Sad about .NET
from edm@thelemmy.club to programming@programming.dev on 04 Mar 15:34
https://thelemmy.club/post/45323257
from edm@thelemmy.club to programming@programming.dev on 04 Mar 15:34
https://thelemmy.club/post/45323257
These last ten years I was really enjoying what Microsoft and its .NET teams were doing. Felt like a good community to be a part of. Huge strides to make things run anywhere and be more involved with the open source community.
While that hasn’t necessarily gone away, jamming LLM’s into everything is leaving a real sour taste. Pointless copilot button anywhere and everywhere. VS and VSCode pushing the GitHub copilot chats and agents.
We are quickly back to the corporate MSFT that doesn’t listen to its users or employees. All that good will has been washed away and now I feel the need to switch off of Windows.
#programming
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Are you familiar with Embrace, extend, and extinguish?
For a while there, there was a perception that Satya was trying to move away from that.
Then they started firing people, cutting the sales budget, running licensing audits, and churning out trash and its 100% back to business as usual.
I remember the “this is my office” stickers the MS people had, when they were pushing the EMS. Now they’re required to be on site. Hmmm
Ya I agree, there was a time where Satya had a fresh outlook and instilled hope.
Now he cannot take criticism about their AI offerings and they are forcing it into everything.
Boggles my mind that Notepad has a Copilot button. Truly tone deaf.
You can be on Linux and still enjoy most of .NET. Hell, I’d say its high time for most to switch off of Linux.
I’ll admit, I really enjoyed C# for Game Dev, but post Unity shenanigans that died off. And now Judy do boring, run of the mill backend stiff…
Though as a programmer, Ive been tempted to learn classic C, and even D.
Outside of corporate, I game found much fun (besides GDScript, cause game dev) but languages used by FOSS do get my attention from time to time.
If you are looking to learn a lower level language that c# and arent interested in rust I really recomend Zig. It feels a lot like c but with modern convenieces and with the footguns removed. It is still in development though do breaking changes happen in the stdlib on version changes.
Yes but despite the footguns, C (not C++) is a relatively small language, not too hard to learn. And it’s the glue between kernel, system libraries, and all other languages. You don’t want to write big applications in it any more, but it’s still useful to know when you interface with existing stuff.
Meanwhile everyone I work with is loving the smooth copilot integration with vscode.
Its so good at automating boilerplate stuff.
Especially testing, oh god does it make writing tests faster. I just tell it the scenarios that have to be tested and boom, 1000 lines of boilerplate produced in like 5 minutes.
And when it has existing code to use as a reference on how to do it right, it does a very solid job, especially repetitive stuff like tests, since usually 95% of the code in a test is just arranging and boilerplate setting up the scenario.
Also “hey go add xml docs to all the new public functions and types we made” and it just goes and does it, love that lol
Once you acknowledge like 90% of your code is boilerplate and sonnet/opus are extremely capable at handling that stuff when they have existing references to go off of, you can just focus on the remaining 10% of “real” work.
That 10% is ideally “creating value” for the customer. Boilerplate code is not value, therefore outsource it to LLMs.
Pretty much, its the actually important code you wanna pay attention to.
The majority of code is just connecting pipe A up to pipe B, its honestly fine for an LLM to handle.
The job security comes from, as a developer, knowing which code goes in the 90% bin vs which goes in the 10% bin, being able to tell the difference is part of the job now.
Yea I am not saying the tools are bad. Also use Claude mostly via our internal corporate tooling to do initial generation of things like unit tests and it helps sketch and brainstorm.
I will say it is crazy the amount of trust people/companies are putting in the tools though. It can and will make up straight lies out of thin air. At least with code things don’t compile which helps a bit. Even then, have been watching a few MSFT repo’s and they have devs just blanket approving copilot generated PR’s that have bugs and breaking changes.
The tools are great, but they aren’t an excuse to be lazy. And they aren’t a replacement for that last 10% like you said, still need devs and real human problem solving.
Please cite one example of Microsoft ever giving a fuck about users. Since their inception, Microsoft has always been about gaining as much leverage as possible in every business relationship, and then exploiting that leverage to the fullest. “Embrace Extend Extinguish” is a well documented example of that philosophy.
Anybody who still trusts Microsoft is dumb, or too young to have been really screwed over yet.
Seriously, STOP TRUSTING MICROSOFT. No matter how much the tech industry evolves, that rule is ironclad. It has even outlived Moore’s Law.
The other day I was thinking there should be a fork of dotnet. The two things that it would do differently would be telemetry being totally removed, and an alternative to nuget.org with the requirement that packages be published with free software licenses. Setting such a thing up could be insurance in case they pull anything in the future, too.