Comment by h_r | Hacker News Reader

Comment by h_r | Hacker News Reader

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If you are thinking of porting an old 4.x app but you wait until some time beyond Nov 2020 (https://i.redd.it/f8todfd66uw21.png) then it is in your interest to track the latest .NET Standard along the way. If you haven't been keeping the app up to date, say you're on 4.6.1, and then you decide you like .NET 5 and want to move to it, I think you'll just have to try it and fix whatever breaks.

This is pretty much like every other porting project where you have an old neglected project that you want to bring up to date. Maybe there is an easier way but I don't know what it is. Staying on the legacy .NET Framework isn't the end of the world, you're just committing to maintaining it as is. If you want new features as they become available, well... that's on you, don't wait.

Maybe you move some functionality out of your legacy GUI app to microservices written in .NET 5, parts that are unlikely to have any porting issues. In any case it's not like anyone is going to be surprised by what's going on. Maybe the community will back port some new things to .NET 4.8. MS will be devoting their efforts to enhancing the new platform while keeping the old one on life support. I think that's reasonable. (edit: typos)

Yeah all that is completely obvious. So why not just communicate honestly: This is a massive breaking change. It is going to be painful, but is necessary to moving forward. But don't deny the reality of it.

Saying .net 5 is unifying .net is like saying Python 3 unified Python or that Angular 2 unified Angular.

> If you haven't been keeping the app up to date, say you're on 4.6.1,

Again, why the dishonest arguing? 4.6.1 is years old, but you will have exactly the same problem if you are on 4.8 which was just released. It has nothing to do with code not being updated.

> where you have an old neglected project that you want to bring up to date

Again, this has nothing to do with projects being old and neglected. It is a breaking change, it will affect all projects on .net framework if they want to upgrade. And you know that.

I honestly fail to see what has been dishonest in the communications around this.

The plan for .NET 5 does, in fact, unify .NET Standard, Core and Xamarin. These will no longer be separate things but will go forward under one name.

I'm not sure what you're claiming as the _breaking change_. Can you be specific? It's not, in fact, going to break anything from what I can see. .NET Standard will simply continue to grow larger in .NET Core 3+ until it covers everything. This seems to me to be very different from the Python situation where you are (probably) forced to make code changes to compile with Python 3. If I have some code that compiles with .NET Standard 2.0, are you under the impression that it won't compile with .NET Core 3+ or .NET 5? If so, what leads you to think that?

OK, sorry I called it dishonest, that was out of line since it was assuming bad faith. I just don't think we can pretend .net framework doesn't exist anymore just because the successor is announced.

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