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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

I am really curious, who is actually using Windows containers in a way that's critical to their business? (i.e. your main web app, not giving some janky legacy Windows thing a place to live while you migrate away from it)

I have to imagine at some point probably very soon all of the time spent maintaining and hacking in the NT kernel to work in a container world is just throwing good money at a vanishingly small segment of the market.

kudos to this team for being on the ball and supporting ARM and ARM64 images though. Now when can we actually run ARM64 stuff on Azure....

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Hacker News represents only a pretty small fraction of the IT world. There are many, many companies out there doing things Hacker News never heard of because it's not related to web or startups.

What I do at my day job would be considered legacy tech here on HN but my company is a multi million dollar profitable business working in the B2B sector. Our customers don't want flashy websites, they want software that works over many years with minimal maintenance burden running on their own hardware.

Microsoft Windows is still dominant in the business world because the often external IT knows how to work on it and most of the time it just works.

There are large and successful companies with very modern enterprise apps communicating with old stuff like AS400 mainframe systems.

These and many other companies also have generations of (not quite as old) Windows applications that aren't going anywhere anytime soon either.

These companies want to manage it all in a modern way. Sometimes, it's part of the migration strategy.

> I am really curious, who is actually using Windows containers in a way that's critical to their business?

Valid question, but not exactly what the article is about. .NET Containers != Windows Containers

From the article:

> . We publish updated .NET images for Alpine, Debian, and Ubuntu

I am, there is no reason for .NET developers to deploy on Linux containers, and castrate ourselves to libraries only available in .NET Core.

Also outside HN universe, Windows servers are a thing, so it is not only .NET, there are also Java and C++ applications.

Barring GUI libraries that depend on WinForms/WPF, surely there are very few libraries now only available for dotnet framework?

I work at a consultancy for enterprise-size orgs, and Windows servers are indeed still frequently used - but almost exclusively on-prem, and I've never even once come across Windows containers being used. Seems the shift to the cloud, and Microsoft's shift to OSS and Linux love, has tamed even the most fervent of Microsoft shops. 10 years ago you'd be laughed at if you suggested anything other than Windows, but now it's the default for anything in the cloud.

Sitecore, Sharepoint, Dynamics, EF 6 and WCF in-house frameworks, and plenty of third party solutions on the Windows ecosystem.

All the cloud based deployments I have done, other than a couple of serverless microservices on AWS Lambda, have been done on Windows and that won't change for the foreseeable future in what concerns the kind of customers I work with.

In fact, it is a bit ironic that instead of getting advises from cloud experts, I am the one with my lower skill set in the domain, to have to explain to them what is to be expected for production delivery.

Is there a compelling reason to use EF6 instead of EF Core? I personally haven't used EF, or even seen other teams using it, for years now.

Similarly with WCF. It's something I used to use a decade ago (though I admit I was never a fan), but haven't seen it used in eons.

99% of enterprise projects I deal with are brownfield projects, unless it there is a business value in a code rewrite, there is no compelling value to spend money rewriting code from scratch for newer stacks, specially if they require buying third party tools to replace existing workflows, like it happens with the broken EF 6 designer on core (and non existent one for EF Core).

EF 6 runs on net core: https://www.nuget.org/packages/EntityFramework/

Partially, not everything that is part of EF 6, specially VS designers.

Don't take marketing for the full use in production environments.

Also we can keep doing this game, there are plenty of enterprise tools I can list.

.NET Core is the Python 3 of .NET world.

I've used EF Core in production for years, and seen it used in production by numerous teams, and it's been at least at stable as EF6 was, while being a lot more performant.

You are correct that you don't get a VS designer, but I've personally always favoured a code-first approach anyway, so this never affected me.

> .NET Core is the Python 3 of .NET world.

I see where you are coming from, but I don't think I agree. There is still a large segment of Python 2 devs, and for many, there isn't a particularly compelling reason to move to Python 3. Dotnet Core is different, in that there are very compelling reasons to move: cross-platform (massively important in our new cloudy world), performance, and of course ongoing support. There are for sure a small hardcore of sad dotnet devs stuck on Framework because of some legacy libraries, but I reckon the majority made the move to Core a long time ago.

The WinForms designer for .NET Core in Visual Studio is still broken and doesn't work with third-party controls. The whole WinForms team at Microsoft is afaik less than 5 developers strong who are also working on other things on the side. If you look into the bug tracker you will see that those <5 devs are not experienced enough for the monumental task of porting WinForms. There are a few volunteers that keep submitting PRs and giving insights into .NET Framework's WinForms to keep the devs from accidentally knocking things over.

The .NET Framework version is working fine and has been for years. That's why my company won't switch in the near future. Marketing and reality are just too far apart.

> The WinForms designer for .NET Core in Visual Studio is still broken

That's tooling, not Dotnet Core itself. As an aside, I think there is even a WinForms GUI editor in Jetbrains Rider now.

> Marketing and reality are just too far apart

I mean, that's your opinion, but there are millions of Dotnet Core devs for whom the reality is as wonderful as promised. If you still have to work with legacy libraries or maybe WinForms, then of course I understand where you are coming from, but I don't think it's fair to tar the whole of Dotnet Core based on some limited failings that affect only a minority.

What Scott Hanselman calls dark matter developers, don't care one second about where .NET Core stands today, the large majority doesn't come to sites like HN and Reddit, and is busy porting applications to 4.7.2 and if they are lucky already using .NET Framework 4.8, regardless how Microsoft would like to pimp the .NET Core story.

Just look at the github issues of everyone on the UWP/WinRT disgruntled with the lack of roadmap for .NET Native, or how WPF has taken one year to ramp up a new team, after they sent everyone away. Worse it seems that WPF bug fixes are being done from other side of the globe in some offshoring deal.

Real life on the trenches is not like on Channel 9 TV.

I think we'll need to disagree, as we have incompatible views on what the reality is.

I absolutely do not dispute that anyone involved in building Windows-only desktop apps is not going to be satisfied - but they are absolutely in the minority.

As a consultant, I don't just see the workings of a single org - I work across several orgs every year. When Core first became a thing, some were slow to take it on, which was understandable considering the confusing messaging from Microsoft. But it's been around for a long time now, and Microsoft's messaging and intentions became clear. What I now seen is huge uptake of Dotnet Core - way, way more is now on Core than Framework, and I haven't seen anything new being built on Framework for at least a couple of years.

I also do consultancy, on enterprise projects where using Oracle and SQL Server is a rounding error on project expenses, in a mix of Java, .NET and C++ based solutions.

On my side, I am yet to see a new project done on Core besides some tiny micro-services on department level.

As mentioned on another thread answers, still waiting on SharePoint and Dynamics running on Core.

So yeah, we'll need to disagree.

Microsoft is selling it as a package deal. .NET and VS go hand in hand.

The current LTS release of .NET Core 3.1 has a broken socket implementation that can lead to deadlocks on Linux and macOS.

Microsoft will not fix it in 3.1 LTS and recommends using .NET 5, which is not an LTS. If you are a company that is deploying multiple times a day, that's probably fine. If you are a company that keeps the lights on with about 5 devs for a few hundred customers with on-prem setups, this is just unacceptable and doesn't even have anything to do with legacy libs.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/31570

Wow, so much for LTS I guess. I really admired the Microsoft of before (yes, antitrust; I'm not talking about that here.)

Admittedly it's just from what Raymond Chen's blogged about, but it seems to me that Microsoft had a different "corporate attitude" back then, so to speak.

Running your code on linux is cheaper. Of course legacy code/dependencies might prevent you from running your code on Linux. .NET libraries that are still being developed are either already available on .NET Core or are going to be.

I don't think Java applications have dependencies to Windows that often, and it's a pretty bad idea to use C++ in server applications.

Looking forward to see SharePoint and WCF on Linux.

Sure Java runs on Linux, that doesn't mean many shops want to build the human skill set to manage those boxes.

As for C++ and server applications, in what languages do you think database servers and similar high performance servers are written on, most of the time?

I've seen a few people answer this question in the affirmative in previous threads, but I've never seen Windows containers in the wild yet. I work for a consultancy for enterprises, so if it was commonplace I would have expected to see them at least once. Obviously not doubting anyone else; just saying I think it must be pretty rare.

I provided an answer in the blog post post comments. We see it most big corps and government. We also see Linux in those same places. If there are big Windows Server apps (typically .NET Framework) that people want to host in the cloud, then they often choose Windows Containers as the lowest friction solution, at least for step one. I work closely with the Windows Container team, and this is what I see from their customer engagements. Inside Microsoft, it is the same. Many big services at Microsoft have hard dependencies on Windows (both .NET Framework and Win32), and at the same time, many have also embraced Linux.

I don’t know anyone using Windows Containers in production.

Even Microsoft is using Linux containers for production dotnet deployments.

I would pay to see SharePoint and Dynamics running on Linux containers.

Don't judge what Microsoft is doing, with the .NET Core teams are marketing for.

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