[bananas]

I've been through EVERY ASP.net update on every version of .net and every MVC update from CTP2 onwards, dealt with WWF being canned and rewritten, moved APIs between old SOAP stuff (asmx), WCF and WebAPI and rewritten swathes of ASP VBnand C++ COM code, ported EF stuff to later versions and worked around piles of framework bugs including the MS11-100 fiasco. That and been left royally in the shit with silverlight.

Not one of the above has actually improved the product we produce and are all reactionary "we might get left in the shit again" changes.

I'm really tired of it now.

[MartinCron]

Not one of the above has actually improved the product we produce

You didn't see an improvement from early versions of .NET to later versions? No improvement from WebForms to ASP.NET MVC? I have a very hard time believing that. The system is SO MUCH more mature than it used to be.

[tonyedgecombe]

I think the point is the end user doesn't see any of the benefits when they are using your application.

[wvenable]

In my opinion, it's not really any different outside of the Microsoft bubble except outside you're dealing with different vendors. In the time that all these technology changes by Microsoft, node.js came out of nothing, PHP got namespaces and package management, Python 3 became a thing nobody uses, Rails has several high-profile security bugs, etc, etc, etc.

It's the nature of the industry; if you stop moving you'll be left behind.

[_random_]

You missed node.js for Visual Studio did you? Node.js is a part of Microsoft "bubble" for years now (Azure support etc.).

[Spearchucker]

Interesting how different people have vastly different experiences. I've been using .NET since pre-release 1.0. Once I ran into my first reactionary "we might get left in the shit again" change I stopped using anything that wasn't in the core framework. I don't go near ORMs, and I don't touch LINQ either. I have code running in a project now that's 7 years old, and I cannot improve it, even after revisiting it many times. I love using Visual Studio, and I love writing .NET code. I try new things when I hear about them, but nothing has compelled me to change.

[PallarelCoedr]

This reads like a standard list of a cocooned MS developer. With ServiceStack, NancyFX, NHibernate, Dapper, OrmLite, etc out there could you have just been making some bad choices?

And anyone who knew web, knew Silverlight didn't have a future from the very beginning.

[bananas]

The only bad choice was the foundation on which to build the product. The above technologies are pretty much a response to the world being better elsewhere. Unfortunately the responses are pretty immature, poorly documented with bad support reputations and virtually no backing.

I've used most of the above. ServiceStack was pretty good but nothing in comparison to Jasper which has much better documentation, a cleaner architecture, stable migration notes and better performance. Look: https://jersey.java.net/documentation/latest/index.html

NancyFX I haven't touched.

NHibernate is a buggy behemoth with a learning curve from hell. It doesn't scale well with project size (we have 2000 tables of which about 500 are NH mapped "model-first") and it stinks. The SQL generated is terrible, it's impossible to debug when it goes wrong other than sift through 50Mb of log4net DEBUG level logs. To add insult to injury, the LINQ provider is so buggy it's like programming with a hand grenade. I've used hibernate in java and NHibernate isn't even a tenth of the way to the maturity and reliability.

Dapper - I really like Dapper. I have used it for data transforms before. However it doesn't play well with low trust as it uses IL emit.

OrmLite - see ServiceStack.

Not bad choices - just choices I either regret or had to make because the whole ecosystem is amateurish outside of Microsoft and unstable inside of Microsoft. Sorry.

[duncans]

> And anyone who knew web, knew Silverlight didn't have a future from the very beginning.

Totally agree. In 2006/7 jQuery effectively meant that Silverlight was DOA.

[troygoode]

Why are you still using it?

[bananas]

As for the company, we've got over one million lines of c#. As new subsystems appear they are being moved to other technologies (Angular + Java + Jersey + maven + guice + Jetty + Redis + postgresql). This takes time. The amount of code is tiny compared to the old implementations and the time to market and reliability is awesome.

As for me, because I'm in charge of the migration. When its gone I'm not even going to go to the funeral.