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 11 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 27 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 2 minutes 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.