[HN Gopher] .NET on Linux: What a Contrast
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       .NET on Linux: What a Contrast
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2024-02-03 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (two-wrongs.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (two-wrongs.com)
        
       | Doches wrote:
       | Not just JetBrains: surely Unity has been another strong driver
       | of cross-platform .Net use. If nothing else it's certainly
       | provided a reason to use C# for folks not coming from a Windows
       | platform app developer background!
       | 
       | Certainly for me C# is "the Unity language." I'm dimly aware that
       | it has some vague Microsoft association, but I don't think I've
       | even seen a piece of MS tooling for it in...many years. Unity +
       | JetBrains Rider has been a pleasant gamedev environment.
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | Unity is definitely a huge reason that C# has continued to grow
         | outside the enterprise-y space.
         | 
         | It's unfortunate that they're still stuck on their old fork of
         | Mono, because Microsoft's tooling (and their runtime) is really
         | good. You can write a C# game in Godot now and seamlessly use
         | the Visual Studio debugger without any janky plugin.
        
           | ClimaxGravely wrote:
           | Have you had trouble debugging unity with VS in the past? I
           | can't recall ever having any issues personally.
        
           | qwytw wrote:
           | > stuck on their old fork of Mono
           | 
           | Didn't they switch to .NET Core years ago? Of course for many
           | platforms you have to use their CPP transpiler which
           | complicates some things that might be possible in normal C#.
        
       | chrsw wrote:
       | Can one .NET GUI application look and feel native on Windows and
       | Linux?
        
         | generichuman wrote:
         | Depends on what GUI library you're using, same as every other
         | programming environment. There's GTK Sharp for C#.
        
         | jiggawatts wrote:
         | Yes, but the portable GUI frameworks by Microsoft themselves
         | are generally not very good, and they tend to be abandoned
         | after a couple of years.
         | 
         | Avalonia is developed outside of the Microsoft corporate
         | madness and seems to be slowly becoming the defacto cross-
         | platform framework because it is expected to last a bit longer
         | than a manager's attention span: https://avaloniaui.net/
        
           | FirmwareBurner wrote:
           | That's rich considering that many of the new Windows apps
           | shipped out of the box with Windows 11 are web based and use
           | some sort of Edge based Electron-like container.
        
       | asabla wrote:
       | It has taken .net and Microsoft a long time to get to this point.
       | But I do feel we're in a really good state for .net development.
       | 
       | I do agree what kqr mentions in the blog post, that the state of
       | .net wasn't really that great during the core era (especially
       | during 1-3). But after hitting .net core 3.1 things really took a
       | turn.
       | 
       | And now with .Net 8 (note that core is not part of the naming
       | anymore), things are looking great.
       | 
       | The two things which lags behind in both experience and is still
       | UX related.
       | 
       | MAUI was meant to be this super cool new UX tech, which would
       | save us from electron. But it never happen, and may never do it
       | in the future either.
       | 
       | The second one is Blazor. It's such a mixed bag of what the
       | experience is. Sometimes it's so seamless and nice...and then you
       | hit some weird LSP stuff and away goes type checking, hinting and
       | syntax highlighting. But there is hope ig guess.
       | 
       | If you're interested in writing C# and .Net code on a Linux
       | machine. Then wait no further. VS Code (with .Net dev kit
       | extension) works great.
       | 
       | And if you're like (which prefers neovim), things are pretty good
       | as well. Just don't expect to have a good experience with razor
       | pages and/or blazor (when using Neovim instead of VS Code).
        
         | generichuman wrote:
         | > If you're interested in writing C# and .Net code on a Linux
         | machine. Then wait no further. VS Code (with .Net dev kit
         | extension) works great.
         | 
         | Unless you're writing Roslyn source generators. You can only
         | debug them with (non-code) Visual Studio on Windows in my
         | experience. Rider does not work well either.
        
       | politelemon wrote:
       | > Today, I still write .net code (for a different employer) and I
       | can barely tell whether I'm on Windows or Linux.
       | 
       | One of the most interesting and nicest outcomes of this has been
       | wsl2, which has made Linux development in enterprises available,
       | and palatable to policies and security requirements. While
       | keeping that nice seamless experience. Without it my only choices
       | were a mediocre experience directly on windows with its odd
       | choices, or a mediocre experience with "we have UNIX at home" on
       | macos with its handwaved away deficiencies.
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-03 23:00 UTC)