HACKER Q&A
📣 aredirect

What's preventing you from using .NET?


I had the chance to do research on C#, F#, .NET (I must admit, I'm still confused with all the various names and versions), and ASP.NET (core?). I genuinely find the technology stack intriguing and am considering using it in a few side projects. If things progress well, I might propose it to my employer. What factors are hindering your adoption of .NET? Is it because of the Microsoft label? concerns about the desktop GUI support? License? Could it be related to tooling, or are software requirements and packaging considerations playing a role? or something else?

  👤 wg0 Accepted Answer ✓
That it should work flawlessly on Linux. That it should be deployable without any "enterprise application container" or server software that requires specific licensing.

And that it should have first class developer and IDE tooling on every platform.

All of the above are actually true for Go, Rust, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS etc but I'm no so sure that application development and deployment experience on Linux for .NET would be as first class, battle tested and widely documented.

For me, development+deployment for backend services, Linux is non-negotiable.

👤 simonblack
The fact that I see no incentive or 'raison d'etre' to use it to start with?

The question is a bit like "Why aren't you using a bulldozer to drive to work?" or "What's preventing you from wearing running spikes around the office?"

👤 MattGaiser
This is admittedly more a social opinion, but except for one social enterprise job, Unity, and Microsoft, every job posting I can remember and every recruiter who has sent me a C# job has been from a crappy tech body shop, a tech consulting shop, or somewhere where technical decision making clearly starts and ends with whatever the salesperson from Microsoft has to sell.

So a major reason I don't consider it for anything is that few places where I might like to work seem to use it while the low paying and non-technical corporate places seem to love it. Anecdotally in my network, people say the language is fine, but, and there is nearly always a "but", they mention Microsoft and being tied to Azure.