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A Love Letter to .NET

Matt Eland on September 24, 2019

With Microsoft's official release of .NET Core 3 today, I want to give you my perspective on .NET and tell you how the platform continues to innova...
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Kelly Brown • Edited

I love .NET, but I never understood how people could have used the language since its birth. Like, it was a pretty bad language (alongside Java) in those early years. It only started to come to life as a worthwhile tool in 2008-2012. Whatever. Let the past die, I guess. All I know is 2020 .NET is freaking amazing; .NET Core changed the game and finally made me feel good about dropping C++ as a primary language. I am working on a brand new game + game engine in C#, and I've never been happier.

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Matt Eland

It was still pretty cool back in the old days, it's just way better now.

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leob • Edited

Microsoft is much more open these days than it was before ... I mean, .NET is even "cross platform" nowadays, right? At least I've heard about ".NET Core" that it's able to run on Windows, Linux and Mac.

I'm a longtime Java developer (well over the last few years I've largely moved to other stacks), and in my mind .NET was always conceptually very similar to Java, but tied to Windows. But even that isn't the case anymore since it's cross platform now.

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Matt Eland

That's correct

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Irkan Hadi

I have been using .NET on and off for almost a decade now and I hate the fact that it is being stigmatized in the dev community (less so now than before though).

Blazor is one of the things that I am very excited about!

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Peter Street

Did you have the tall flip-out cardboard version, with (I think) 6 CD's and a DVD of the .NET Beta? I can still recall writing my own site in that, setting up XSLT transforms with some basic AJAX script (All the buzz words at the time)... Brings back memories :D

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Matt Eland

I was a student programmer at University of Wisconsin at the time, working on a fitness center web app for them, so I never saw a box, but back in the day, massive boxes like that were common.

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Kamran Ayub

I've been using .NET since around the same time! Even though full-time I focus on full-stack JavaScript/TypeScript, I run a website built on .NET. Now the issue is I am migrating to .NET Core so that I can run on Linux which will save me on cost but also I've become a pretty big fan of the JAMStack architecture so ideally I'd like to remove the MVC tier and switch to only an API and perhaps use Next.js for the frontend (which allows me to scale to SSR in the future if needed).

After using TypeScript so much now though, I find myself wanting a lot of the type features in C#. I know I could use F# but to be honest it can be really hard to interop with C# libraries. F# is good as a consuming language in an app but less-so as a library language.

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saint4eva

With .NET Core, developers can now integrate AI and ML capabilities into their apps with ease. The ecosystem is getting better and broader, and many other big companies such as Google, Amazon, Samsung etc. are betting on .NET. What a time to be a .NET developer.

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Chad Smith

Great post.

I have been using .NET for about 6 years now and have loved it. It got a bad name for a while from developers, still does sometimes, but most of them never really sat down to try .NET Core.

Blazor is very interesting and it's very fun to play around with. I wouldn't build a production web app on it just yet, but I'm really excited to watch how it grows. I'm big into Web Assembly being part of the future.

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Vincent Humeau

Thanks for this post, I started to look at .Net core recently and found it really enjoyable, love signalR. As a front-end I'm really looking forward playing with Blazor!