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Hi there! I'm a developer on the .Net team, and I heavily work on our IDE offerings. You can absolutely write a small program that is only a CLI, and our tooling is heavily tailored to make that a great experience. First off, you don't need to use an IDE for this at all (if you don't want to). You can just do `dotnet new ...` from the command line to spit out what is needed to do CLI development.

If you do want to use an IDE, there are many choices available. First party options include Visual Studio itself (which has varying skus depending on what you're interested in). For just CLI development, the Community sku would work great. Then there is VSCode, which has both the open-source "C# Extension" (also built by us), and the closed-source add-on "DevKit" which enhances that further with more features".

Regardless of which environment you use, writing a CLI is extremely simple, and the language and environment cater to it. A simple 'Hello World' for C# literally is just:

    Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

And you can grow on that as you want to flesh out whatever your CLI needs to do. If you're interested in doing anything web/server related, then ASP.NET Core also fits into this very simply, allowing you to stand up a web server from your CLI app trivially.

We def want .Net, including the language, runtime, and tooling to scale all the way from these sorts of experiences to the "enterprisey" space, in a clean and consistent fashion.

If you do run into issues with any of the above, def let us know. You can see all the work we do in .Net over at github.com/dotnet/... Including what's being worked on now, and what we're continuing to invest in for future releases.

Thanks!

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at_a_remove|2 years ago

That's great to know!

You may not know this, but ESRI is more or less the Microsoft of GIS (Geographic Information Systems). While they largely settled on Python, some of the newer "add-ins" for ArcGIS Pro rely on .NET, instead. As such, I thought it would be a good idea to begin looking into .NET, C#, and the like to see if I could develop some add-ins myself.

I'm one of those solo "dark matter" developers who ends up writing middleware, custom ETLs, and such that almost nobody will ever see and I had begun to despair of finding tooling for "the little guy." I will look into the SKUs you mentioned, it gives me some hope.