Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Mon, 2 Dec 2024 15:21:29 -0800, John Ames wrote:

The downside to C# is that being MS's baby, as far as I've ever seen it
pretty much locks you into a Windows environment. Yes, technically Mono
is A Thing That Exists, but it's about as pleasant as the disease with
which it aptly shares a name. Java, whatever else you want to say about
it, is equally mediocre on any platform.

Yes and no. I have the dotnet SDK on my Fedora machine and an app that
given an artist or track title queries the itunes database and returns
either other tracks by the artist or covers of the title by various
artists. The catch is it's command line. So far, there hasn't been a
successful GUI system although there have been other attempts than Mnoo.

Even on Windows  'dotnet build --runtime linux-x64' will build a package
that executes on Linux in a separate subdirectory otherwise it builds for
the current OS/architecture.

Long story which Microsoft managed to obduscate with their versioning
but .NET Core was a cross platform project while .NET Framework was
Windows. .NET Core's last version was 3.1 which overlapped with .NET
Framework 4.8.  In 2020 they dropped the 'Core' so .NET 5.0 and above are
the descendants of .NET Core 3.1, not Framework.  Confused?

ASP.NET became ASP.NET Core, although now it's usually just called
ASP.NET.

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/aspnet/what-is-aspnet

And there you have the culmination of the plan, cross platform backends in
C#. I suppose if you're a masochist you could use F# or VB. It fits in
with WSL. The bet is on the cloud and Linux instances are cheaper than
Windows Server instances, even on Azure.

.NET MAUI supposedly targets Android, macOS, iOS, and Windows and is a
follow on to Xamarin which followed Mono. The noticeable omission is
Linux. I'm not sure what the long term business plan is but the one thing
MS doesn't seem to be interested in is building desktop apps for Linux.