I looked for Senior Software Developer positions, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is that lots of enterprises look for people with experience with technologies such as .NET and C#.

I personally HATE Microsoft and their platforms. From my experience they take all the fun from developing by creating stupid compile errors with their stupid gigantic Visual Studio and buggy dependencies. Not to mention their ridiculous resources greedy and unsecured Windows OS! Also there are no healthy and independent communities around a their technologies. They don’t open source much of their technologies so it would be easier to hack their tools, and harder to make security patches.

Why enterprises do that for themselves and for their developers?

Do you think enterprises will make a turn in this attitude?

  • .NET has been around for two decades. It’s a well established technology with plenty of resources, documentation and libraries and frameworks. I guess these are in part the reason it’s still thriving.

    You’re thinking about .NET Framework reading your opinions on it, .NET (Microsoft is terrible at naming) is the “newest” standard and it’s fully open source and cross platform. They removed Windows only APIs and embraced the open source way.

    While Microsoft is indeed full of shit they did a great move with .NET in the last 10 years.

    You don’t even need Visual Studio, I use Rider for instance and I love it! I cannot stand Visual Studio either, mostly because I hate its UI/UX.

    At the end of the day is matter of preferences, I like .NET and C# and I work with these technologies daily for instance.

    • Also, from an enterprise point-of-view, .Net has the same advantages as Java (stability, runs everywhere, backed by a large corp) but is fundamental better designed and doesn’t come with the potential legal baggage of being owned by Oracle.

      I would argue that .Net is one of the best techs that Microsoft is producing at the moment. I’ve used it on and off for a number of years and haven’t done any development targeting Windows in a decade. It’s all be running on Linux servers. The dotNet works great there.

      And, 100% agree with using Rider. My hierarchy of .Net IDEs is Rider->Notepad+±>Visual Studio Code->manually adjusting the memory on my computer using magnets->Full Visual Studio (whatever they are calling it these days).

    •  TehPers   ( @TehPers@beehaw.org ) 
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      1 year ago

      Worth calling out as well, but modern .NET is maintained by the .NET Foundation, which is a 501(c) (non-profit) organization that MS founded. MS naturally has a lot of influence over the direction of the language and frameworks, but it’s more of a symbiotic relationship, and others benefit from and contribute to the work as well.

  • You want to have a superficial little rant about how much you hate microsoft. It’s uninformed and boring, and you’re not going to learn anything in that mindset.

    C# is an excellent language for many circumstances. If you knock off the attitude, I’d be willing to explain to you why it’s so widely used.

    • Well to be fair, Microsoft used to be entirely proprietary until recent.

      Same thing with things like Ghidra; used to be a completely locked up proprietary software for NSA, now it’s open source.

  • Your views of Microsoft and dotnet are very outdated, as you’ve been informed. You can develop dotnet code on Linux/Mac, Intel/arm using whatever editor or ide you like. The tooling is comparable to other language (i.e. dotnet add package …, dotnet build, dotnet test bla bla), it’s performant and imo fun.

    You should check out the ASP .net core 7 minimal api, it’s a great way to run a backend api (no IIS required), or write some code to control gpio on a raspberry pi, you could try out F# in vs code(ium) using the polyglot Jupyter notebook extension, or just use the repl shell…

    Anyway, I just wanted to address the ‘fun’ factor.

  • Microsoft has done some pretty shitty things before, like buying and extinguishing many competitors. But it’s pretty telling that you are NOT an experienced dev if you are criticizing the one thing MS has done really well. .NET is a rather mature framework with multiple seasoned languages under its umbrella.

    Having used C# and .NET for many years, it’s easily one of Microsofts best decisions they have made. C# is arguably one of the most dev-friendly languages on the market right now. With each iteration offering many quality-of-life improvements, I can’t think of many languages that offer the amount of improvements that C# has had over the last 10 years. Compare that to seasoned languages like PHP, Golang or even Java and I think C# is still the easiest to use in terms of terse (but still understandable) syntax, generics, data structure improvements, general iterators syntax and can’t forget LINQ improvements. I’ve often felt left behind when using Java, as it plays keep-up with some of the changes in C#.

  • I for one hate Microsoft Windows a great amount, yet am in love with C#… Just because a company has one terrible product, doesn’t mean everything they make is terrible.

    Also… What everyone else here already said. No reason for me to rinse and repeat what’s been said lol.

  • First, every company uses Windows, you can’t avoid this and you’ll have to learn how to use all the tools (Visual Studio, Office365, everything else). Yes it sucks, no you can’t use another OS if you want to eat.

    As for why .NET and C#: my shitty theory is that companies used to write software in C++. Then Java came along but it was not evolving fast enough, and Oracle was suing the whole planet. Microsoft invented C# to annoy everyone (both C++ and Java) and it worked because C# is actually a good language. You have a big SDK, you can do everything that Java does, it’s easier than C++, and you can use your C++ code with C++/CLI. C# was a good alternative and people used it.

    Do you think enterprises will make a turn in this attitude?

    C++ is too hard (I know, I use it daily), and Java is dead. I don’t think companies who use C# will go back to using an older language. That would be suicidal.

  • I’ve been developing stuff with .NET and F#. For the most part the experience with the compiler, libraries and IDEs + tools has been good. Haven’t had to touch visual studio or windows. Most devs run Linux or MacOS and the end product is deployed on servers running Linux and open source dotnet. I’m about as far as you can be from a Microsoft fanboy but you might want to get up to date with the ecosystem. Is it my favourite tech stack? No, but I’ve experienced much worse.

  • The enterprises are not going to change their attitude, you might want to. There’s plenty of fair criticism to level at Microsoft, but this is uninformed, inaccurate and even if it weren’t, kind of obnoxious.

  • Don’t take issue with the platform. Take issue with companies that are so fanatical with “we’re a microsoft/java/javascript/esperanto shop!” that they’d cram it into medical devices and nuclear reactor controls before doing some sort of sober domain analysis.

    Everything has its own set of problems.