With this release, .NET reshapes the way we build intelligent, cloud-native applications and high-traffic services that scale on demand. Whether you’re deploying to Linux or Windows, using containers or a cloud app model of your choice, .NET 8 makes building these apps easier. It includes a set of proven libraries that are used today by the many high-scale services at Microsoft to help you with fundamental challenges around observability, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and more.
Integrate large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT directly into your .NET app. Use a single powerful component model to handle all your web UI needs with Blazor. Deploy your mobile applications to the latest version of iOS and Android with .NET MAUI. Discover new language enhancements that make your code more concise and expressive with C# 12.
It’s still wild to me to that Microsoft provides detailed installation instructions for .NET for a variety of Linux distributions, down to stuff like Alpine.
People love to hate on msft for the things they do in the consumer software world like Windows and Office, but they’re doing incredibly cool stuff with C#, .net core, VS code, and the things I think come from “devdiv”. It is a shame more people can’t separate the two.
C# is nice in many ways, I don’t have a huge issue with it. Its Good enough for many things, I think the main issue is its not fabulous at anything. Its not terrible at anything either. I haven’t used it extensively since version 4, so my personal gripes with it may not be an issue anymore.
All the stuff that came from their Azure/cloud team has been pretty awesome. Even Windows doesn’t suck “on the inside”. It’s just that they leave it vulnerable because of it’s horrible defaults, which makes it require performance tanking nonsense like Windows Defender (which is also inadequate by default). And of course, they can’t figure out how to sell it, so they nixed their dedicated team, and are loading it up with spyware/adware, which sucks the life out of it as a viable platform.
They could make Windows “not suck,” but they haven’t done it, and no one should use it.
(Office/Outlook is another story, with some rhymes – the cloud version isn’t bad, but their desktop offerings are shoot yourself in the foot horrible…)
BTW, the reason they can’t sell it is almost exclusively that they charge too much. If they sold if for like $40 it’d be fine (yes, I know you CAN get it for that price – but that is irrelevant). $130 is ridiculous for the hobbled “home” version, and $200 for the complete “pro” edition is insane (especially with all the spyware they ship now).
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/shop/windows-operating-systems
Azure has had some *scary* scary vulnerabilities, that really want to make me avoid it despite the decent prices and services.
Totally agree about .net Core and VSCode. Plus the work they’ve done to support Linux, Mac, languages like Python and Ruby, other dev chain tools like Github, etc, it’s all really cool. But people have a long memory and many are still pretty scarred from the 90s and early 2000s.
You mean that Microsoft has stopped shady tactics since ?
It’s a godsend honestly for me on Void Linux, as Pinta is my favorite image editor and there isn’t a Void package for it. Building .NET using Micrsoft’s instructions is simple and quick, and building Pinta afterwards is just as easy. I’d love if one of the Void devs would take on Pinta as a package but until that happens, it’s a trivial task.
I do find it amusing that there is a Pinta package for OpenBSD of all things, but not for many of the better Linux distros. It’s an excellent editor that was born right here on OSNews[1], and I feel there may be some bias in the Linux community in general due to it being written in .NET.
[1] https://www.osnews.com/story/22843/introducing-pinta-a-gtk-clone-of-paintnet/
I do wonder what Gnome would be like now if Gnome and mono founder had won over other gnome devs and made c# the lingua franca of gnome. Ultimately desktop applications are very much not nearly as important as they used to be, but it would have been interesting to see.
Funnily enough they invented Vala, a language closely similar to C# that nobody else uses.
I’d forgotten Gnome/Mono/Ximian. How different things might have been!
It is one of the most surprising stories in tech.
Ximian pivoted from building Linux desktop apps to building dev tools that let you use Mono ( .NET ) to target iOS and Android.. Technically the latter is Xamarin but it was all the same people.
Microsoft bought Xamarin. So, what happened to their tech? Well, today .NET ships with two runtimes and one of them is Mono ( still what gets used on iOS and Android ). Xamarin Forms is now called Microsoft MAUI. The old Xamarin Studio IDE is now Visual Studio for Mac. After years of people predicting Microsoft would shut Mono down, they ended up baking Mono into their own core product. Almost every .NET dev installs Mono on their machine. Who saw that coming?
Most of the Ximian era .NET apps are abandoned these days: Banshee, Tomboy, F-Spot, and friends. Even Pinta is pretty rare. Its too bad though. The way things worked out, embracing .NET more broadly back then could have resulted in some incredible apps by now.
.NET still shows up in Open Source though. I use Jellyfin as my media server and it is a .NET application.