Comment by farlight
8 hours ago
I've been using .NET almost exclusively on Linux since it was called .NET Core 2.0, and development platforms other than Windows do feel like second class citizens. Any time you venture into anything remotely advanced, the tooling is usually Windows only.
"Everything" expects you to use MSSQL, even if today there's ok official support for PostgreSQL and SQLite. Most "thought leaders" of various sorts are on Windows and expect you to use it. This pervades throughout the ecosystem.
Can't see this ever changing as it's not in MS' interest to turn other operating systems into good .NET development platforms.
I do all my dev in .NET on a mac, using Postgres and Sqlite only, so I don't relate to your experience at all. It's dead simple for me and I'm not even that good of a developer.
I can't even remember the last time I used MSSQL with .NET. I'm embarrassed that I worked on projects now that were paying huge sums for licenses when .NET works so absolutely well with every other DB.
These days I just use EF with Sqlite on 99% of my projects.
I used .NET for many years with Postgres on a huge project. Honestly, I don't know what you mean. Can you break down "Everything" a little. What is it that expects MSSQL? Who are the thought leaders pushing it?
I'd say Microsoft's revenue related push with .NET these days is to try to subtly nudge you into Azure (where MSSQL is rare and Windows is virtually non-existent). But, I also think they know they will kill .NET if they go overboard with it as the competition is strong.
I'm sure you know more about this than me, but EF works fine with SQLite for a project I work on. There are limitations, but I think there's a difference between the idea of EF deliberately not implementing some features for SQLite and SQLite itself not having support for some EF features (which is the reality I'm familiar with).
SQL Server is the flagship database project on the Microsoft side and that team surely has some imperative to facilitate the EF vision. It simply must be less of a priority for the PostgreSQL and SQLite maintainers to do so. Is that really a valid dig on the .net ecosystem, though?
I think for most projects, add an ORM only after you start getting really annoyed and understand what you are trading.
Incidentally, I'm seriously considering dropping EF. The ability to apply migrations is nice. I find the means of authoring them to be arcane and capricious. Not having to write every simple query is nice, but it gets really hard to do complex or high performance stuff. After a decade of using this thing, I find myself fighting the Entity tracker more and more and now I'm seriously questioning if it's really all worth it.
I use EF now - but only for the string interpolation in Database.SqlQuery and Database.ExecuteSql. We don't use POCOs but instead use XML and JSON with Linq.
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