C# was my 2nd programming language after VB6. I remember in the early 2000s when I was 12, using my best friends computer to try and download VB .NET (he had faster internet) just because it was free, then being extremely disappointed when I couldnt just run my VB6 projects I wanted to run on it... Some years later, during 2007 ~ 2009 I tried out C# and that was life changing.

I wound up going to college after working retail at Disney, then after college, my first job was supposed to be C# but they didn't have the project approved, so I got my first exposure to Python - which I loved, then JavaScript - which I hated but have a love-hate with to this day, and finally C#, but it wasn't .NET 3.5 no, they started using .NET Core, which was... something else, lots of teeth pulling during the original .NET Core days.

So many wonderful projects made with .NET my only complaint is I wish Microsoft would make a cross-platform GUI stack they'd actually stick to, and make it work on Linux too. ;)

I know there's alternatives but nothing beats telling your coworkers "lets just use the built-in" when choosing a GUI stack.

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HeckFeck 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>I wish Microsoft would make a cross-platform GUI stack

I know this may as well be beseeched of the King of Nod, but if they just made WPF cross platform I'd be delighted beyond words.

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giancarlostoro 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'd be okay with this, I'd also be okay with MAUI (which... is a whole behemoth of how to make UIs), but anything, hell I would take them porting WinForms somehow into a cross-platform .NET thing that runs everywhere (Mono used to!), I just want anything at this point.

XAML was supposed to become an open spec, not sure why they have so many teams making so many different ways to make UIs. Then there's those "Windows 8" apps, or the "Universal Windows Apps" which are poorly named, you cannot run any of them on previous versions of Windows, if anything Win32 apps are universal apps.

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joseda-hg 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn't this exactly the point of Avalonia?

	▲	joshheitzman 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes and Avalonia was created by not-Microsoft as Microsoft has repeatedly proven itself incapable of doing it.

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Ungh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We abandoned .Net years ago before our third major product rewrite prompted by withdrawal of various bits of tech they said was the next greatest thing. AppFabric, WWF, WCF and Silverlight hit us hard.

Once burned, twice shy.

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giancarlostoro 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Silverlight hit us hard.

So about that... when I started using .NET Core, it was bleeding edge and shiny, but it was to rewrite a Silverlight application, the only way to run it was Firefox ESR 54 (I think it was 54?) we thought "oh this is easy" only to find out that it was a colossal nightmare, EF didn't support some things, including Shapefiles, we had to force the support, get back a WKT from SQL Server, and send one back when we did updates, basically Entity Framework was mostly useless.

I also reverse scaffolded the existing database into EF compatible classes, so that saved us a ton of effort, the original idea was to be backwards compatible.

Best part? It never got used, when we found out they weren't using the project, my boss said, screw it, lets remake it in Python I know we can build it up quicker, and sure enough, it was done quicker than the C# rewrite, fastest rewrite I ever did, because he figured out the key things they actually needed, and trimmed the requirements to just those key things.

Sometimes rewrites don't need to be 1:1 especially if it's an internal only tool.

Anyway, lots of blood, sweat, tears, stress, etc from me as it was my first job in tech.

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pjc50 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's fair enough, but the dust has largely settled on dotnet core. The death of Silverlight was long ago. I think the only thing at risk of abandonment is the native UI situation, which is a mess.

	▲	alternatex 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Hard to say what's native in Windows anymore. I imagine Win32 APIs and more recently Windows App SDK? The most supported UI frameworks from MS for Windows are WPF and WinUI 3. UWP is dead and WinForms (even though closest to something native to Windows) is probably going to end up in the land of forgotten (sorry nostalgic Windows devs, you have to face it eventually). A "mess" is an understatement when the people who themselves develop Windows desktop apps have trouble explaining the landscape.

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verst 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used to be in the anti .NET camp but for Enterprise applications .NET has been delightful and upgrading between versions has been trivial since .NET 6.

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CodeCompost 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We've always stuck to the server-side web technologies: WebForms (now very much obsolete), MVC, Web API + Angular, Blazor.

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mandeepj an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Never chase the shiniest toy at work! Give it a year or two to settle down first.

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npodbielski an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

WCF, Silverlight... They were terrible. New .net stack is much better.

	▲	WorldMaker a minute ago \| parent [-]
		WCF had some good ideas and if you followed its best practices migrating to other networking stacks should have been straightforward. Delete your complex Bindings XML configs and just write implementations of your Contract interfaces and figure out where you need to dependency inject the new implementations. If you were deep enough into WCF you might have even had mock implementations you could bootstrap from. That concept of "define an RPC interface and let the platform fill it" was ancient before WCF and continues to this day (I've got a bunch of tabs open for Cloudflare Durable Objects right now). The legacy problem with WCF was not but long term backward compatibility with the Bindings abstractions and XML config junk and SOAP Stack RPC. Without WCF native in the box in .NET 5+ it is harder (but not impossible) to build SOAP RPC monoliths. But so few businesses actually need SOAP and can't just switch to something more RESTful. Silverlight was maybe ahead of its time given the growing popularity of Blazor WASM.

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anthk 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

VB6 clone written in Rust:

https://github.com/iBobX/RapidR

Not compatible, but you can use it in a cross-platform way.

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dude250711 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> I wish Microsoft would make a cross-platform GUI stack they'd actually stick to

Sinofsky left a lasting damage. The way things go with LLMs, it might be now pure app-specific Rust instead of any common frameworks....