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When will the next Facebook or Twitter be written in .NET? #96

Open matthewblott opened 6 years ago

matthewblott commented 6 years ago

The OSS world is dominated by Linux (many would argue it pretty much is Linux) and since .NET now has the official MS stamp of approval to run on Linux more 3rd parties are providing .NET specific APIs and opening the framework to their platforms (Stripe being the most recent example). I have been pleasantly surprised at how quickly some vendors have adopted .NET Core, more than I thought would be the case which demonstrates how things can quickly change in the tech industry.

That said I think it will still take some time to bed in and we do need a bit of a cultural change. .NET is still dominated by Windows and Visual Studio and the hipsters will stay away until this changes (I attended a .NET meetup a few weeks ago and in a room of about 20 I was the only person that didn't use Visual Studio). A couple of practical examples where this has been a problem for me ...

  1. I was trying out ASP.NET Core and the documentation made references to VS which made it difficult for me as I was using a Mac (the documentation instructed the user to create a project using a template which obviously performed certain 'magic' plumbing the required elements and adding namespaces from packages I struggled to find). I'm an experienced .NET guy who's been working with Linux / Mono for a few years and I found this off putting so I can only assume someone hopping over from outside the .NET space might not be too impressed. FWIW I checked out a few other comparable frameworks (Play for example) and their getting started tutorials were all platform and IDE agnostic (as they should be).

  2. I'd been looking at quicker alternatives for front end work and I heard about an interesting open source project on .NET rocks so went to check it out. Although they were working on .NET Core integration, VS templating was probably its USP and so whilst I was interested in the framework I'd struggle to get the benefits and decided it wasn't worth it. A lot of .NET stuff seems to be based around VS templating.

These might seem like minor quibbles but I just put them up as things to bear in mind because I've found it a real problem. Thankfully some are noticing: Orchard 2 is quite clear they are cross platform and instructs contributors not to make assumptions everyone is working and developing using Windows and Visual Studio. Hopefully more will follow this example.

Anyhow, your comments on this would be welcome. I'd also like to add I appreciate the good work you do Scott. I was listening to a podcast on Linux and your name came up with nothing but praise from the guys on the show (they were discussing WSL) so your good work and evangelising is clearly paying off and noticed by others.

Thanks,

Matt :-)

M-Zuber commented 6 years ago

Follow this work, as there is a lot going on to make templates better. (also, there are people working on plugins for VS code to enable templates there as well) I agree though that documentation should be encouraged to be friendlier to non vs-code users.