My experience has largely been the same, the whole mono, xamarin, vs studio, etc of tooling (whatever it all is) is a tragedy of good technology made useless. The licensing, tooling, and runtimes are such a mess I give up before I begin. There needs to be one canonical way to do things on every platform, this "band-aid" approach might've worked when you first open sourced but surely no longer does the job.
I'd love to use .NET but the overhead of getting started isn't worth it when I can use any number of other truly free languages/platforms that are much easier to understand. And are truly cross platform because they have been so for years.
For reference languages I use regularly or on occasion which don't suffer from any degree of the issues .NET has: ruby, swift, elixir, java, scala, JavaScript, and Elm.
CLR and .NET seem very awesome but so far have turned me off in a big way. Please fix <3
I've been putting food on the table as a .net specialist for fifteen years. My impression is that .Net 4 is a band-aid of Windows-dependent implementations and that .Net Core is some solid tech, using industry's best practises for streams, collections, GC and so on. How do you think they made it portable?
I started to get pissed off at MS at around the time MVC 3 came out. That was not the direction I would have taken. Oh the bloat. Asp.Net Core Mvc is a dream. You start out with nothing, basically. Invent your own conventions.
I'm happy to not touch .Net 4 again. Love Core.
Edit: as parent said though: Microsoft, your tooling has gone from best-of-breed to just-another-messed-up-ide. Please remove everything you copied from Resharper from Visual Studio. It just doesn't work. Try renaming a file. I have never had anything but near-fatal studio errors such as "the refactoring of the file name just didn't work, man, crashing soon...". I want my Resharper back. Can you disable your stuff? I mean, all of it? And please don't ask me to develop server applications on a javascript client such as VS Code. Nut gunna do it.
Having knowledge about legacy (Microsoft) tech is not bad if you're good. Many companies I know run their business on VB.Net/WebForms/Knockout/ELK/MSSQL. We do at my current gig. You have to be its mother to love that stack.
It takes about 5 minutes to set up the dotnet CLI tools and get a "Hello World".
If you don't even want to spend that you can install Visual Studio and .NET Core stuff will just work out of the box, as is customary for VS.
Versioning and documentation is a mess, but neither you nor the grandparent seem to have actually made the minimal time investment necessary to even encounter those problems.
> Versioning and documentation is a mess, but neither you nor the grandparent seem to have actually made the minimal time investment necessary to even encounter those problems.
This is Microsoft's fault, not these guys, and it has pissed me off so many times over the years.
I always use the analogy that Microsoft builds these gigantic, beautiful mansions, but then to get to them you have to find the secret path that's covered in weeds.
A slightly different topic, but very much along the same theme:
What a mess! I want SSMS, do I even have it installed anymore? How do I clean this up without spending 6 hours (because I know something's going to go wrong during the uninstall)?
Yeah the problem isn't "hello world." It never is, it's building something with the tooling that works cross platform or that can be deployed to the platforms I want to target. That's much more than "hello world" and the important part.
Perhaps you could make a useful comment next time instead of something plainly not?
Well, you literally said that it was useless and that you gave up before you began. Given that, I'd say that revelation's comment was pretty useful - explaining how you could quickly and easily get up and running with .NET. Perhaps you could tone down the hyperbole next time?
I'd love to use .NET but the overhead of getting started isn't worth it when I can use any number of other truly free languages/platforms that are much easier to understand. And are truly cross platform because they have been so for years.
For reference languages I use regularly or on occasion which don't suffer from any degree of the issues .NET has: ruby, swift, elixir, java, scala, JavaScript, and Elm.
CLR and .NET seem very awesome but so far have turned me off in a big way. Please fix <3