Comment by tostitos1979 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tostitos1979 | Hacker News Reader

I used to do quite a bit of Windows development back in the day (started with win32/MFC, moved to winforms). I was wondering the other day why I stopped (to some extent because the modern Microsoft seems to be more hip with Linux support, containers, etc.). My guess was that things started getting wonky around the time LINQ came out. It seemed pretty unnatural to me personally, and it was being pushed hard. The metro apps was also being pushed hard at that time. My reaction was to leave the complexity/instability behind and go to an ecosystem that seemed/was more stable. Web based GUIs along with Python backends. I'm at the point now, where I've shipped a few projects using these tools, and am pretty satisfied for the most part. I do miss C# on some days, and I suspect I'll get a chance to work with it if Microsoft keeps up being hip :)

P.S. I never got into ASP/ASP.net ... is that what people use .net for most these days?

LINQ is far from wonky, it's essentially just a bunch of lambdas built to create execution trees which can be optimised then converted to e.g. SQL.

it's powerful and using typed-compile-time-checked LINQ for building DB queries is far superior as a developer experience than some monolithic blocks of SQL text and a test suite.

asp.net5 is getting pretty decent (and close to release) so for current projects I use c# to host my API and bootstrap the app up, but all the frontends are modern js frameworks (using typescript) rather than MS MVC.

Even leaving SQL out of the equation, LINQ is basically just standard functional programming constructs, albeit with SQL-y names. Select() == map, Where() == filter, Aggregate() == fold

> P.S. I never got into ASP/ASP.net ... is that what people use .net for most these days?

For web development, yes. MS's REST framework is called WebAPI, and most people pair that with Angular, but you can use your poison of choice. If you want a more traditional MVC framework, there's MVC. If you want be all hip and cool, you can deploy a web api container to one Ubuntu machine, and the your frontend to another.

A lot of people do use .NET through ASP. Personally, I use it through Powershell, loading libraries and invoking functions in scripts or the command line. I've put together a couple server applications in it, and a voice recognition application too.

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