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Comment by VadimPR | Hacker News Reader

I jumped into .NET w/o any background while running Linux - it's not a pleasant experience when you lack the heavy Windows+VS background you've had. Perhaps Jetbrains Rider is better, but at this point you know all the ins and outs of the platforms - a beginner lack that.

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The experience of picking up a new IDE, language, framework, flow, etc, is no different regardless of it being .NET or anything else. There's a learning curve.

My point is not that experience is easy or hard, just that when comparing the two side by side, the experience of being a .NET developer on linux is good, and I would argue with jetbrains rider, is better than being on Windows with Visual Studio.

Sorry, I don't buy it - tried it for 4 years and that's just not the case. It was stumbling block to be on Linux and without Visual Studio with every tutorial or instructions. I think you have it easy since you know the ecosystem so well - and coming over from Windows, you know what alternatives to look for.

For me, even simple things like getting C# aliases working was a pain. I would not recommend a Linux developer to be picking up C# to do cross-platform development anytime soon. The only nice benefit I've seen is the amount of batteries included with .NET - but that's a solvable problem in other languages.

> tried it for 4 years and that's just not the case.

So just fired up a VM with a clean install of Ubuntu.

No VSCode, No Rider.

> wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/20.10/packages-... -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb

> sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb

> sudo apt update && sudo apt install apt-transport-https dotnet-sdk-5.0 -y

> mkdir test

> cd test

> dotnet new console --output sample1

> dotnet run --project sample1

This is all on the MS Docs website for getting started.

So I'm really not sure what part you find difficult. Getting hello world is no more difficult than me getting hello world working for golang, nodejs, python.

> For me, even simple things like getting C# aliases working was a pain.

Aliases for what?!?

EDIT: Simplified the commands cos I can't format in comments.

Yeah, of course, now try to build a real world application with it.

Aliases: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe.... Support for those was only added in the last year or so to the dotnet/nuget/roslyn/whatever it is needed things to make it work. Microsoft's own documentation only documents how to use it for Visual Studio: too bad if you're using another IDE or the command line like you did above.

Using aliases have existed for like ever. So I guess you’re trying to use extern aliases which are super rare to ever need so still don’t know what you’re struggling with.

In terms of building a real world application. What are you struggling with? The code is no different regardless of IDE you use. VSCode, Visual Studio, and Rider all have a debugger and can step through code.

Right now it sounds like you’re just trying to make .net sound bad.

Okay, what other programming languages did you master before? What is so much easier?

I suppose you mean using-aliases for types/namespaces? This is a C# language concept, not a very complicated one, and totally independent of the operating system

It's not complicated, but the .NET tooling on Linux did not understand it :) that's what my point is all about. For the best .NET experience, use Visual Studio on Windows. If you're not on those two, the tooling experience is not going to be particularly pleasant - nor the documentation.

My advice after having tried it seriously - .NET does work crossplatform, I've seen it, but you need to be a Windows dev to tap into that. Would not recommend a mac/linux dev who's looking to do cross-platform work to pick .NET as the foundation.

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