Is there a straight-forward recipe anywhere for doing this targeted at absolute simpletons?
To boil it down: you create a console app, add a couple of attributes to the solution file (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/global-t...). Packaging and publishing to nuget (if you want to share with others) is via `dotnet pack` and `dotnet nuget push` with some flags.
I do have to say it's actually very well documented.
Sorry for confusing you. I can't edit the post now. The command is dotnet run script.cs. The tool stuff is about something else unrelated; NuGet installable CLI executables.
It's great that Microsoft added this as an official feature but there has been an open-source third-party solution that does exactly the same thing for a long time: https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script
I agree. The stability comes from its ecosystem though. Enterprise Software. Where things like meticulous use of Omit and Task are common place and really REALLY bad things happen if you fuck up.
But besides that, there’s a healthy gamedev community that embraced C# early and have been using it ever since. There’s C++ MFC guys that got duped into WPF and have been supporting it ever since. Winforms devs that are still trying to make a dark mode. I’ve even seen community grass roots “I need this in Silverlight” projects take hold and become one of the largest SDKs in the world. It’s cool. It’s fun. And with AOT, it’s everywhere. C# is like that cool uncle of your Father (Java) that likes to party all night but still holds a job. Maybe someday TS.Net will exist and we’ll all be singing “Back in my day”
I very much doubt about TS.Net, given the rewrite in Go decision.
.NET nowadays has a serious adoption problem, and they should spend more time talking with their own colleagues at Azure, about their use of Java, Go, Rust.
Since you mention great CLI - is there a CLI tool that is free/cross platform that works like prettier ? I found https://csharpier.com/ but have never heard of anyone using it.
Also not sure how it works with linters like roslynator or stylecop ?
This is something I miss very much when coming back from TS, other languages also have better formatters. C# is very tied to editors/IDEs which is a nightmare in teams where some people use vs/vs code/rider
Csharpier is the best option available. I've been using it for 3-4 years now and had success getting it adopted at my last two companies on greenfield projects. It's not exactly an unknown tool - nearly 2k stars on Github. But a lot old school .Net companies just don't seem to have much interest in auto formatters because they've been working without them for a long time.
If you're using csharpier you don't need to use Roslynator formatters. No issue with the analyzers package. The csharpier docs have info on what StyleCop rules need to be adjusted so they can work together. Personally I don't use StyleCop anymore as it seems to be fairly dead, and I don't really feel the need for things like enforcing file layout or naming.
Edit: Also I will add that unless the landscape has changed recently, I believe csharpier is the only C# tool that has deterministic formatting good enough to enforce code formatting checks in CI.
dotnet format [0] exists and is maintained by the .NET team. It is different from Prettier in that it is much more configurable, but it gets the job done for us. It does integrate language services and can automatically apply code fixes for custom analyzers. I have not explicitly tried roslynator or stylecop, but I suspect this would work as expected.
Hi! I use csharpier, it does the job - I included it as a preliminary check in our CI pipeline for a step of merge requests quality assessment. It is the closest tool I found, that ressembles prettier. You should definitely give it a try.
Sometimes I feel like there ought to be a Hacker News like forum for us dinosaurs stuck in the Enterprise tarpit. Instead of talking about Elixir and AWS startup credits, we’d complain about the weather and legacy CORBA components.
For the last few years, I’ve been developing CAM/CAE software on my job, sometimes embedded Linux.
Same experience: last time I developed software written entirely in C++ was in 2008. Nowadays, only using C++ for DLLs consumed by C#, for 2 reasons: manually vectorized SIMD for CPU bound numerical stuff, and consuming C or C++ libraries like GPU APIs, MS Media Foundation, or Eigen.
I've been using it since 2002 so you can imagine my opinion when jumping to other languages. They've been very good to steal all of the things that worked from other languages and constantly iterate on their core infrastructure and language.
I liked .NET but the performance was really bad for anything that had even reasonably latency requirements. But this was 15 years ago, so maybe it has improved. I don't remember exactly what I wanted to do but it was something like pumping some event every few milliseconds and it was basically impossible. The jitter was already larger than the interval.
Dotnet's GC has a real latency problem. Miguel de Icaza gave a nice talk on why noticeable pauses are inevitable in a stop-the-world tracing GC, proposing Swift's reference-counting GC as the viable alternative [1]. Still, there are recent developments (Satori GC) with the promise to make the worst case far more palatable (e.g. 250ms -> 5ms) [2].
Do you know about any sizeable open source projects written in C#, other than what Microsoft has produced? I rarely come across anything written in it.
It's a curious thing, the .NET ecosystem. The overwhelming majority of it's ecosystem seems to be dominated by Microsoft first-party libraries and frameworks. 3rd party libraries and frameworks seem to either get swallowed up by Microsoft, killed, or never reach critical-mass.
Often in the .NET ecosystem, it seems there is exactly one library or framework for thing $X or $Y. Whereas in the JVM ecosystem, you have 30+ logging libraries, 87 different MVC frameworks, etc. (yes, I'm being a bit facetious, but you get the point).
I imagine .NET developers often think this is a good thing, in regard to their ecosystem. No guessing what to use, just go with the "blessed" path and don't think about it. And, to that end, there is some obvious merit to this.
However, I feel the .NET ecosystem loses out on cross-pollination of ideas. There's zero possibility Microsoft's employees just happen to make the best frameworks and libraries... there should be many web frameworks - each competing for mindshare and trying to out-innovate each other, each with their own pro's and con's, etc.
So, while .NET might be technically open source, it still feels rather like a closed source ecosystem, controlled by a single corporate entity.
Can't speak for FLOSS, but I've worked on massive projects in various Banking, Govt and eLearning spaces. I've never really hurt for library support via NuGet either. It's honestly not always my first choice, but pays the bills.
I mostly just dislike a lot of the excessive use of "Enterprise Patterns" for projects that don't come close to actually needing them.
Not sure what your definition of sizable is. But if it’s just physical size of repo then my language-ext project [1] is about half a million lines of code, ~7,000 stars, and ~25 million downloads.
It is a self-fullfilling prophecy: No big open source without motivated contributors, no contributors because of bad rap because of no big open source projects.
It is not technology what holds .NET back. It is also not politics (nearly all languages have evil overlords). It is people who hold up to statements like: "I will not touch .NET with a 10-stick-pole"
> .NET was the most sane programming ecosystem that I worked in.
Having written libraries in .Net I fully disagree with that notion.
First insanity is figuring out what in the fuck you need to support. .Net framework or .Net standard or .Net Core or Mono (or .Net Duplo or .Net dot nes :P).
Second is the Source generators. I swear using t4 templates is the saner option. I've had cached artifacts appearing out of the fucking nowhere like unkillable zombies despite closing the Rider, clearing its cache, and killing build server.
Third is the availability of packages. In Rust and Java there are like several libs for anything (even if C bindings).
> First insanity is figuring out what in the fuck you need to support.
Since I no longer support .NET Framework, it's just .NET now.
.NET was two platforms for a while and they did a lot of weird stuff to make that work (.NET standard) but it's been one platform for many versions now so that specific difficulty can mostly be ignored.
Most C# libraries I use are outdated, crappy and do just a little less than what I need. Also, most Rust libraries I try to use are outdated, crappy and do just a little less than what I need. Maybe what I need is niche but my experience is pretty similar in that regard.
All I want is for dotnet watch to behave in a predictable way. In .NET 9, even when using —no-hot-reload, sometimes CSS changes to components are not picked up on Blazor components.
It’s so aggravating because ASP.NET with server side Blazor components really has it all: type safety, server-side components ala Astro, fantastic ORM model, great runtime perf. But this little issue makes dev quite tedious at present: did I mistype a Tailwind class name, or did dotnet watch miss the change?
I inherited an MVC app that has a bunch of jQuery rendering crap and I would like to move to server side components - since you seem to be into Blazor Server side - have you heard of HTMX ?
What would you say would be the benefit of Blazor vs HTMX and Razor Pages for subviews ?
My experience with Microsoft UI toolkits after winforms, is that they are all janky over-engineered stuff (Silverlight/WPF/Xamarin/Maui) terrible tooling and support compared to alternatives. And Blazor using websockets makes me believe it is the same. The compile to WASM idea is a typical example of this.
So what would be the selling point of Blazor ? It feels like you are just bundling stuff into Blazor magic when you could KISS with something simple like HTMX ?
As of today (and going forward), there are two different flavors of Blazor server-side rendering. There is the original version where the component is rendered on the server and interactivity is provided via websockets. Now there is also static server-side rendering, which works very similarly to razor pages, pages/components are rendered on the server and there is no interactivity. You can then, of course, add interactivity wherever you'd need it with server-interactive or webassembly interactive sub-components.
I wouldn't necessarily say there's any benefit of Blazor over HTMX, it just depends on what you're most comfortable with and what works for you in your project. But you could architect your front-end in a similar way where you have small blazor components in your pages with interactivity.
I think Blazor is in a nice state now, where I can iterate very quickly on projects with just static server side rendering and add interactivity whenever it's needed. It gives me a very fast website, rendered on the server, and the option to add some interactivity whenever I need.
I still haven't found a use-case for the websocket Blazor Hybrid and it still smells so much like the worst mistakes of the original ASP (before .NET) and the `runat="client"` versus `runat="server"` confusions.
Blazor WASM makes some sense if Silverlight ever made sense for a project: it's a way to ship C# directly to the browser for maximal code sharing with other C# projects in a C# ecosystem. It's basically "what if Angular/React was just Razor Pages running on the browser?"
It's absolutely the opposite of KISS, it's lifting and shifting the entire .NET runtime in WASM to the client. Outside of corporate networks and packaged apps like Electron or Tauri, I'm not sure it makes any sense. But if you like writing Razor Pages and wished they ran closer to the client metal, and you can afford the bandwidth of an entire .NET application soup-to-nuts as your SPA framework, there is a sense to it.
If all you think you need is Razor Pages with HTMX that's probably all you need.
Blazor static server side + HTMX is probably the only way to make a cost efficient and performant version of Blazor suitable for public websites. WASM is way too big and slow, Websockets take up server resources and cause problems with timeouts where the user has to refresh their screen losing all state.
> It’s so aggravating because ASP.NET with server side Blazor components really has it all
Agreed. I bailed on Blazor over the tooling experience. Editing components in VS2022 was so janky for me. Syntax highlighting and intellisense never worked correctly.
I don’t think there’s ever been any good tooling for the entire collection of ASP.NET DSLs. Be that MVC, Razor, or Blazor. Genuinely the same problems I had in VS2010 still happen in VS2022.
There’s been some changes and improvements, but I really have to ask what the editor tooling team within that team are doing.
I know there are some very difficult problems involved in parsing and formatting and highlighting bastardised mixtures of HTML, C#, and JavaScript all in the same file but if anything I think that perhaps suggests it was a bad idea to begin with.
Consider the tooling for desktop and mobile apps with XAML (WPF, Avalonia) or even WinForms - they all have code behind support.
Meaning there is no need (or ability) to mix all three in the same file.
We have had great success with Maui Blazor Hybrid. Each release hot reload gets better with fewer edge cases. I also found that having a separate .cs file instead of in one file helps with highlighing and intellisense.
I hear a lot of complaints about dotnet watch, but my experience doesn't match. I just use it from the terminal (instead of running it from an IDE) and it mostly just works.
All these changes, yet still no satisfactory UI framework.
Still no migration path from WinForms to something modern.
I love .NET but if you're taking on an older desktop app that is still using VB.NET and WinForms it feels like Microsoft have decided to let you circle the drain with no supported way forward into MAUI or whatever stupid XAML UI they decided is the solution these days.
On a server, .NET is fantastic and it's entirely possible to build and debug your system on Linux with no loss of productivity, but the desktop stuff is bad and getting worse.
I've tried each iteration of UI paradigm they've tried since WinRT and never really had any significant problems with any of them. WinRT, UWP, WinUI, MAUI...
But then they aren't even willing to invest the time to dogfood their own products and fully replace the windows UI. Really doesn't inspire confidence.
I suspect they also made a bad bet by going so hard on blazor without putting more support behind WASM itself. Now that's stalled out with WASM's own failure to reach critical mass.
Microsoft has zero vision in the UI space. It’s crazy that there isn’t there a single, obvious solution for developing Windows applications in 2025.
I agree that it seems they’ve made some bad bets and now are bogged down supporting half a dozen different frameworks with different limitations and tradeoffs.
They keep trying to reinvent the wheel, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve ever really meaningfully improved on WPF.
At least there is Avalonia for an open source, cross platform WPF alternative. It seems like the sanest way of making desktop applications with C# currently.
That would be a first, not having significant problems.
As someone that was deeply invested into WinRT since Windows 8, and went back into distributed systems and Web after all the disappointment regarding how managemetn handled it.
Everyone on the Windows development ecosystem has had enough from the multiple reboots and tool changes, UWP never being as good as WPF, WinUI iterations even worse, the team now went radio silent, the last community call was a disaster,...
Assuming the web is not an option for whatever reason.
I did some Win32 interop recently and found it to be refreshing. It's definitely lower level and more difficult, but it will outlive all of these other paths.
Using tools like cswin32 makes this a lot more tolerable development experience from managed code.
Only thing I want to hear about lately is the next major version of Visual Studio, I feel like it will never come. I always feel like every major version has drastic improvements, and I'm starved for them.
They’re consolidating the tech with SQL Server Management Studio, last I heard. I think they mean to get the rewrite of SSMS out this fall, but I may be misremembering. A new major version of VS is probably coming, although I must say I’m pretty pleased with the current tranquility.
You can divide visual studio into 4 era's. The vs6 (we smashed all of our dev tooling together and its integrated decently) era, the vs2002/vs2003/vs2005 (we broke it all and you will like it and never speak of C++ again), vs2010 era (we fixed all of that from 2002 sorry about that), vs2017/vs2022 (it updates from the internet and takes forever to install and now does everything).
The problem is MS is unwilling to stick with anything dev wise. The whole ecos system is a littered realm of half forgotten techs that may or may not be supported anymore. Wrapped with very confusing messaging to the devs what to use.
It also solves a more subtle problem - when people install a tool globally they install latest _at that time_. But the world doesn't stand still, and things get updated. `dnx` always uses the latest available version by default (you can of course pin with `dnx <package>@<version>`) so that you never get out of date.
I haven't used C#/.NET since .NET 4 - I remember it was great, yet heavily tied into Visual Studio, and forget about using CLI for things like most other languages. It was all GUI or nothing. Insurmountable XML files.
How are things these days with .NET 10! Jesus, 10!
Dudes who use it daily, what is your favorite feature you think?
Favorite recent language feature is a big investment in C# pattern matching. It's a big feature from the functional programming world rare to see in "Enterprise" languages.
Favorite recent runtime feature is all the cool low level stuff opened up by Span<T> (and Memory<T>). It has a similarity to Rust borrowing, but well integrated into the CLR's existing type system. It has opened all sorts of performance code possibilities that is still memory-safe/type-safe with fewer needs for falling back to "unsafe" operations. This is not just exciting because it is an interesting playground if you like low-level programming, but also because it has been a performance flood lifting all boats in the .NET ecosystem. A lot of code over the last few years has gotten easy performance boosts by just recompiling (because the compilers were taught to prefer Span/Memory overloads when they get added; no change to C# or F# code, just the compiler picking a new performance path).
Definitely change for F# code, some of those Span overloads broke type inference. Also, certain APIs even removed their non-Span overloads between .NET versions, which was a straight up breaking change for every language other than C#.
Very different. That was the .NET I knew in college, .NET Core really changed the game. I personally use CLI just for EF Core (ORM) but Rider support is there so you're not tied to VS.
My fav feature is honestly how little boilerplate I need compared to Spring Boot and the syntax sugar is honestly really nice.
My favorite feature, especially considering the past of "heavily tied into Visual Studio" is the platform independent nature of (most of) "modern" dotnet. That is to say, I run Fedora on my laptop, and I do not want Windows, yet I don't feel like a second class citizen and dotnet runs well and is available from repositories that Microsoft provides for various Linux distributions (it just hit me how strange this is, for _Microsoft_ to offer official repositories for Linux operating systems...).
I also really like that its development is fairly open (it's on github).
From a more technical point of view, I think C# is a slightly better Java. A pretty nice language overall. It's not gui-or-nothing with dotnet core so it's not too difficult to create workflows for ci/cd pipelines, although the .net framework solutions we still have aren't too much harder to script: msbuild is pretty capable.
Everyone here missing some the main features of modern dotnet: cross-platform by default with the new runtime, CoreCLR (no more Mono).
Additionally, blazingly fast, especially as they continue to use stronger memory-aware primitives like Span<T> under the hood, and back that work with code in System.Numerics that continues to lean into hardware intrinsics.
C# itself is also an incredible language, much maturing since .NET 4. Things like Source Generators, record types, collection expressions... you can be _nearly_ as terse as something like python but with all the added benefit of C#'s type system (AND you get LINQ!).
People act like C# is some weird hanger-on dinosaur of a previous age of "tech" that people hang on to out of stubbornness, but IMO it's one of the most forward thinking languages today with an incredibly powerful runtime to boot.
The version numbers used to increase much more slowly. Since the .NET (modernized / cross platform) core "track" the version number increments every year.
The version increments roughly every 6 months. It's almost the exact same update cadence as NodeJS: LTS versions are even numbers released in the Fall and STS versions are odd numbers released in the Spring. STS often focuses on "bleeding edge features" and LTS often on performance and stability. (Though both are year round projects and there are bleeding edge features in an LTS and perf/stability fixes in an STS.)
It's still stuck in weird formats and monoliths. A lot of GUI-only stuff has been ported to the mega CLI, but it's still the weird Visual Studio format plus XML files that you cannot replace with a simple Makefile. You still can't just compile a bit of C# as-is, it must have the Solution, Project, Assembly etc. chain, the run-as-script feature is nice (lots of cheers when that was presented! even on the live stream), but it's specifically not designed to allow you to assemble a toolchain that works for what you need. There is only one and it has everything, no options.
The question, of course, becomes: when does that matter? For a lot of people who are in to .NET, they see that as a benefit. Look at Go through this lens, and it's similar; the go CLI is the compiler, linker, package manager etc. I suppose the biggest difference is that it doesn't prescribe solutions and projects and file formats to go with them, which enables you to put this in any existing CI, make or other system.
.NET 4 doesn't exist and was avoided on purpose. There was a .NET Framework 4, but after Framework was abandonned in favour of Core they dropped the core suffix and skipped to 5.
Well, spiritually this is the 13th(?) major version of .NET (possibly more if we count Silverlight's runtime). You missed the part when there was .NET Core 1-3 alongside the old .NET Framework 4.8., and then they skipped Core 4 and stopped supporting Framework so they could finally fix their naming scheme.
I've upgraded apps from every version since .Net Core 2.0. The upgrades always take a few hours, maybe half a day (with the exception of 2.0 to 3.0 which took a few days - many breaking changes). It's well worth a few hours per year to get the advantages of newer languages features, enhancements in Asp.Net Core, security and performance enhancements in the .Net Runtime, etc.
Is upgrading every 3 years really that bad? As far as I know, they typically aren’t removing features or causing disruptive changes in .NET versions.
They did when switching away from .NET Framework, but this was because they had to reimplement many features from scratch to work on other platforms, and certain parts got left behind.
The last few .NET updates have been pretty much effortless updates for us. These are internal web apps and not using really esoteric C# features but that probably describes a reasonably large percentage of enterprise .NET adoption.
When I need to send someone an app, I usually use .NET Framework 4.8 because I know it's already installed on every recent version of Windows. This way all I have to distribute is a single very small exe. No need to package a framework with it.
Similar feat with .NET core usually results in a 70-80MB executable.
Yea that's why I write all my programs in C using the win32 APIs. It has a lifetime even longer than .NET Framework 4.8.1! I'll never have to change or adapt to new things. /s
reminder the .net compiler is IP of microsoft and they state this clearly when you invoke it on any platform other than windows. you are merging your company with microsoft and windows if you use it.
My favorite .NET 10 feature so far is not within the .NET library itself, but `dotnet tool exec` to run C# files as scripts without a build step. This has been available in F# for a long time via `dotnet fsi`, and for C# also via the third party cs-script tool. It took a surprisingly long time to officially reach the primary .NET language!
I only really wish C# would’ve been directly integrated as an alternative scripting language in PowerShell. You may balk at the idea for causing a ton of cruft for people who don’t need it; ”a whole new scripting language!” But the thing is — PowerShell already builds upon .NET so supporting a new language is a rather small effort (relatively speaking) if it happens to be a .NET language. And C# just feels so much better for me to code in when the scripts grow in size. I’m not sure I’ll ever become friends with the implicit returns. C# has become particularly suitable for scripting with the recent developments in the language: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...
"dotnet tool exec" is not that feature; you're thinking of https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-... which they added to "dotnet run". "dotnet run my-cool-thing.cs"
"dotnet tool exec" is so you can run third party command line tools like csharpier that previously required "dotnet tool install" before you could use them. For example, in https://csharpier.com/docs/Installation you can now simply do "dotnet tool exec csharpier". This is like "npx" in the JavaScript world.
dotnet run *.cs is my favorite new feature for scripting. It has basically replaced powershell for me. It's trivial to script powerful operations now.
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Ah yes, that's the one I was thinking of. Got confused by this article.
> I only really wish C# would’ve been directly integrated as an alternative scripting language in PowerShell.
You can embed C# in PowerShell scripts, and you have been able to do so for a long time. This webpage has a couple of examples of how this can work:
https://blog.nuvotex.de/run-c-inside-powershell/
That's not "embedding C#". That's runtime loading of .NET assemblies, which every .NET language--including PowerShell--can do.
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One of many examples of C# following in F#'s footprints years later. F# deserves a higher profile in the .NET ecosystem.
F# has been a third class citizen for a long time... Last I heard the entire f# team was ~10 people. Pretty sure "find references" still doesn't work across c# and f# (if you call a c# method from f# or vise versa). That also means symbol renames don't work correctly.
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Now I'm curious if C#/.Net 10 is smart enough to ignore the shebang line. Personally, I've tended to use Deno/TS for my more advanced shell scripting... the main runtime is a single executable that works fine in user context, and dependencies can be loaded/cached at first run.
Of course, with C# as a shell script, you'd likely be limited to just in the box libraries or have to setup a project for sake of running a script, like I've had to do with Node or Python stuff.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...
"dotnet run app.cs" natively supports shebang lines and nugets. The only requirement is to make sure the .net sdk is installed on your computer.
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I've wanted this for a long time. After reading this link, and the MS release announcement, I still don't understand what a "tool" is, or how you can use `tool exec` to run a single *.cs file. Is there a straight-forward recipe anywhere for doing this targeted at absolute simpletons?
Well if you're familiar with the node ecosystem it's a corollary for npx/bunx/etc.
It is so that folks can build and run "tools" that are executed, utilizing the nuget ecosystem.
Relevant links in the dotnet docs (was just a quick google away):
* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/global-t...
* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/global-t...
It's actually a top-level doc section in the primary dotnet docs (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/).
To boil it down: you create a console app, add a couple of attributes to the solution file (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/global-t...). Packaging and publishing to nuget (if you want to share with others) is via `dotnet pack` and `dotnet nuget push` with some flags.
I do have to say it's actually very well documented.
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The docs are terrible right now (prerelease and all that), but to get started:
1. Install the dotnet sdk preview
2. Make a .CS file with top level statements.
3. dotnet run <file>
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...
> I still don't understand what a "tool" is
"A .NET tool is a special NuGet package that contains a console application. You can install a tool..."
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/global-t...
it's actually very similar to the node.js / NPM equivalent, which came first:
https://docs.npmjs.com/downloading-and-installing-packages-g...
Sorry for confusing you. I can't edit the post now. The command is dotnet run script.cs. The tool stuff is about something else unrelated; NuGet installable CLI executables.
It's great that Microsoft added this as an official feature but there has been an open-source third-party solution that does exactly the same thing for a long time: https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script
.NET was the most sane programming ecosystem that I worked in.
Great CLI, great package manager, very good stdlib, strong IDEs/Debuggers, etc.
but sadly interesting jobs like OSes, databases and compilers are way less common than in C++ world :(
I agree. The stability comes from its ecosystem though. Enterprise Software. Where things like meticulous use of Omit and Task are common place and really REALLY bad things happen if you fuck up.
But besides that, there’s a healthy gamedev community that embraced C# early and have been using it ever since. There’s C++ MFC guys that got duped into WPF and have been supporting it ever since. Winforms devs that are still trying to make a dark mode. I’ve even seen community grass roots “I need this in Silverlight” projects take hold and become one of the largest SDKs in the world. It’s cool. It’s fun. And with AOT, it’s everywhere. C# is like that cool uncle of your Father (Java) that likes to party all night but still holds a job. Maybe someday TS.Net will exist and we’ll all be singing “Back in my day”
I very much doubt about TS.Net, given the rewrite in Go decision.
.NET nowadays has a serious adoption problem, and they should spend more time talking with their own colleagues at Azure, about their use of Java, Go, Rust.
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What's Omit refer to in this context?
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Since you mention great CLI - is there a CLI tool that is free/cross platform that works like prettier ? I found https://csharpier.com/ but have never heard of anyone using it.
Also not sure how it works with linters like roslynator or stylecop ?
This is something I miss very much when coming back from TS, other languages also have better formatters. C# is very tied to editors/IDEs which is a nightmare in teams where some people use vs/vs code/rider
Csharpier is the best option available. I've been using it for 3-4 years now and had success getting it adopted at my last two companies on greenfield projects. It's not exactly an unknown tool - nearly 2k stars on Github. But a lot old school .Net companies just don't seem to have much interest in auto formatters because they've been working without them for a long time.
If you're using csharpier you don't need to use Roslynator formatters. No issue with the analyzers package. The csharpier docs have info on what StyleCop rules need to be adjusted so they can work together. Personally I don't use StyleCop anymore as it seems to be fairly dead, and I don't really feel the need for things like enforcing file layout or naming.
Edit: Also I will add that unless the landscape has changed recently, I believe csharpier is the only C# tool that has deterministic formatting good enough to enforce code formatting checks in CI.
dotnet format [0] exists and is maintained by the .NET team. It is different from Prettier in that it is much more configurable, but it gets the job done for us. It does integrate language services and can automatically apply code fixes for custom analyzers. I have not explicitly tried roslynator or stylecop, but I suspect this would work as expected.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-f...
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Hi! I use csharpier, it does the job - I included it as a preliminary check in our CI pipeline for a step of merge requests quality assessment. It is the closest tool I found, that ressembles prettier. You should definitely give it a try.
I’ve been using csharpier for almost a year now and it’s amazing. Because it’s opinionated, you don’t have the space to overthink it, you just use it.
Besides, I really like its formatting style.
csharpier is great. It is what "dotnet format" should be.
On my little enterprise bubble, the only place remaining for C and C++ is writing native libraries to be consumed by managed languages, or bindings.
The last time I wrote pure C++ applications at work, was in 2005.
Libraries still regularly.
Sometimes I feel like there ought to be a Hacker News like forum for us dinosaurs stuck in the Enterprise tarpit. Instead of talking about Elixir and AWS startup credits, we’d complain about the weather and legacy CORBA components.
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For the last few years, I’ve been developing CAM/CAE software on my job, sometimes embedded Linux.
Same experience: last time I developed software written entirely in C++ was in 2008. Nowadays, only using C++ for DLLs consumed by C#, for 2 reasons: manually vectorized SIMD for CPU bound numerical stuff, and consuming C or C++ libraries like GPU APIs, MS Media Foundation, or Eigen.
I've been using it since 2002 so you can imagine my opinion when jumping to other languages. They've been very good to steal all of the things that worked from other languages and constantly iterate on their core infrastructure and language.
I liked .NET but the performance was really bad for anything that had even reasonably latency requirements. But this was 15 years ago, so maybe it has improved. I don't remember exactly what I wanted to do but it was something like pumping some event every few milliseconds and it was basically impossible. The jitter was already larger than the interval.
Dotnet's GC has a real latency problem. Miguel de Icaza gave a nice talk on why noticeable pauses are inevitable in a stop-the-world tracing GC, proposing Swift's reference-counting GC as the viable alternative [1]. Still, there are recent developments (Satori GC) with the promise to make the worst case far more palatable (e.g. 250ms -> 5ms) [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo
[2] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/discussions/115627#discuss...
https://medium.com/@ocoanet/improving-net-disruptor-performa...
Do you know about any sizeable open source projects written in C#, other than what Microsoft has produced? I rarely come across anything written in it.
It's a curious thing, the .NET ecosystem. The overwhelming majority of it's ecosystem seems to be dominated by Microsoft first-party libraries and frameworks. 3rd party libraries and frameworks seem to either get swallowed up by Microsoft, killed, or never reach critical-mass.
Often in the .NET ecosystem, it seems there is exactly one library or framework for thing $X or $Y. Whereas in the JVM ecosystem, you have 30+ logging libraries, 87 different MVC frameworks, etc. (yes, I'm being a bit facetious, but you get the point).
I imagine .NET developers often think this is a good thing, in regard to their ecosystem. No guessing what to use, just go with the "blessed" path and don't think about it. And, to that end, there is some obvious merit to this.
However, I feel the .NET ecosystem loses out on cross-pollination of ideas. There's zero possibility Microsoft's employees just happen to make the best frameworks and libraries... there should be many web frameworks - each competing for mindshare and trying to out-innovate each other, each with their own pro's and con's, etc.
So, while .NET might be technically open source, it still feels rather like a closed source ecosystem, controlled by a single corporate entity.
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https://github.com/MonoGame/MonoGame (runs even on consoles, which is rare for open source game frameworks and engines)
https://github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
https://github.com/bitwarden/server
https://github.com/unoplatform/uno
https://github.com/files-community/Files
https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif
https://github.com/DevToys-app/DevToys
https://github.com/d2phap/ImageGlass
https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX
https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryujinx
https://sourceforge.net/projects/keepass/
https://github.com/orchardcms
https://github.com/piranhacms/piranha.core
https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS
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Can't speak for FLOSS, but I've worked on massive projects in various Banking, Govt and eLearning spaces. I've never really hurt for library support via NuGet either. It's honestly not always my first choice, but pays the bills.
I mostly just dislike a lot of the excessive use of "Enterprise Patterns" for projects that don't come close to actually needing them.
Jellyfin / Emby
A lot of the *arr tools like Sonarr
Bitwarden and Keepass
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Ryujinx, a state-of-the-art Switch 1 emulator, was open source and written in C#
Not sure what your definition of sizable is. But if it’s just physical size of repo then my language-ext project [1] is about half a million lines of code, ~7,000 stars, and ~25 million downloads.
We are out there :)
[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext
Akka.NET and AvaloniaUI are two big ones.
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It is a self-fullfilling prophecy: No big open source without motivated contributors, no contributors because of bad rap because of no big open source projects.
It is not technology what holds .NET back. It is also not politics (nearly all languages have evil overlords). It is people who hold up to statements like: "I will not touch .NET with a 10-stick-pole"
https://github.com/paintdotnet was the first one that came to mind.
Bitwarden
Unity?
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I despise working with Nuget. Whether it's a restore, managing your csproj, or publishing packages, compared to NPM it's an absolute mess.
It is the first time I see anyone praising npm.
> .NET was the most sane programming ecosystem that I worked in.
Having written libraries in .Net I fully disagree with that notion.
First insanity is figuring out what in the fuck you need to support. .Net framework or .Net standard or .Net Core or Mono (or .Net Duplo or .Net dot nes :P).
Second is the Source generators. I swear using t4 templates is the saner option. I've had cached artifacts appearing out of the fucking nowhere like unkillable zombies despite closing the Rider, clearing its cache, and killing build server.
Third is the availability of packages. In Rust and Java there are like several libs for anything (even if C bindings).
> First insanity is figuring out what in the fuck you need to support.
Since I no longer support .NET Framework, it's just .NET now.
.NET was two platforms for a while and they did a lot of weird stuff to make that work (.NET standard) but it's been one platform for many versions now so that specific difficulty can mostly be ignored.
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Most C# libraries I use are outdated, crappy and do just a little less than what I need. Also, most Rust libraries I try to use are outdated, crappy and do just a little less than what I need. Maybe what I need is niche but my experience is pretty similar in that regard.
All I want is for dotnet watch to behave in a predictable way. In .NET 9, even when using —no-hot-reload, sometimes CSS changes to components are not picked up on Blazor components.
It’s so aggravating because ASP.NET with server side Blazor components really has it all: type safety, server-side components ala Astro, fantastic ORM model, great runtime perf. But this little issue makes dev quite tedious at present: did I mistype a Tailwind class name, or did dotnet watch miss the change?
I inherited an MVC app that has a bunch of jQuery rendering crap and I would like to move to server side components - since you seem to be into Blazor Server side - have you heard of HTMX ?
What would you say would be the benefit of Blazor vs HTMX and Razor Pages for subviews ?
My experience with Microsoft UI toolkits after winforms, is that they are all janky over-engineered stuff (Silverlight/WPF/Xamarin/Maui) terrible tooling and support compared to alternatives. And Blazor using websockets makes me believe it is the same. The compile to WASM idea is a typical example of this.
So what would be the selling point of Blazor ? It feels like you are just bundling stuff into Blazor magic when you could KISS with something simple like HTMX ?
As of today (and going forward), there are two different flavors of Blazor server-side rendering. There is the original version where the component is rendered on the server and interactivity is provided via websockets. Now there is also static server-side rendering, which works very similarly to razor pages, pages/components are rendered on the server and there is no interactivity. You can then, of course, add interactivity wherever you'd need it with server-interactive or webassembly interactive sub-components.
I wouldn't necessarily say there's any benefit of Blazor over HTMX, it just depends on what you're most comfortable with and what works for you in your project. But you could architect your front-end in a similar way where you have small blazor components in your pages with interactivity.
I think Blazor is in a nice state now, where I can iterate very quickly on projects with just static server side rendering and add interactivity whenever it's needed. It gives me a very fast website, rendered on the server, and the option to add some interactivity whenever I need.
I still haven't found a use-case for the websocket Blazor Hybrid and it still smells so much like the worst mistakes of the original ASP (before .NET) and the `runat="client"` versus `runat="server"` confusions.
Blazor WASM makes some sense if Silverlight ever made sense for a project: it's a way to ship C# directly to the browser for maximal code sharing with other C# projects in a C# ecosystem. It's basically "what if Angular/React was just Razor Pages running on the browser?"
It's absolutely the opposite of KISS, it's lifting and shifting the entire .NET runtime in WASM to the client. Outside of corporate networks and packaged apps like Electron or Tauri, I'm not sure it makes any sense. But if you like writing Razor Pages and wished they ran closer to the client metal, and you can afford the bandwidth of an entire .NET application soup-to-nuts as your SPA framework, there is a sense to it.
If all you think you need is Razor Pages with HTMX that's probably all you need.
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Blazor static server side + HTMX is probably the only way to make a cost efficient and performant version of Blazor suitable for public websites. WASM is way too big and slow, Websockets take up server resources and cause problems with timeouts where the user has to refresh their screen losing all state.
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Jetbrains built some awesome tooling to support HTMX apps using razor engine and some MVC conventions. It's pretty neat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS6m37jhdqM&t=1800s
Are you using Visual Studio or another tool (vscode, vim, rider)? I found hot reload works a lot better in Visual Studio than any other IDE
That's true, but even in Visual Studio, Hot Reload breaks too often to be comfortable. It seems the intermediate .g.cs handling is a bit error prone.
Rider, but I'm on Mac, so I can't use the real VS. I run dotnet watch from a terminal separately.
> It’s so aggravating because ASP.NET with server side Blazor components really has it all
Agreed. I bailed on Blazor over the tooling experience. Editing components in VS2022 was so janky for me. Syntax highlighting and intellisense never worked correctly.
I don’t think there’s ever been any good tooling for the entire collection of ASP.NET DSLs. Be that MVC, Razor, or Blazor. Genuinely the same problems I had in VS2010 still happen in VS2022.
There’s been some changes and improvements, but I really have to ask what the editor tooling team within that team are doing.
I know there are some very difficult problems involved in parsing and formatting and highlighting bastardised mixtures of HTML, C#, and JavaScript all in the same file but if anything I think that perhaps suggests it was a bad idea to begin with.
Consider the tooling for desktop and mobile apps with XAML (WPF, Avalonia) or even WinForms - they all have code behind support.
Meaning there is no need (or ability) to mix all three in the same file.
We have had great success with Maui Blazor Hybrid. Each release hot reload gets better with fewer edge cases. I also found that having a separate .cs file instead of in one file helps with highlighing and intellisense.
I hear a lot of complaints about dotnet watch, but my experience doesn't match. I just use it from the terminal (instead of running it from an IDE) and it mostly just works.
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Say more?
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Might be worth viewing the full list of changes in the blog post that the article links to:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-10-preview-6/
Also, if you want to see the full list of changes in .NET 10 (not just the latest preview), you can find it here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotn...
All these changes, yet still no satisfactory UI framework.
Still no migration path from WinForms to something modern.
I love .NET but if you're taking on an older desktop app that is still using VB.NET and WinForms it feels like Microsoft have decided to let you circle the drain with no supported way forward into MAUI or whatever stupid XAML UI they decided is the solution these days.
On a server, .NET is fantastic and it's entirely possible to build and debug your system on Linux with no loss of productivity, but the desktop stuff is bad and getting worse.
I've tried each iteration of UI paradigm they've tried since WinRT and never really had any significant problems with any of them. WinRT, UWP, WinUI, MAUI...
But then they aren't even willing to invest the time to dogfood their own products and fully replace the windows UI. Really doesn't inspire confidence.
I suspect they also made a bad bet by going so hard on blazor without putting more support behind WASM itself. Now that's stalled out with WASM's own failure to reach critical mass.
Microsoft has zero vision in the UI space. It’s crazy that there isn’t there a single, obvious solution for developing Windows applications in 2025.
I agree that it seems they’ve made some bad bets and now are bogged down supporting half a dozen different frameworks with different limitations and tradeoffs.
They keep trying to reinvent the wheel, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve ever really meaningfully improved on WPF.
At least there is Avalonia for an open source, cross platform WPF alternative. It seems like the sanest way of making desktop applications with C# currently.
That would be a first, not having significant problems.
As someone that was deeply invested into WinRT since Windows 8, and went back into distributed systems and Web after all the disappointment regarding how managemetn handled it.
Everyone on the Windows development ecosystem has had enough from the multiple reboots and tool changes, UWP never being as good as WPF, WinUI iterations even worse, the team now went radio silent, the last community call was a disaster,...
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You know, I agree but thinking about it, is it really a fair ask? What's the analog in Java, Go, Rust, etc?
Is Swing the competition? It feels like mobile and web stacks have really sucked the air out of the room.
Assuming the web is not an option for whatever reason.
I did some Win32 interop recently and found it to be refreshing. It's definitely lower level and more difficult, but it will outlive all of these other paths.
Using tools like cswin32 makes this a lot more tolerable development experience from managed code.
Only thing I want to hear about lately is the next major version of Visual Studio, I feel like it will never come. I always feel like every major version has drastic improvements, and I'm starved for them.
They’re consolidating the tech with SQL Server Management Studio, last I heard. I think they mean to get the rewrite of SSMS out this fall, but I may be misremembering. A new major version of VS is probably coming, although I must say I’m pretty pleased with the current tranquility.
This thing has barely changed in the ~30 years I've been using it. There's definitely room for some more improvements.
You can divide visual studio into 4 era's. The vs6 (we smashed all of our dev tooling together and its integrated decently) era, the vs2002/vs2003/vs2005 (we broke it all and you will like it and never speak of C++ again), vs2010 era (we fixed all of that from 2002 sorry about that), vs2017/vs2022 (it updates from the internet and takes forever to install and now does everything).
The problem is MS is unwilling to stick with anything dev wise. The whole ecos system is a littered realm of half forgotten techs that may or may not be supported anymore. Wrapped with very confusing messaging to the devs what to use.
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Maybe they will use this chance to finally switch it away from the .NET Framework to the modern dotnet runtime with its many years optimizations.
My guess is we'll know soon. Maybe at VS Live next week?
> "Stay tuned for more details later this summer about what's coming next for Visual Studio..."
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022...
Just buy a Rider license. Never looked back.
Have you tried Rider?
Yes, it was a bit rough originally, but they've managed to make it better, sadly some employers do not want to buy into JetBrains.
They should fix github issues and write in-depth tutorials, instead of AI features or minimal API.
I adore minimal API and when paired with Carter it’s just gorgeous.
https://github.com/CarterCommunity/Carter
My current absolute favorite is .NET Aspire. Build distributed applications with an OTEL support dashboard - up and running in minutes.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/dotnet/aspire/whats-new/do...
Only gap in Aspire is deployment (k8s) tooling which is on the way.
"they" are more than one person and can do more than one thing at a time
Looking forward to playing with 'dotnet run app.cs' instead of PowerShell.
It'll probably not be really useful until multiple files support arrives in .NET 11: https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/48174
One-shot execution looks exciting, what problems does it solve? Less cluttering in the environment?
Scripting, CLI tools ...
It also solves a more subtle problem - when people install a tool globally they install latest _at that time_. But the world doesn't stand still, and things get updated. `dnx` always uses the latest available version by default (you can of course pin with `dnx <package>@<version>`) so that you never get out of date.
I haven't used C#/.NET since .NET 4 - I remember it was great, yet heavily tied into Visual Studio, and forget about using CLI for things like most other languages. It was all GUI or nothing. Insurmountable XML files.
How are things these days with .NET 10! Jesus, 10!
Dudes who use it daily, what is your favorite feature you think?
Favorite recent language feature is a big investment in C# pattern matching. It's a big feature from the functional programming world rare to see in "Enterprise" languages.
Favorite recent runtime feature is all the cool low level stuff opened up by Span<T> (and Memory<T>). It has a similarity to Rust borrowing, but well integrated into the CLR's existing type system. It has opened all sorts of performance code possibilities that is still memory-safe/type-safe with fewer needs for falling back to "unsafe" operations. This is not just exciting because it is an interesting playground if you like low-level programming, but also because it has been a performance flood lifting all boats in the .NET ecosystem. A lot of code over the last few years has gotten easy performance boosts by just recompiling (because the compilers were taught to prefer Span/Memory overloads when they get added; no change to C# or F# code, just the compiler picking a new performance path).
Definitely change for F# code, some of those Span overloads broke type inference. Also, certain APIs even removed their non-Span overloads between .NET versions, which was a straight up breaking change for every language other than C#.
The biggest change for me has been the ability to deploy my web sites to a Linux box instead of having to deal with IIS.
WinForms app development hasn't changed one bit in 25 years.
If you code in C# then they've added some nice new language features every year to make your code a little tidier.
And the whole framework is totally open source now, which is a bonus.
There's nothing I'm really asking for. It does pretty much everything I need these days.
Very different. That was the .NET I knew in college, .NET Core really changed the game. I personally use CLI just for EF Core (ORM) but Rider support is there so you're not tied to VS.
My fav feature is honestly how little boilerplate I need compared to Spring Boot and the syntax sugar is honestly really nice.
My favorite feature, especially considering the past of "heavily tied into Visual Studio" is the platform independent nature of (most of) "modern" dotnet. That is to say, I run Fedora on my laptop, and I do not want Windows, yet I don't feel like a second class citizen and dotnet runs well and is available from repositories that Microsoft provides for various Linux distributions (it just hit me how strange this is, for _Microsoft_ to offer official repositories for Linux operating systems...).
I also really like that its development is fairly open (it's on github). From a more technical point of view, I think C# is a slightly better Java. A pretty nice language overall. It's not gui-or-nothing with dotnet core so it's not too difficult to create workflows for ci/cd pipelines, although the .net framework solutions we still have aren't too much harder to script: msbuild is pretty capable.
Everyone here missing some the main features of modern dotnet: cross-platform by default with the new runtime, CoreCLR (no more Mono).
Additionally, blazingly fast, especially as they continue to use stronger memory-aware primitives like Span<T> under the hood, and back that work with code in System.Numerics that continues to lean into hardware intrinsics.
C# itself is also an incredible language, much maturing since .NET 4. Things like Source Generators, record types, collection expressions... you can be _nearly_ as terse as something like python but with all the added benefit of C#'s type system (AND you get LINQ!).
People act like C# is some weird hanger-on dinosaur of a previous age of "tech" that people hang on to out of stubbornness, but IMO it's one of the most forward thinking languages today with an incredibly powerful runtime to boot.
The version numbers used to increase much more slowly. Since the .NET (modernized / cross platform) core "track" the version number increments every year.
The version increments roughly every 6 months. It's almost the exact same update cadence as NodeJS: LTS versions are even numbers released in the Fall and STS versions are odd numbers released in the Spring. STS often focuses on "bleeding edge features" and LTS often on performance and stability. (Though both are year round projects and there are bleeding edge features in an LTS and perf/stability fixes in an STS.)
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It's still stuck in weird formats and monoliths. A lot of GUI-only stuff has been ported to the mega CLI, but it's still the weird Visual Studio format plus XML files that you cannot replace with a simple Makefile. You still can't just compile a bit of C# as-is, it must have the Solution, Project, Assembly etc. chain, the run-as-script feature is nice (lots of cheers when that was presented! even on the live stream), but it's specifically not designed to allow you to assemble a toolchain that works for what you need. There is only one and it has everything, no options.
The question, of course, becomes: when does that matter? For a lot of people who are in to .NET, they see that as a benefit. Look at Go through this lens, and it's similar; the go CLI is the compiler, linker, package manager etc. I suppose the biggest difference is that it doesn't prescribe solutions and projects and file formats to go with them, which enables you to put this in any existing CI, make or other system.
> it's still the weird Visual Studio format
.NET 9 (and VS2022) added support for the SLNX replacement format to replace the old weird solution format:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/new-simpler-solu...
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.NET 4 doesn't exist and was avoided on purpose. There was a .NET Framework 4, but after Framework was abandonned in favour of Core they dropped the core suffix and skipped to 5.
> NET 10! Jesus, 10!
Well, spiritually this is the 13th(?) major version of .NET (possibly more if we count Silverlight's runtime). You missed the part when there was .NET Core 1-3 alongside the old .NET Framework 4.8., and then they skipped Core 4 and stopped supporting Framework so they could finally fix their naming scheme.
I prefer .Net Framework 4.8 Longer lifetime than any .Net version.
I've upgraded apps from every version since .Net Core 2.0. The upgrades always take a few hours, maybe half a day (with the exception of 2.0 to 3.0 which took a few days - many breaking changes). It's well worth a few hours per year to get the advantages of newer languages features, enhancements in Asp.Net Core, security and performance enhancements in the .Net Runtime, etc.
Is upgrading every 3 years really that bad? As far as I know, they typically aren’t removing features or causing disruptive changes in .NET versions.
They did when switching away from .NET Framework, but this was because they had to reimplement many features from scratch to work on other platforms, and certain parts got left behind.
The last few .NET updates have been pretty much effortless updates for us. These are internal web apps and not using really esoteric C# features but that probably describes a reasonably large percentage of enterprise .NET adoption.
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.NET LTS is on a 2-year cycle, isn't it?
I've worked in .NET shops with very niche WPF/WinForms applications where customers were years behind with our software/major .NET Framework releases.
I don't think it's a technical challenge, more a cultural one.
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When I need to send someone an app, I usually use .NET Framework 4.8 because I know it's already installed on every recent version of Windows. This way all I have to distribute is a single very small exe. No need to package a framework with it.
Similar feat with .NET core usually results in a 70-80MB executable.
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With all the dependencies that maybe getting an update to the new .Net version, yes.
Yea that's why I write all my programs in C using the win32 APIs. It has a lifetime even longer than .NET Framework 4.8.1! I'll never have to change or adapt to new things. /s
I change things if it’s necessary, not for the sake of using the newest version.
Now I have to update software and all its dependencies without a real benefit.
It’s equivalent of buying a new PC because MS tries to force Windows 11.
Lets waste lots of time and resources for nothing.
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reminder the .net compiler is IP of microsoft and they state this clearly when you invoke it on any platform other than windows. you are merging your company with microsoft and windows if you use it.
MIT license: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
> you are merging your company with microsoft and windows if you use it
That's not how that works. Nothing about the .NET license entitles Microsoft to what you make with the tooling.
It is fully open source so... who cares?