.NET 10 Preview 6 brings JIT improvements, one-shot tool execution

infoworld.com

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180 points

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breve

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6 days ago

223 comments

jug ・ 2 days ago

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...

electroly ・ 2 days ago

"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.
- Salgat ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  SeriousM ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  I guess LinqPad will lose some users to this feature.
  
  teh_klev ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  This isn't LinqPad's selling point. All that dotnet run *.cs has done is remove the need to have a project file for each "script" you write.
  LinqPad maybe has this feature but it's selling point is as a scratch pad to experiment with working with data and general futzing around.
  
  Salgat ・ 2 days ago
  
  The .NET team said they're working on VS Code integration. LinqPad still has some unique features (mostly database related), but at least for me, VS Code + dotnet run will be sufficient for my needs. Worst case, I can just throw a breakpoint on my database IQueryable result.
- jug ・ 2 days ago
  
  Ah yes, that's the one I was thinking of. Got confused by this article.
ZenoArrow ・ 2 days ago

> 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/
- moron4hire ・ 2 days ago
  
  That's not "embedding C#". That's runtime loading of .NET assemblies, which every .NET language--including PowerShell--can do.
  
  ZenoArrow ・ a day ago
  
  It is embedding C#, if it was embedding assemblies it would be embedding compiled code. It's no different from inlining assembly in C.
munchler ・ 2 days ago

One of many examples of C# following in F#'s footprints years later. F# deserves a higher profile in the .NET ecosystem.
- eyegor ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  nickpeterson ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  I agree, but somewhat paradoxically, F#’s lack of new features kind of becomes a feature. Have you seen the number of C# features added in the last 5-10 years? It’s crazy
  
  pshirshov ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Half-baked adhoc features which didn't bring the language closer to Scala.
  Still no HKTs and typeclasses, call-site expansion can only be simulated with partials and text-level code generation, etc, etc.
  
  athrun ・ 2 days ago
  
  Not bringing the language closer to Scala is a feature, not a bug though.
  
  phillipcarter ・ a day ago
  
  The F# team is smaller than 10 people, always has been.
  ~10 people is the size of the C# and VB language design and compiler team. The IDE side of things for C# and VB is about another 20+ people depending on how you count, although they also build and own infrastructure that (a) the F# team sits atop, and (b) is used by other languages in Visual Studio and is used in VS Code.
  The #1 thing that people always end up surprised by is just how small and effective these teams are.
tracker1 ・ 2 days ago

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.
- Salgat ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  tracker1 ・ a day ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  I'm guessing, however that using nuget packages means having at least a .csproj file near your .cs file with the packages defined. And downloading the packages, compiling to a space under the .csproj path, similar to a node_modules directory (bin and obj for .Net).
  What I like about Deno, is the packages are downloaded/cached to a shared location not next to your script, and you don't need additional files configured. At least for shell scripts.
  I'm glad shebang works, that will actually help with some process checking I'm wanting to do from CLI without launching my entire services around it.
  
  electroly ・ a day ago
  
  The second link in the post you replied to explains how to use NuGet packages without using a .csproj file. You are not limited to in-the-box libraries. Not having a .csproj is the whole point of this feature; everything in this blog post is talking about things you can now do without a .csproj file.
  Repeating the link again here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...
recursive ・ 2 days ago

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?
- banashark ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  recursive ・ 2 days ago
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  Sorry for being unclear. Using tools isn't my goal. I want to run a single *.cs file from the console. It may be possible to achieve this using tools, but I don't know how. I did read the resources I could find, and didn't find any information about this.
  
  banashark ・ 2 days ago
  
  Ah rereading your original comment that makes sense.
  I found the announcement page here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...
  And here are the docs for “dotnet run” https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-r...
  You’re right that it’s missing this new functionality. The blog post has some details to get started, but I’m guessing that a docs link or section is missing for that.
  Dotnet covers quite a bit so the docs are accordingly larger than other projects that have a smaller scope. I will say though that while hit or miss, on average I’ve enjoyed their docs more than the average project.
- easton ・ 2 days ago
  
  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-...
- jug ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- SideburnsOfDoom ・ a day ago
  
  > 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...
xps ・ 2 days ago

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

tester756 ・ 2 days ago

.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 :(

reactordev ・ 2 days ago

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”
- pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  thewebguyd ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 22 more
  
  > .NET nowadays has a serious adoption problem
  It's seriously going to make people question the future of the platform. Look at Microsoft's actions, not their words.
  TS Compiler: Go New TUI Editor: Rust Winget: C++ (this would have been a great candidate for .NET)
  At least PowerToys is C#.
  .NET is great, but why isn't it good enough for Microsoft? The company that historically has had such a strong culture of dogfooding.
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 11 more
  
  The issue was in the beginning they didn’t think interop with C/C++ was value add. People complained and they added “Managed C++” which unfortunately influenced C++03’s design a lot. It wasn’t until C++11 that Microsoft gave up. You couldn’t effectively interop with C++ without writing a managed C++ wrapper, which only worked on windows. They added support for P/Invoke to aid in Win32 calls (shell.dll, user32.dll) as a simple fix and we went nuts for it. Wrote wrappers using P/Invoke and a config map nightmare of which dll’s, or dylib’s, or so’s, you needed to get the form to show.
  Fast forward to today… Rust can interop with C natively. Go can as well, though you’re bringing your luggage with you with CGO. .Net hasn’t ever really had that kind of focus. For one, IL, two, Microsoft saw the platform as a cash cow, three, ecosystem lock in allowed a thriving “MVP” contractor community.
  
  jaydcarlson ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  You're clobbering together a bunch of different stuff and not making a ton of sense. C and C++ are very different languages, and that's especially true when doing interop with them from other languages.
  For C-based libraries, P/invoking is trivial in C# and has been around forever. And it's cross-platform, working identically on Linux and macOS. I have no idea how you can say ".Net hasn’t ever really had that kind of focus" when it's been a core part of .NET from the start, and .NET relies on P/Invoke to do everything. Go look at all the DllImport() statements in the .NET reference source. Rust FFI is nearly identical in implementation to C#. Go has a slightly different implementation with the CGO module, but whatever, it's close enough. Just step back and remember that, in general, calling into C code is trivial in every language, since it has to be: all these languages will eventually have to hit libc / user32.dll / whatever.
  C++ is a totally different story. You can't work with C++ libraries with P/Invoke, that's true... But you also can't work with C++ libraries using Rust or Go, either. Nor Python, Java, Javascript, or really any other popular cross-platform language.
  C++ dynamic libraries are really challenging to call into for a variety of reasons. Virtual functions, multiple inheritance, RTTI, name-mangling, struct/class layout, vtable placement, ABI differences, runtimes, etc all make calling into precompiled C++ libraries a nightmare.
  In fact, the only way I know of working with pre-compiled C++ libraries is with languages that target specific operating system / compiler collections. E.g., Objective-C++/Swift from Apple, and C++/CLI from Microsoft. These are obviously not cross-platform solutions, since they depend on knowing the exact compiler configuration used to build those libraries in the first place.
  For every other language, you either need to manually build C shim libs that you can call into using the C-based approach above, or if you have access to the C++ source code, creating wrappers around it and building it into a module (for example, using pybind11 in Python).
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  The only reason is name mangling. You can disable this or export declspec it and keep the C-like signature. Painstakingly recreate the API in C#, using P/Invoke, and hope for the best. It wasn’t until late 2015 that we got codegen to “automate” this, or roll your own.
  My perspective is from a first adopter, not an insider, 24 years ago, so I can’t speak to motive but as a customer, it felt exactly as I described. The documentation around P/Invoke was lax, you were shoved “Managed C++” down your throat by your rep, and any dream of going cross platform died in that meeting room until Miguel De Icaza did something about it.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  It certainly is not, it is quite common to use templates directly or indirectly via the C++ standard library, and P/Invoke cannot handle those.
  Also during .NET 1.0 days, Microsoft had a Website where you could paste any well known Win32 API or related SDK, and it would spit the annotations.
  What was never as good in .NET as it was in VB 6 and still is in Delphi and C++ Builder to this day, was creating and consuming COM, which is kind of annonying given how much Windows team loves it.
  At least it isn't as bad as the multiple reboots in C++, which I will keep asserting that from all of those, MFC still has the best tooling to handle COM.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 4 more
  
  You are jumping over a few facts there.
  P/Invoke was born as J/Direct on J++, it became P/Invoke after the lawsuit, and Cool project turned into C#.
  Managed C++ Extensions in .NET 1.0 got replaced by C++/CLI on .NET 2.0, it was a .NET Core 3.1 milestone to support it, and has recently been updated up to C++20, minus modules.
  Still heavily used among .NET community on Windows.
  Meanwhile the native C++/CX and C++/WinRT, both failed their adoption efforts.
  
  malkia ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  I only wish if C++/CLI worked on other platforms...
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  Same here, for those of us comfortable on C++ land, it is much easier way to do integration with native libraries, than getting P/Invoke right.
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  
  My memory is fragmented in my older age.
  
  lowleveldesign ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  Interestingly, the Rust windows crate is generated from an MSIL assembly. And same metadata might be used to generate C# bindings thanks to cswin32 [1] project. The meta-assembly generation (Win32 metadata project) is based on clangsharp and it's fairly straightforward to generate interop code for native Windows libraries. Some time ago I described this process on my blog for the detours library [2]
  [1] https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32
  [2] https://lowleveldesign.org/2023/11/23/generating-c-bindings-...
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  
  The point is why is another language generating anything for C#?
  
  contextfree ・ 2 days ago
  
  Yes, and this approach is an extension of the one taken with WinRT metadata which is also ".NET assembly" based.
  
  contextfree ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 7 more
  
  Windows and Office never adopted .NET for client code in the first place except for the Longhorn period in the mid-00s, which burned them and put them off it. If that didn't stop .NET in the two decades between then and now, I'm not sure why it would today. Actually, Windows is just now starting to adopt C# now that AOT is supported (I think the new native Copilot app is C#).
  
  Kwpolska ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 6 more
  
  Many Windows Server admin tools (such as Server Manager or Virtual Machine Connection) and MMC snap-ins (e.g. Event Viewer, Hyper-V Manager) are written in .NET Framework 4. PowerShell is .NET Framework 4. Everyone’s favorite bloated IDE (Visual Studio) is .NET Framework 4 as well.
  In the Office land, Excel’s Power Query is .NET Framework 4.
  Adopting the modern .NET is probably harder due to its lifecycle.
  
  jamesfinlayson ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Calculator is C# as well (though apparently that's somewhat recent: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/pull/1598).
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  Porting to C# was a community effort after it went open source, it was originally C++/CX.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  Powershell is .NET Core since version 6, the .NET Framework one is Powershell 5.1.
  Yeah, Microsoft themselves have issue moving away from .NET Framework.
  You can add SQL Server CLR, Dynamics, Sharepoint on prem, to the list.
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  OMG could you imagine writing MMC snap-ins using some sort of plugin declspec import bs in C++? .Net and reflection with Assembly.Load saves so much time and effort to build modular “ship it now, deliver features later, extend it if we fall behind” apps. Not that those are good things, it just means you can defer until your MS PM gets the budget to fill those backfill positions that have been open for 12 months because the hiring bar is astrophysics
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  I can, because due to Windows team love for COM and C++, many extension points require doing exactly that.
  Want to extend the context menu actions, or add new thumbnail capabilities for a recent file format?
  It is exactly that.
  Even with WinRT Runtime Components, they were doing in a way that some APIs were only surfaced when using the components from C++.
  Quite a different approach from OS / language teams at Apple and Google, where productivity with better languages has a priority no matter what.
  
  adabyron ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  Anders Hejlsberg, a main architect on C# & TS, stated somewhere that they re-wrote the TS Compiler in Go because the syntax was the closest to how it was originally written and allowed re-writing to be easiest. He has a great write up of it somewhere on GitHub.
  Microsoft is an insanely huge company. There teams seem to be able to use whatever works best for the project/team.
  The old XKCD comic of org charts in big tech shows Microsoft as a bunch of people aiming guns at each other for a reason. They'll have 5 teams making 5 competing products sometimes. That's the culture I'm aware of. I'm not aware of the dogfooding culture you are suggesting.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Yeah, and then at BUILD 2025 session, he ended up explaining how they had to rewrite all the data structures, due to the less capable type system from Go versus Typescript.
  So the gain isn't as much as what is being sold.
  Meanwhile Azure has no issues using AI based translation to port C++ projects into Rust, which they could have done in a similar way to port into C#.
  Also, Go has a less capable tooling as C# for WebAssembly, due to Blazor efforts, the team has invested quite a lot into it.
  It remains questionable what will they do for the in browser playgrounds and editors use cases.
  
  reactordev ・ a day ago
  
  Exactly. They chose Golang because they wanted to, not because of any technical limitation. Could have been C#, or Rust…
  
  9cb14c1ec0 ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Not sure I agree on the adoption problem. A few medium sized client projects are nothing compared to the massive internal .NET codebases Microsoft has that run some of their largest services.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  .NET team members have acknowledged this on podcast interviews, .NET Rocks, Nick Chapsas, The Unhadled Exception, among possibly others.
  
  mathverse ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 4 more
  
  I would not touch C# unless you are already using it. Microsoft proves over and over it cannot be trusted in what they say. Watch what they do:
  - basically dont use ant UI framework they say is the future and they are not using themselves - be vary of the future of some of it stuff like C#
  
  adabyron ・ 2 days ago
  
  C# has been around a long enough time and Microsoft's teams over that time have done a pretty good job making upgrading each version easy.
  As long as the current leadership in the C# & .NET teams remain, it's a very safe language and framework to use. They also deserve huge kudos to API & performance improvements the past decade since moving on from .NET Framework 4.x, which still runs fine.
  They also have a lot of internal & external users using it.
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  
  Oh I learned this the hard way. Managed DirectX, XNA, Creators Club, Windows Store, shared profit motive, fair business practices, Project Natal/Kinect, Azure, and finally… .Net. Yup, Microsoft loves developers… loves their subscriptions.
  
  undefined ・ 2 days ago
  
  [deleted]
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  I know, so sad, could have been a great opportunity.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  Just like every CNCF project that Azure contributes to, written in Go or Rust, which could have been great carrots to further .NET's adoption.
  
  cogman10 ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 8 more
  
  I blame historic microsoft for their anti-oss stance. It kneecapped the .net ecosystem for over a decade and created an attitude of "if it isn't in .NET, I won't use it".
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  That has certainly played a role, however that is common to Windows development culture in general.
  The 3x "Developers !" meme isn't for nothing, Microsoft just like Apple (and NeXT), always a full stack development experience story.
  Everything that one needs is there on the full Visual Studio Professional, and then there was the ecosystem of small indie developers and MS Partners building on top of that.
  That is quite different from UNIX FOSS culture, and has also been a friction point to those that went Apple without understanding that also have that on their DNA, regardless of OS X foundations.
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 6 more
  
  I agree as well. The hostile attitude towards OSS under Ballmer led to this. Nadella had the correct approach and a year later, started repairing those bridges, joining the Linux Foundation.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 5 more
  
  Many things under Satya also feel like good old Microsoft, like lack of GUI frameworks for GNU/Linux, killing VS4Mac after the rewrite, dotnet watch drama, profiling tools being VS only,...
  
  runevault ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  MAUI not supporting Linux feels like such a huge whiff. It is clearly possible to get at least decent cross platform support that includes linux in .net considering Avalonia exists.
  
  nic547 ・ 2 days ago
  
  MAUI is supposed to use native ui components, AvaloniaUI just uses Skia. I think going with a non-native approach would kinda make Linux a clear second class platform, especially with all the native features that need to be rebuilt?
  Is there any multiplatform ui framework that's actually "native" for all the different linux ui toolkits?
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  VS4Mac deserved to die, that was Mono Code aka Xamarin and it was terrible. No offense to Miguel, mono is amazing, but the IDE they made was horrid.
  Microsoft was asleep at the wheel the last decade of Ballmer, leaning too heavily on their Xbox Studios and Enterprise Cloud to care about desktops. They gladly let Mac take office share as “no enterprise software developer would ever choose a Mac”. Those famous Mac vs PC ads.
  The GUI development story has plagued us for a long time. No one wants to take on the challenge of a unified user interface spec. Why? Because it will always be wrong - ever changing - and a giant suck of corporate resources.
  It’s better to let each team think of their own way of doing things. Then, they can choose the best of them and release them as frameworks (WPF) only to be abandoned by the next regime change.
  MAUI, UWA, Metro, WPF, all an attempt to save what effort they have made. Ultimately, everyone loves their Electron apps, so HTML has become to new UI paradigm. They move too slowly. Convinced “they know better than you” and will spend the next 5 years hyping up the next XML abomination.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  No it wasn't any longer, that is why the rewrite took place.
  I rather use XAML, if given the choice.
- rictic ・ 2 days ago
  
  What's Omit refer to in this context?
  
  reactordev ・ 2 days ago
  
  The 14,000~ instances of T? or _
rafaelmn ・ 2 days ago

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
- Merad ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- Cu3PO42 ・ 2 days ago
  
  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...
  
  jswny ・ 2 days ago
  
  The problem is that dotnet format is horribly slow. So much so that it's only useful as a precommit hook
  
  rafaelmn ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  > It is different from Prettier in that it is much more configurable
  I only tried it briefly but found it was waaay to lenient with the amount of variance in style it left unchanged (eg line breaks for function parameters) - can it get configured to produce consistent formatting like prettier ?
  
  eterm ・ 2 days ago
  
  I think there are also a lot of default rules which aren't enforced until they're bumped up in severity in the .editorconfig.
  Also it can hook into roslyn analyzers, so if you want a more opinionated analyzer then stylecop analyzers ( https://github.com/DotNetAnalyzers/StyleCopAnalyzers) would be an option, although I haven't used it myself for a long time.
  
  Cu3PO42 ・ 2 days ago
  
  It can be configured to be much more aggressive with formatting, but I'm not certain if you can force it to produce the exact same output for any possible whitespace in the input.
  
  malkia ・ 2 days ago
  
  I was not able to use (recent) dotnet-format as standalone .exe tool, also it only worked if inside an actual project with .sln/.slnx file and all that. I could not instruct it to work on single file.
- undefined ・ 2 days ago
  
  [deleted]
- mguijarr ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- siws ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- edtech_dev ・ 2 days ago
  
  csharpier is great. It is what "dotnet format" should be.
pjmlp ・ 2 days ago

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.
- Const-me ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- jiggawatts ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  Indeed, it could be interesting.
  What do you mean by CORBA, isn't that the cool new shiny WebAssembly components? :)
radicalbyte ・ 2 days ago

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.
atombender ・ 2 days ago

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.
- Alupis ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  cogman10 ・ 2 days ago
  
  That because that's the environment MS nurtured for over a decade. They were openly hostile to things like nuget up until like 2016 or so.
  They purposefully made it painful to venture out of the MS ecosystem.
  
  tester756 ・ a day ago
  
  >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.
  Supply chain security is important thing, especially after last years
  You go with Microsoft's libraries and you don't have to care that much about some random developer receiving 50k USD for their GH account
  
  legulere ・ 2 days ago
  
  There are several logging libraries for .net as well, microsoft even lists them: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/extensions/log...
  Libraries getting swallowed up is not so bad as it sounds. For instance for web frameworks there was a phase of experimentation with projects like Nancy that inspired changes for asp.net core. There is still alternatives like fast endpoints.
  Also you have things happening like integrated system.text.json replacing newtonsoft.json that over time took on some cruft.
  
  75345d4c ・ 2 days ago
  
  Why would anyone make a .NET open source library when Microsoft is quick to squash anything that is actually useful with their own open source implementation?
  Microsoft still has some lessons to learn about fostering an active open source ecosystem -- of course, unless they are intentionally suppressing it in .NET.
  
  mattmanser ・ 2 days ago
  
  It's weird you using logging as there used to be 3/4 different libraries people used (nlog, log4net, elmah, another one I forget?).
  Then serilog came out and pretty much everyone switched to that in a very short period.
- zigzag312 ・ 2 days ago
  
  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
  
  vizzier ・ 2 days ago
  
  https://github.com/quozd/awesome-dotnet
  
  jayd16 ・ 2 days ago
  
  The FFXIV extension/mod tool is a fun example.
  https://github.com/goatcorp/Dalamud
  
  HeliumHydride ・ 2 days ago
  
  https://github.com/SM64-TAS-ABC/STROOP
- tracker1 ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- 369548684892826 ・ 2 days ago
  
  Jellyfin / Emby
  A lot of the *arr tools like Sonarr
  Bitwarden and Keepass
  
  majora2007 ・ 2 days ago
  
  Kavita (self hosting for books/comics)
- orphea ・ 2 days ago
  
  Ryujinx, a state-of-the-art Switch 1 emulator, was open source and written in C#
- louthy ・ 2 days ago
  
  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
- oaiey ・ 2 days ago
  
  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"
- Nelkins ・ 2 days ago
  
  Akka.NET and AvaloniaUI are two big ones.
  
  edtech_dev ・ 2 days ago
  
  I'll add Orchard CMS to this list. Also a lot of the seven seas software.
- undefined ・ 2 days ago
  
  [deleted]
- jamesfinlayson ・ 2 days ago
  
  https://github.com/paintdotnet was the first one that came to mind.
- legulere ・ 2 days ago
  
  Bitwarden
- whoamii ・ 2 days ago
  
  Unity?
  
  atombender ・ 2 days ago
  
  Is Unity open source?
undefined ・ 2 days ago

[deleted]
rowanG077 ・ 2 days ago

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.
- perennialmind ・ a day ago
  
  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...
- bob1029 ・ a day ago
  
  https://medium.com/@ocoanet/improving-net-disruptor-performa...
radicalriddler ・ 2 days ago

I despise working with Nuget. Whether it's a restore, managing your csproj, or publishing packages, compared to NPM it's an absolute mess.
- pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  It is the first time I see anyone praising npm.
Ygg2 ・ 2 days ago

> .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).
- wvenable ・ 2 days ago
  
  > 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.
  
  Ygg2 ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Easy to say, but it poiets to ecosystem fracture. But I've been getting requests to support really weird and outlandish versions. Stuff like Mono and .Net 4.56
  
  wvenable ・ a day ago
  
  Microsoft managed a smoother transition than Python 2.x to 3.x. This kind of thing is very difficult. I don't see any reason to support Mono or .NET 4.56 anymore.
- meibo ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- undefined ・ 2 days ago
  
  [deleted]

mattgreenrocks ・ 2 days ago

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?

rafaelmn ・ 2 days ago

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 ?
- doomroot13 ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- WorldMaker ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  rafaelmn ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  >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.
  That is exactly my read of it, especially given Microsoft track record on delivering with stuff like this.
  Not sure about the Silverlight comparison - in the days of Flash, browsers did not even have a way to stream video reliably, nowadays it just cramming a square peg in to a round hole - heavyweight runtime built on multithreading crammed to a single threaded event loop. I have not tried it - but after using .net in much more powerful/native envs like Android - I know for a fact that the iteration/build/debugging story sucks compared to native JS/TS. Also as bad JS is, TS makes it saner, tooling has matured and DOM APIs are built for JS.
  
  WorldMaker ・ 2 days ago
  
  > nowadays it just cramming a square peg in to a round hole - heavyweight runtime built on multithreading crammed to a single threaded event loop
  Sometimes the "event loop" part is forgotten because JS' single threaded thing is very "cooperatively threaded". This is a large part of why async/await works so well in JS and is growing so quickly in adoptions. .NET's multithreading is built in a way to excel in "cooperatively threaded" environments (its task pools are cooperative by default, for instance, and also arguably heavy use of async/await was C#'s idea first).
  It would be great to see more WASM multithreading powers, but writing C# for today's WASM environment doesn't feel that different from "regular" multi-threaded C#.
  > I know for a fact that the iteration/build/debugging story sucks compared to native JS/TS
  WASM debugging is nearly great, including growing Sourcemap support. The ability for Visual Studio to be the Debugger interface to Chromium-based browsers is more powerful that ever. Certainly in its debugging story Blazor WASM is much advanced from Silverlight which was only really debuggable in IE and then was still often flaky.
  > DOM APIs are built for JS
  There's still talk of making more direct DOM APIs for WASM. Might be interesting to see eventually.
  This is why it is so easy to relate Blazor WASM to React. Blazor is essentially using Razor templates to define a Virtual DOM which it then sends render updates across the WASM/JS boundary to a very tiny virtual DOM renderer.
  It's not what I'd use for smarter direct DOM work, but in comparison to React it gets the job done and works surprisingly well, even with the language barrier and data marshalling across sandbox layers.
  I've used Blazor WASM on Enterprise projects. I'd probably use it again on Enterprise projects. It can be real nice to have backend and frontend all entirely in C#. (In different projects. So that you can scale them independently if nothing else.)
- terandle ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  rafaelmn ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  What would be the benefit over Razor pages tho ? Component model ? Feels like partial views and razor templates might not be the cleanest/dry-est solution but would make the implementation super straightforawd.
  
  terandle ・ 2 days ago
  
  Yeah there is basically no real difference between MVC or RazorPages or BlazorStaticServer pick your poison depending on your preference. Personally I wish the .NET team would just add components to MVC and RazorPages then we can forget about Blazor.
- tracker1 ・ 2 days ago
  
  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
shortrounddev2 ・ 2 days ago

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
- deburo ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- mattgreenrocks ・ 2 days ago
  
  Rider, but I'm on Mac, so I can't use the real VS. I run dotnet watch from a terminal separately.
bob1029 ・ 2 days ago

> 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.
- MortyWaves ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- jabart ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
edtech_dev ・ 2 days ago

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.
whoknowsidont ・ 2 days ago

[flagged]
- zbentley ・ 2 days ago
  
  Say more?
  
  whoknowsidont ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 5 more
  
  Why does his statement not require more substance? Why do I have to provide it? The burden is the other way around.
  Blazor's architectural model makes it impossible to be "performant." It's not even debatable.
  What you gain in DevEx you lose substantially in user experience.
  
  zbentley ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  > Why do I have to provide it? The burden is the other way around.
  Well, it sounds like you have an axe to grind, but I didn’t ask to “prove” anything; I was curious to learn what was meant by the bad-performance claim. I don’t program in any of these technologies; I don’t have a horse in this race.
  Let’s try this again:
  > Blazor's architectural model makes it impossible to be "performant."
  Say more?
  
  whoknowsidont ・ 2 days ago
  
  It sounds like you're just baiting.
  
  mattgreenrocks ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  I'm speaking of static server-side components, thus no JS or WASM. Wouldn't touch any other Blazor mode for a public facing app.
  
  whoknowsidont ・ 2 days ago
  
  What do you gain from implementing in Blazor at that point?
  
  PathOfEclipse ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  .NET perf can be great in the sense that it provides more tools to write C-like code while still taking advantage of safe memory management, as compared to Java. On the downside, both their JIT and their GC seem to be far less sophisticated than the JVM.
  Why, for instance, does the CLR GC not have something like TLABs? The result is that it seems like .NET devs have to worry a lot more about the expense of small, short-lived allocations, while in Java these things are much cheaper.
  Overall, I think it's easier to program idiomatically in Java and get decent performance out-of-the-box, while C# may provide more opportunities for optimization without having to rely on something equivalent to sun.misc.Unsafe and offheap allocations.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  And it does, how I wish for Valhala to become a reality, and finally having structs, spans, and all the other C++ like capabilities C# enjoys, and Java lacks.
  
  Capricorn2481 ・ 2 days ago
  
  > On the downside, both their JIT and their GC seem to be far less sophisticated than the JVM
  I've always heard this, but does it actually manifest in noticeably worse performance than the JVM? Go has a much simpler GC, but it's not terribly slower than Java (I do know they are optimized for different things).
  It seems like C# is within bounds of Java while also having great performance escape hatches.

tekdude ・ 2 days ago

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/

Metalnem ・ 2 days ago

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...

smackeyacky ・ 2 days ago

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.

cheschire ・ 2 days ago

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.
- brokencode ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
- pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  
  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,...
  
  cheschire ・ a day ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Sorry, to be clear I meant no significant problems with the tech.
  Sure, it was opinionated tech, but that would’ve been ok if they had stuck with it like C# itself and fleshed it out more, which only would’ve happened had they implemented the entire OS in it. The fact that they couldn’t is in my mind the exact reason the tech failed.
  
  pjmlp ・ a day ago
  
  I agree with your point of view, this was the second coming of Longhorn, WinRT was after all pushed by the same folks that killed the Longhorn effort, those on Windows team that sided with Steven Sinofsky, using COM in Vista as future foundation for .NET ideas in Longhorn.
  The Hilo tutorial for Windows 7 remarks regarding C++ are quite telling of their point of view, on which programming language one should be using,
  https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/
  "The rich user experience of Windows 7 is best accessed through a powerful, flexible language, and that means C++: by using C++ you can access the raw power of the APIs for Windows 7."
  From https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/f...
  Joe Duffy has some remarks on how even with Midori running Asia Bing infrastructure, and proving workloads in front of the Windows team, the reception to it was rather cold.
  https://youtu.be/CuD7SCqHB7k?t=921&si=r8a0nScB4fcrxxIu
  Eventually he left MSR and created Pulumin on top of Go.
  Meanwhile Apple/NeXT and Google, decided to push languages like Objective-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin, over classical C and C++, proving the point that change is possible if management is willing to support the team, even if that is a very long run.
  See Apple's Metal Swift bindings, versus Microsoft's Agility SDK for DirectX.
jayd16 ・ a day ago

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.
bob1029 ・ a day ago

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.

giancarlostoro ・ 2 days ago

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.

wvbdmp ・ a day ago

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.
qingcharles ・ 2 days ago

This thing has barely changed in the ~30 years I've been using it. There's definitely room for some more improvements.
- sumtechguy ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  tracker1 ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 6 more
  
  I prefer VS Code... though MS has for better or worse kept the .Net tooling relatively weak. I'll use Rider or VS on a few occasions... then retreat back to Code as much as I can.
  For split web projects, definitely work on the web ui in VS Code.
  
  giancarlostoro ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 5 more
  
  I used to like VS Code, but something about it changed and it does not feel as snappy as it once did for me. Now I prefer Zed.
  
  pjmlp ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 4 more
  
  Electron apps are seldom snappy, we use it, because some plugins aren't available anywhere else.
  
  tracker1 ・ a day ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  I mostly agree, that said, after VS Code starts, it runs pretty well. I almost didn't try it after Brackets and Atom as they were really slow. I haven't tried zed, so can't speak to it. VS Code was really just the first editor that I used with an integrated terminal and the directory tree. Just those two features made it a great fit for my workflow. I'm able to use the CLI to run/debug without leaving the editor, and/or run git commands from the terminal as well.
  
  pjmlp ・ a day ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Because it runs a bunch of background processes in C++, Rust, and does text rendering via WebGL.
  Programmer editors with such capabilities are decades old.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)
  
  tracker1 ・ 14 hours ago
  
  I know they use a lot of background processes to get the performance, the point is it works pretty well.
  As to the second, I'm unaware of a gui editor with a built in interactive terminal prior to VS Code.
  
  jcotton42 ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  VS2017 was the introduction of the modern VS installer that is way faster than the prior ones.
  
  malkia ・ 2 days ago
  
  Also (since 2015) forward/backward (to a degree) CRT compatibility.
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/porting/binary-compat-...
  This saved so much time, space and support - where previously we had to recompile stuff, and if you had Maya/MotionBuilder/etc plugin it had to use the right compiler.
  Also now even with newer IDE you can instruct the project to use older (or even better - a specific) version of the toolchain.
  
  cheschire ・ 2 days ago
  
  I dunno, I think the big change over to roslyn in 2015 was a bit of a tectonic shift.
fsfod ・ 2 days ago

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.
vyrotek ・ 2 days ago

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...
JaggerJo ・ 2 days ago

Just buy a Rider license. Never looked back.
edtech_dev ・ 2 days ago

Have you tried Rider?
- giancarlostoro ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.

brainzap ・ 2 days ago

They should fix github issues and write in-depth tutorials, instead of AI features or minimal API.

junto ・ 2 days ago

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.
stronglikedan ・ 2 days ago

"they" are more than one person and can do more than one thing at a time

Alifatisk ・ 2 days ago

One-shot execution looks exciting, what problems does it solve? Less cluttering in the environment?

pjerem ・ 2 days ago

Scripting, CLI tools ...
- chusk3 ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.

sharken ・ a day ago

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

sergiotapia ・ 2 days ago

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?

WorldMaker ・ 2 days ago

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).
- debugnik ・ 2 days ago
  
  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#.
qingcharles ・ 2 days ago

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.
majora2007 ・ 2 days ago

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.
kkukshtel ・ a day ago

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.
cyphax ・ 2 days ago

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.
osigurdson ・ 2 days ago

The version numbers used to increase much more slowly. Since the .NET (modernized / cross platform) core "track" the version number increments every year.
- WorldMaker ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.)
  
  rawling ・ 2 days ago
  
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/microso...
  The last 5 version have been released a year apart, in Novembers.
oneplane ・ 2 days ago

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.
- WorldMaker ・ 2 days ago
  
  > 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...
  
  oneplane ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Yep, but you still can't say "compile and link everything in this tree". Technically, the language can, but the framework assumes specific compiler, linker and layouts on the filesystem so at that point you can't. It really wants that editor-related stuff to be part of the framework, and everything else has to bend for it.
  
  WorldMaker ・ 2 days ago
  
  A Project file today can just be a full tree glob. New projects start out in that form. The `dotnet` CLI is still going to assume some default output paths as it builds object files and executable assets, but those are all easily flag configurable today. (I've done some wild CI things.)
  You don't have to use a Solution at all with the CLI, you can do everything in a single Project and one full tree glob. (Technically you haven't need a Solution with Visual Studio for a long while either, if you don't mind it sometimes auto-creating them at compile time, and even then you can just .gitignore .sln and not care. But even that random auto-.sln file thing has disappeared in recent years and Visual Studio has learned more auto-workspace tricks from VS Code.)
  I have started projects that just did that, started with a simple glob-only project and no prescribed file layout.
  Yeah, dotnet doesn't let you micro-manage the linker specifically, but few languages since C++ do and arguably the C/C++ linker sometimes seems as much a bug of C/C++ as a feature in modern times.
3836293648 ・ 2 days ago

.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.
debugnik ・ 2 days ago

> 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.

croes ・ 2 days ago

I prefer .Net Framework 4.8 Longer lifetime than any .Net version.

Merad ・ 2 days ago

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.
brokencode ・ 2 days ago

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.
- ewoodrich ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  nartho ・ 2 days ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  I don't think they introduced any breaking changes after .NET 6
  
  orphea ・ 2 days ago
  
  Every version had breaking changes, they could not affect you too much though: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/...
  
  Salgat ・ 2 days ago
  
  The only breaking change for us was how .NET 7 introduced [FromServices] which causes controller methods to use dependency injection for attributeless parameters. Confused me at first since it was a rather subtle update that didn't break anything until runtime.
- nic547 ・ 2 days ago
  
  .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.
  
  WorldMaker ・ 2 days ago
  
  A shift in those cultural dynamics is that you can ship the current .NET LTS with your app (or even STS if you feel like making that sort of security support SLA with your own clients). You aren't relying on their Windows Update habits (or lack of them) or having to install a big .NET installer that might break their other apps.
  They may still get left behind on an older version of your software because they want to be, but their relationship to Windows is no longer the big excuse/reason to skip updating to your latest that it used to be.
  
  brokencode ・ 2 days ago
  
  You are right that it’s on a 2 year cycle. Though there is support for 3 years, so you could safely put off an upgrade for up to a year if there are breaking changes one release.
- starik36 ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  SirMaster ・ 2 days ago
  
  Is 70-80MB really a big deal to distribute in 2025?
  Also if you use trim unused code and compress the executable in my experience it's usually a lot smaller than this.
- croes ・ 2 days ago
  
  With all the dependencies that maybe getting an update to the new .Net version, yes.
HumanOstrich ・ 2 days ago

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
- croes ・ 2 days ago
  
  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.
  
  edtech_dev ・ 2 days ago
  
  Just the amount of perf improvements they have added since .NET 4.8, year after year, is staggering.
  
  cheschire ・ 2 days ago
  
  Having written .NET 5+ apps, and now being back to maintaining a 4.8 app...
  There's a lot of quality of life features of the later versions of C# that we're missing out on. My code was a LOT more streamlined in my .NET 9 app.

devwastaken ・ 2 days ago

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.

dimaaan ・ 2 days ago

MIT license: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
jcotton42 ・ 2 days ago

> 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.
zaphar ・ 2 days ago

It is fully open source so... who cares?