[HN Gopher] Revert "Remove Hot Reload support from dotnet watch"
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Revert "Remove Hot Reload support from dotnet watch"
        
       Author : Codemonkey51
       Score  : 144 points
       Date   : 2021-10-23 21:23 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | chrismsimpson wrote:
       | I'm developing my own tools in my own language going forward.
       | Between the two languages I use professionally (Swift & C#),
       | there's enough bloat and secret sauce going in the apparently
       | open source sausage I'm still getting indigestion.
        
       | yblu wrote:
       | Follow-up blog post from .NET Director:
       | https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-hot-reload-support...
        
         | ethbr0 wrote:
         | >> _We underestimated the number of developers that are
         | dependent upon this capability in their environments across
         | scenarios, and how the CLI was being used alongside Visual
         | Studio to drive inner loop productivity by many._
         | 
         | That's a very odd way to say "modern developers don't use
         | Visual Studio."
        
         | oaiey wrote:
         | He wrote some "face keeping" Blabla but then the key fact:
         | admitting that they made a mistake and misunderstood the
         | community wish.
         | 
         | A step in the right direction.
        
       | sbelskie wrote:
       | Pretty encouraging sign given the drama the last few days. In
       | addition to the community response, it's pretty clear that a
       | number of dotnet and MSFT team members went to bat hard for this.
       | Really happy to see that they won out.
        
         | zmj wrote:
         | High-stakes bets escalated to the public forum just to maintain
         | the status quo aren't encouraging - even when the good guys
         | win.
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | Encouraging? Microsoft demonstrated here that the move wasn't
         | because of quality or that the change was unable to be in the
         | OSS version, they demonstrated that they only act a certain way
         | because of the backlash. If they would have stand their ground,
         | they would have given the image that this change didn't live up
         | to their wanted quality, instead this demonstrated that they
         | are just giving up to peer-pressure because they don't want to
         | lose "developer love".
        
           | sillysaurusx wrote:
           | If someone reverts a bad decision, then that's objectively a
           | good thing, regardless of the reasons.
        
           | sedatk wrote:
           | What's bad about not wanting to lose developer love?
        
       | dgellow wrote:
       | Well, at least we cannot say they don't listen to feedbacks.
        
       | fabian2k wrote:
       | This feels more like an internal turf war inside Microsoft. The
       | general open source strategy with .NET Core and VS Code has been
       | running long enough that I don't think it's just a smoke screen.
       | But there's probably plenty of different interests inside
       | Microsoft that are at least partially in conflict.
       | 
       | The Azure side probably doesn't care about selling Visual Studio,
       | but they care about developer mindshare and reputation. The
       | Visual Studio side seems to be in a more difficult position, I
       | assumed they can just live from the enterprise/everyone else
       | split and focus on enterprise-y stuff to still sell Visual
       | Studio. But it looks a bit to me like VS Code and the .NET cli
       | have become more of a competition than they'd like.
       | 
       | And the worst mistake here might not have been pissing off the
       | .NET community, but pissing of the people working on .NET for
       | Microsoft. I mean in the end this is the same, but pissing off
       | the people working on .NET would result in a much more thorough
       | destruction of trust with the community in the end.
       | 
       | But I have zero inside knowledge here, might just be weird
       | decisions driven by internal politics or whatever.
        
         | graycat wrote:
         | Thanks! Again, Hacker News has some utility!
         | 
         | For my startup, I typed in 100,000 lines of text, 24,000
         | programming language statements, in .NET, maybe 4.0 and not
         | _core_ , and got it running apparently as intended.
         | 
         | Then some unpredictable external events got me pulled off the
         | work, but now I'm eager to get back to it! Actually am doing
         | some _work_ , collecting initial data before the Alpha test
         | (hopefully here at Hacker News).
         | 
         | But I didn't use _VS_ -- which I assume abbreviates Visual
         | Studio (and not _virtual system_ , _virtual storage_ , or some
         | such). I looked at VS, started a _project_ or whatever, got a
         | directory with about 50 files, gave up on understanding what
         | all those files were for, and, thus, gave up on VS. So, I did
         | all the typing for the 100,000 just using my favorite text
         | editor -- I was super happy to do that.
         | 
         | But a fast Google search shows some documentation for a .NET
         | CORE CLI (command line interface). I tend to like command lines
         | because they are explicit and easy to drive with scripts --
         | often better on those two criteria than _graphical user
         | interfaces_!
         | 
         | So, with a little Google searching, I found
         | 
         | dotnet command
         | 
         | 10/01/2021 7 minutes to read
         | 
         | at                  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
         | us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet
         | 
         | which looks like relatively good documentation of some command
         | line programs for _building_ .NET CORE applications! Looks
         | good!
         | 
         | Soooo, at Hacker News, learned something that I might actually
         | use!
        
         | S04dKHzrKT wrote:
         | I don't remember how old this is org chart graphic is, but it
         | seems like it still applies.
         | 
         | https://i.imgur.com/qZ0RDYw.jpg
        
           | bradfitz wrote:
           | Original source: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-
           | charts
        
         | oaiey wrote:
         | There are people on record that it was the Azure division head
         | Scott Guthrie who gave permission to open source ASP.NET Core
         | (which at the time was part of Azure). Later the asp.net team
         | merged with the .net team and brought the open sourcing with
         | them.
         | 
         | VS has no place anymore. The velocity and mindshare is with VS
         | Code. VS with its visual designers had its place .. but desktop
         | is dead and Xamarin competes with frameworks without costly
         | IDEs.
        
           | creato wrote:
           | Has anything ever actually replaced VS?
           | 
           | I've only ever used VS for hobby/side projects, and even 10
           | years ago it was leaps and bounds better than what I have to
           | use for my professional day to day work now (code completion,
           | debugger are the two things that I miss basically every day).
           | 
           | The tools that I use now have these features, but they're
           | such a joke in comparison. The code completion has no notion
           | of "code", it's just looking for similar words.
        
             | moogly wrote:
             | For many workloads (at least .NET), JetBrains Rider.
             | 
             | For C/C++ on Windows, well, you have VS Code and also
             | JetBrains CLion, but IMO CLion is surprisingly rougher than
             | Rider, even though it's older. You can get stuff done
             | though.
        
             | oaiey wrote:
             | VS Code and language servers have leveled the game a lot.
             | Regular Editing is pretty much on par. Debugging and
             | diagnostic they are still strong.
        
             | jimmaswell wrote:
             | I use VS and VS Code for different things today. VS is much
             | better for something it's made for like a C# project with a
             | solution/projects, and VS code is great as something that
             | works with an existing file structure like an old Java
             | project or a folder full of random Python scripts.
             | 
             | VS Code still has good code completion/etc but it doesn't
             | seem able to match the instant responsiveness of VS.
        
           | fabian2k wrote:
           | I mean at this point I have truly no idea what I'm talking
           | about. But I would always bet on Azure against Visual Studio
           | in a fight. The earning potential for Azure is simply far,
           | far higher than for Visual Studio. AWS has shown that the
           | cloud is a recipe for printing money, and I trust Microsoft
           | to follow the money.
        
             | oaiey wrote:
             | Yes. And IMHO Azure wins. But there are managers, goals and
             | compromises. IMHO this was a compromise. The Azure division
             | is interested in a universal available runtime. The tooling
             | group provides a free editor but had goals of earning VS
             | licenses.
             | 
             | I can only guess but I think Big Scott, lesser Scott and
             | Julia will have a meeting soon. The .NET community is at a
             | boiling point and they should really avoid a community
             | which takes dev productivity in their own hands. Because
             | that is the garantueed end of visual studio.
        
       | radicalbyte wrote:
       | This is good, but given the amount of terrible decisions in the
       | last few weeks from Microsoft I've lost all trust in them. This
       | will pass, and they'll sneakily do something else.
       | 
       | It's clear from the reaction of the well known alt.net people
       | that this problem is strategic, and coming from above. Nothing in
       | this move signifies a change in that strategy.
        
         | aliswe wrote:
         | as i mentioned elsewhere in the discussion of this post, the
         | chairman or w/e left their position after the debaucle
        
         | tytrdev wrote:
         | Weird take IMO. I don't trust MS and strive to stay away from
         | their products where possible. Their acquisitions of a lot of
         | OSS stuff make that pretty hard these days, though...
         | 
         | But I find it weird to expect perfect decision making out of an
         | organization with hundreds of thousands of employees with a
         | global influence. I don't know any individuals with perfect
         | decision making skills, so when you take the union of that and
         | add hierarchy, I certainly wouldn't expect a system of
         | perfection. Especially when perfection is defined by some
         | relative/personal standard.
         | 
         | I agree with your opinions that Microsoft will do weird stuff
         | going forward and that this decision means nothing. It's also
         | irrelevant to me since I don't use .NET for absolutely
         | anything.
         | 
         | But if your "trust" in an org is based on them not making
         | "terrible decisions", I think it may be impossible to actually
         | trust any org. Since inevitably at scale every org will make
         | bad choices. Not criticizing you, just thinking out loud.
        
       | usui wrote:
       | A hot-button issue gets corrected now, but then they continue to
       | make subtler moves. Why say you love open-source if you keep the
       | juicy bits of Visual Studio Code closed-source? More like you
       | love open-source... for making money.
       | 
       | Microsoft is a big company with changing microcultures all the
       | time. They alone as a whole should not take credit for their
       | open-source endeavors. In general, big contributor names should
       | be emphasized more, so that we know when they leave Microsoft or
       | the project.
        
         | duddyggvrvg wrote:
         | I don't understand the complaint when the open-source community
         | seem perfectly happy to provide free labor. That's all it ever
         | was. The rest like like name emphasis is just culture.
        
         | johnfn wrote:
         | > Why say you love open-source if you keep the juicy bits of
         | Visual Studio Code closed-source? More like you love open-
         | source... for making money.
         | 
         | Man, I really dislike this mindset. Sure, it's disappointing
         | that some pieces of VSCode aren't open-sourced, but man, they
         | open-sourced an entire IDE and plugin ecosystem. That's such a
         | fantastic contribution to the open source community, and yet I
         | see comments like yours that treat it as if it's negligible and
         | somehow want even more? The work they did even includes a bunch
         | work on existing plugins they don't even own - I know this
         | because my plugin was one which they got their engineers to do
         | a couple months of volunteer work on.
         | 
         | If MS wants to retain a few small pieces of tech to pay the
         | engineers that make a fantastic IDE and ecosystem free and open
         | source for everyone, so be it.
        
         | angelzen wrote:
         | Inexorably, the locus of making money moves from using one's
         | skill and ability to build software to skimming rent off
         | enormous capital investments: billions of ad impressions,
         | billions of e-commerce transactions, millions of cloud cpus,
         | 
         | Somebody built awesome software and dares charging money for
         | it? Bring on the tar and feathers!
        
         | oaiey wrote:
         | The key difference between the two situation is, that the vs
         | code team does it juicy features as a secret project. Dotnet
         | watch was developed, tested and licensed in the public and
         | stripped out last second.
         | 
         | VS Code behavior you can accept as a open core or commercial
         | plugin thing. The other thing was just a theft.
        
           | oaiey wrote:
           | I want to extend in this a bit: Scott, Damian, Scott, David,
           | Rich, Immo ... If you read this: fight for a clear ahead of
           | time separation of commercial and non commercial features.
           | Many of us can understand that Microsoft still sells dev
           | tools but we do not like bad communication and stuff taking
           | away which have been there already (at the same time we also
           | think that .NET can only become truly awesome when free tools
           | exists ... because fur your competition these exists).
        
       | holografix wrote:
       | I just wrote a comment on the other post about this.
       | 
       | I wonder how this decision was made _behind the scenes_.
       | 
       | Either some negotiation happened and the Visual Studio team got
       | some concessions (smaller target?) or it was mandated from the
       | top.
       | 
       | Both alternatives do not bode well for the VS team.
        
         | aliswe wrote:
         | in large organizations like these there will always be desync
         | issues, though.
        
         | ethbr0 wrote:
         | At this point, VS needs to be put under VSC management.
         | 
         | You saw the same crap with Office vs everything new.
        
           | blibble wrote:
           | yep, modern Visual Studio is a terrible experience end-to-end
           | 
           | it takes at least 3 minutes to start, the UI designer takes
           | 30+ seconds to appear, and starting your process for
           | debugging takes 10+ seconds
           | 
           | every single autocomplete takes a few seconds to appear
           | 
           | even opening a 100 line .c file takes 10+ seconds, and they
           | KNOW its bad because it pops up a dialog with a progress bar!
           | 
           | this is all on a azure "cloud" instance with 8 cores, 64gb of
           | ram and SSD, with a clean install every 2 weeks
           | 
           | not to mention nearly all of the dialogs are as awful and
           | exactly the same as they were in VS6 (e.g. run
           | configurations)
           | 
           | and it's super expensive
           | 
           | meanwhile VSC is snappy and free, and the JetBrains IDEs of
           | 2011 run rings round it
        
             | tester756 wrote:
             | I'm using VS almost everyday, sometimes even 2 or 3
             | instances at the time and it does not reflect my
             | experience, but the difference is
             | 
             | >even opening a 100 line .c
             | 
             | that I'm using it for C#.
        
             | mrec wrote:
             | I haven't used VS in years, but the only time I've seen
             | Windows crash to BIOS in the last two decades was during a
             | VS install.
        
       | tester756 wrote:
       | I'm not sure what to feel
       | 
       | On first hand it'd be weird to expect MS to do everything for
       | free
       | 
       | On the other hand the way they handled it (initially they made it
       | free, OSS and promised fanciness) is kinda poor.
       | 
       | On yet another hand maybe they just really sucked at
       | communication, priorities and stuff this time? hard to say.
       | 
       | On yet another hand2 .NET maintainers are really open about a lot
       | of stuff, it's easy to talk to them - let it be asp .net or
       | roslyn/compiler project which makes me giving them the benefit of
       | doubt
        
       | Etheryte wrote:
       | As a small aside to the general discussion, I don't think I've
       | ever seen an accepted reviews list that long. To me that in and
       | of itself speaks volumes about how the development team feels
       | about the business politics going on here.
        
         | wolpoli wrote:
         | It would be nice if that's the case, but the reviewers are just
         | the general public.
        
           | Etheryte wrote:
           | Oh, sorry, my bad in that case. I was not aware that they
           | allowed anyone to approve in their repositories.
        
       | dccoolgai wrote:
       | All this incident has done for me is to confirm how much _less_
       | evil MS is than 1) It used to be. 2) Almost every other Big Tech
       | operation these days.
        
         | rmsaksida wrote:
         | I don't know how "evil" they are, but this incident made me
         | drop any plans of ever building a web project with .NET Core. I
         | like C# and would love to find an excuse to use it, but I'm not
         | relying on a framework that MS will intentionally cripple
         | because of corporate interests.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Recent and related:
       | 
       |  _Can we trust Microsoft with open source?_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231 - Oct 2021 (223
       | comments)
        
       | Hamcha wrote:
       | If they want .NET to really go mainstream outside Windows, they
       | have to back off pushing for VS so hard.
       | 
       | So far, they have been more convincing in getting me back into
       | .NET than they have getting me back into Visual Studio, locking
       | .NET features inside VS would just alienate me from both.
        
       | atarian wrote:
       | 1. Embrace <-- you are now here
       | 
       | 2. Extend
       | 
       | 3. Extinguish
       | 
       | 4. Go to #1
        
         | solarkraft wrote:
         | You haven't updated your slides. They're already at
         | "Extinguish" at some points. This was (kind of) about one of
         | them.
        
         | oaiey wrote:
         | You cannot EEE yourself.
         | 
         | They do a lot of community related crap but this is not EEE.
        
           | pxc wrote:
           | and yet Microsoft attempted it, before our very eyes
        
       | MauranKilom wrote:
       | Maybe I'm naive, but I fully buy the explanation of "we decided
       | to not have it in the OSS version due to constrained resources"
       | (if I'm parsing the discussion correctly). That was evidently not
       | the smartest move, but attributing it to malice is taking it
       | quite a step further.
       | 
       | Change my view.
        
         | oaiey wrote:
         | It was done.
         | 
         | It was first done and presented in dotnet watch.
         | 
         | The community contributes a lot, why not letting them maintain
         | it.
         | 
         | VS fights a uphill battle to stay relevant.
         | 
         | It empowers VS Code devs to do visual stuff. The only thing VS
         | is still good in.
         | 
         | ... Got bored of writing more.
        
       | solarkraft wrote:
       | It's nice that they walked back on immediately blowing up the
       | whole .NET ecosystem.
       | 
       | But it's not like everything is fine again. The Foundation is
       | apparently a bit of a mess and the C# debugger is STILL not
       | available on VScode versions built from source.
       | 
       | That and that they would ever even consider doing this still
       | discourages serious investment into .NET.
        
         | aliswe wrote:
         | That person who messed up just left the foundation btw.
        
           | sedatk wrote:
           | Who's that?
        
       | __s wrote:
       | Previous thread from today about .NET hot-reload being removed:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231
       | 
       | Always remain vigil
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-23 23:00 UTC)