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Comment on Ask HN: Why is .NET never talked about as an option for solo/small team dev?

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I used to work at a .NET shop. The reason I wouldn’t personally use .NET is MS lock-in. Open source is basically non-existent. Documentation is really bad for getting anything done in a headless way. I don’t enjoy Remote Desktop or running Windows in the cloud.

And while .NET is batteries included like Rails, I just don’t enjoy using it. The docs and frameworks aren’t written for nimble startups, but slow-moving enterprise companies. I know modern C# allows me to code like Ruby/Python/JS, but all the docs are written like 1990s Java. And the frameworks are designed that way too.

.Net has been (_almost_) entirely open source for years now. The whole closed source and Windows-bound .Net Framework is a legacy thing of the past now, since .Net Core (which is now named .Net) everything but the debugger is open source. It's all on GitHub. You can do all your C# development on Linux nowadays, too, with VSCode or Rider.

Open source is basically non-existent.

I think he meant that open source third party add-on packages for .NET were basically non-existent. Not .NET itself. Your "_almost_" qualification has me concerned. Over the decades I've almost been fooled many times by Microsoft's claims of being open and/or interoperable only to find out that it's "almost".

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