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Comment by hdlothia | Hacker News Reader

I love c# and dotnet. I've been holding off on flutter and praying Maui becomes a real thing

Northern Europe runs on C# and .Net. I am not joking. There are more C# jobs in Denmark than Python, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP jobs combined.

It is surprising to me that C# and .NET is comparatively under-represented in North America where it was born. Nothing but good experience in developing and operating software with it, both desktop apps (Win/Mac) and backend services (Linux).

I like .Net and C#, but I've had a lot of experiences that were not good.

I personally hated working with Visual Studio 2017. 2019 was an improvement, but one so small it was still awful. I recently used it again (2021?) and was cynically surprised that they FINALLY got scrolling that isn't forcibly line-based. Why did they even bother now?

This and some other small things that used to make the experience painful are now solved, but they still haven't really gotten on top of the freezes and crashes.

Visual Studio being bad is one thing, it being the only officially supported IDE is the other. They should not only officially support third party efforts like Jetbrains Rider, in the past I've gone as far as saying they should discontinue Visual Studio in favor of it.

Now for the nice part: Almost all "new .NET" announcements/tutorials focus on VS Code, an IDE that sucks a whole lot less.

On another note: Transforming a 20 line T4 template took 4-5x as long as the actual compilation on the last .Net project I've seen.

Weird how experiences differ. I found VS to be one of the best IDEs I've ever used. Of course in conjunction with C#.

Yeah it's big and takes some big chunk of resources, but that has never been a problem in my daily work.

I don't think it is that under-represented in North America. There are large swaths of "flyover country" that are deeply invested in .NET and C#. It was never "hip" or "cool" for Silicon Valley, but a lot of the Fortune 500 outside of FAANG/GAFAM/what-have-you is quietly built on it. Scott Hanselman termed it the "dark matter developer" experience that most .NET stuff just doesn't trend on Reddit or HN, it just kind of quietly exists and gets things done.

The differences were always there, but they change over time. I remember seeing a map ~15 years ago showing market shares of dev stacks in different countries. If I remember correctly, Europe on it was predominantly Java and Delphi, Australia and NZ were mostly .NET, and US and Canada were a mix Java and .NET with the former having a slight edge.

It's kind of hard for me to mentally square that with the amount/types of publications that exist for it, though of course it makes sense on further thought.

What I mean is that I found it very hard to find "interesting" stuff built with it. You get the official documentation and that's it - for .Net Framework, anyway. Few blog posts about issues and their solutions, cool demonstrations or just general musings. It's like people don't care. And maybe they don't - it's just their job, after all, and they can't wait to go home to their wives and kids rather than think about some technology more than they have to.

As a newcomer (forced through an apprenticeship) who does think about technology more than he has to I found this bewildering and demotivating.

Microsoft seems to have realized this and seems to have put a reasonable amount of effort into building a community around the new .Net and making it seem exciting/interesting rather than something that's just in a really slow death spiral. Oh, and building things that one can easily get excited about. Non-nullable types come to mind.

Great observation. Search results for C# are awful. Full of 2000s style, for-profit, consultancy-selling, lukewarm-quality blogs. None of the high grade stuff enthusiastic users from other ecosystems put out. Not to beat a dead horse, but Rust is a good, contrasting example here. In the case of C#, user generated content is written during work hours. It is a worker’s language. In some other ecosystems, content is written on weekends, by enthusiasts (who might not be employed in that ecosystems as there’s no jobs available…).

Same in New Zealand.

Both of those places used to have craptons of mission-critical Delphi code. Going to .NET seems a natural transition from that.

I wouldn’t hold your breath on Maui. I hold no hope for it.

i don’t think I will ever bet on any .NET desktop UI framework again. Even MS is going to Electron or similar for their own stuff. I expect Maui to be put in maintenance mode soon or just to be forgotten.

My problem is many 3rd party companies simply are not upgrading from 4.8 which means I’m stuck on 4.8. It’s too much work for me to reproduce all of these 3rd party controls. Some of these companies are defunct, some don’t see the demand to justify even the small effort, whatever the reason the loss of backward compatibility has been a huge loss to the comercial ecosystem. Microsoft dose not have the power it used to. Practically every large tender I see requires that must be run in the browser. I’m pretty sure everyone is sick of Microsoft.

I have high long term hopes for Maui Blazor. It's such a simple thing, a bridge between native-compiled .NET code and a platform-provided web renderer. There will always be a need for both of those things in .NET, always, so the bridge seems sensible to keep alive.

Not sure about Xaml based Maui...that may well go the way of Silverlight.

Is that like Tauri except it’s dotnet instead of rust?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/build-bla...

"In a Blazor Hybrid app, Razor components run natively on the device. Components render to an embedded Web View control through a local interop channel. Components don't run in the browser, and WebAssembly isn't involved. Razor components load and execute code quickly, and components have full access to the native capabilities of the device through the .NET platform."

I'm not familiar with Tauri but skimming it seems similar. Except that Razor syntax allows C# inline with HTML so you can avoid JavaScript altogether. Maui Blazor also uses Xamarin to support mobile, and can compile to WASM to run in a browser.

(What i skimmed) https://tauri.app/v1/references/architecture/

Avalonia is a real thing and works quite well.

Uno Platform is another popular one. (I haven't tried either.)

I'm too old to believe that, even if it becomes a real thing, it won't die exactly like the rest and leave someone supporting a dead framework or doing a rewrite on the next doomed thing. Those kinds of things depend too much on the rest of the world sharing interest in keeping it alive. Apple and Google aren't going to do that unless it benefits them, and it gives them a EEE attack surface to use against MS.

Unlikely - unless they absolutely crush in terms of performance.

You should also give the Godot game engine a try, it's actually really good at making GUIs

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