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Microsoft has first-party support for .NET on linux and it's open source. Their commitment to non-windows and non-.NET platforms has only increased over time.


They also have a history of randomly deciding to dump a technology (including full languages) too, leaving those invested in it holding the bag.

I like F# too, but I'll stick with one of it's non-MS controlled alternatives.


Not with their core languages. For example, Windows still comes bundled with the old VB6 runtimes and Microsoft still supports the language even if they no longer add features to it. I'm not really sure of any major Microsoft languages that Microsoft has just dumped, unless you count their smaller more esoteric ones.

Also keep in mind that .NET Core is not only open source, but comes with complete protection from any patents Microsoft might have. The only thing Microsoft can sue people over is the .NET Core trademark itself.


> still supports the language even if they no longer add features to it

This is what I assumed the parent post was referring to. Mostly because it mirrors complaints I've heard (and maybe had) about the .net gui story. WinForms -> WPF -> whatever the windows store app framework was called -> I think MAUI now?


That's hardly a fault with Microsoft though. WinForms is fundamentally flawed and far better alternatives now exist, it'd be foolish to continue investing in WinForms. You can still use WinForms and .NET Framework on Windows 11, just don't expect new features, which is okay.


J# is one that comes to mind. Spent some time learning this only to have it dropped the next year.


Wasn't J# designed to be a transitional language for Java devs migrating to .NET/C#? (Wikipedia calls it a transitional language, too) Sure it wouldn't last long.


any software project or language can die, but I honestly struggle to think of a company that has a better history of long term support than Microsoft. You can fault Microsoft for quite a few things but their ability to maintain software and provide stable interfaces for devs is second to none.


MS discontinues a UI library project and then hypes up a new one every few years. Today Blazor and Maui are hot, but there's a lot of abandonware that came before.

You can see it in Windows too, where you can burrow deeper and deeper into progressively older settings dialogs, because they reshuffle the Control Panel every few years.


OTOH even stuff as old as Windows Forms (which literally shipped with .NET 1.0 - that's 2001!) still works and it actually has maintainers. You don't have to chase the shiny new stuff.


To be fair. Creating a good cross UI framework is hard. Winforms wouldn’t cross over to OS X / linux. WPF was too heavily tied to Windows. Silver light was a compeditor to flash and both of those died. Now we are up to Maui and Avalion? Blazor is more silverlight replacement imo.


Also, Winforms and WPF were designed before Microsoft embraced Linux and started making .NET truly cross-platform. Starting over with a new cross-platform UI framework sounds like a reasonable thing to do.


I hear some of IBM's stuff has a pretty long history to it.


For running, yes. For developing, no.


What? I do occasional dotnet development on Linux. Using the dotnet SDK which is from Microsoft, and VS Code which is also from Microsoft.


Their support for VSCode is pretty considerable and reached the point where I'm comfortable working on non-GUI applications in C# in it a while ago, and from a UI perspective prefer it to Visual Studio.


What part of the .NET SDK isn't supported on Linux?


I think they are referring to visual studio support which doesn’t exist on linux.

But if you wanna use VSCode or Rider then the support is 100%


Maybe, but the discussion itself was about Microsoft's commitment to open-source. Open-sourcing VS Professional, traditionally (and still) an enterprise tool, would be a bridge too far. The commenter that started this debate called the article a straw man, which is ironic.


Huh?




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