It has become really confusing to get started with .NET. There's a ton of stuff just from Microsoft, and it's kinda hard to understand how everything fits together.

I recently did a project where we wanted to a small built in webserver. Understanding how all the OWIN stuff fits together and knowing which libraries to use is hard than doing the actual coding. For a compiled language it's confusing that your code will compile, but not work, because you forgot a "using".

Go is younger and therefore doesn't have the baggage of .NET or Java, but it's a good example of how simple a "development environment" can be. It's not alone, Python, Lua and others are also much much easier to get started with, without being bombarded by a ton of acronyms and surrounding infrastructure libraries.

"A small built in webserver" is exactly what ASP Core now gives you. ASP.NET was never previously about providing that, and it wasn't a thing until fairly recently.

Now with Kestrel you only need a handful of lines of code to spin up a web server.

The whole point of Core is that MS have rewritten .Net and ASP to learn the lessons of more modern languages. ASP.NET 4.6 is standing on 19 years of cruft which is why it has so many weird and complicated parts.

> The whole point of Core is that MS have rewritten .Net and ASP to learn the lessons of more modern languages. ASP.NET 4.6 is standing on 19 years of cruft which is why it has so many weird and complicated parts.

MS hasn't rewritten .NET, most code is simply ported from .NET full. ASP.NET has been rewritten, but only a part of it (the rest is simply not implemented (yet)). '19' years of cruft? .NET 1.0 was released in 2002, not sure where your 19 years come from. Besides, it's better to use a framework that actually works and does whatever you throw at it, than some hip new thing that can only do a few tricks today and perhaps learns a few more tomorrow. You know, clients and all, they want to use the stuff you write and not have to stare at things that break down / crash.

ASP (i.e. ASP Classic) is 90s though, and plenty of its legacy lives on for instance in the ASP.NET Request object.

ASP Core isn't going to be able to do "a few tricks" when it's released, it's going to be production ready for a wide range of standard tasks with significant benefits for newer architectures like micro services. "Clients and all" might like having scalability options that don't involve waiting 20 minutes for an AWS Windows VM to spin up for instance...

>Now with Kestrel you only need a handful of lines of code to spin up a web server.

OWIN is also just a handful of lines, it's just very confusing. Based on the Kestrel examples I've seen I wouldn't say they've improved much.

I would argue that Microsoft hasn't learnt anything from "modern language" (.NET/C# is still a modern language in it self). In some areas Microsoft seems to hit a spot right in between "convention over configuration" and total flexibility via configuration and it's extremely confusing.

Exlir, also super easy to get started with, and provides testing out of the box. With a sample test included. `mix new foobar` then you can immediately `mix test` and it'll compile and run.

I can't see myself going back to .NET ever again (it's been 6 years now) because it's so fragmented and hard to find immediately useful information. Microsoft needs to invest on that front.

I needed to read this stuff right here. I have been developing happily on a custom-built CSLA-esque .NET platform for almost two years now, and I cannot begin to explain to my OSS buddies what they should do to spin up a .NET project of their own.

1) It's not my job description or my problem domain at work. I'm paid to code the app, not spin up fresh instances of our app framework from scratch. We have maybe a dozen apps in various stages of progress, so it isn't like we need the whole team to know how to outfit a new instance of our app framework on a regular basis, but...

2) ...it's also amazing how difficult it is to even define what .NET is. It's hard to explain to colleagues what's going on behind the scenes when you can't always quite figure it out yourself. And I don't think of myself as simple-minded. I know that this stuff is a corollary to the inherent power/complexity factor that such a stack brings to the table, but MicroSoft could absolutely do a better job of providing clear and human-readable docs for people who are not already wizards.

Things are getting more confusing today briefly on the road to getting better.

The new `dotnet` CLI is on its way to becoming much like the `go` CLI as a one-stop-shop for a lot of your IDE needs, cross-platform and easily accessible from your favorite command line and/or code editor.

It should be the case soon that you can `yo` up a new web project (or use some other generator tool if you don't like Yeoman) and then `dotnet web` straight into a simple web server.

Also, at its face OWIN is a lot simpler than it seems. It's simply the name of the "middleware protocol" in modern .NET web applications, similar to the Connect versus Express confusion in NodeJS land in that Express uses/provides "Connect-compatible" middleware, ASP.NET uses/provides "OWIN-compatible" middleware. Maybe that helps a little.

Indeed, way too confusing.

".NET Core 5 is now .NET Core 1.0. " Really? What happens when .NET Core v 2.0 comes out?

.NET is drowning in a confusion of its own making.

> ".NET Core 5 is now .NET Core 1.0. " Really? What happens when .NET Core v 2.0 comes out?

Is your point that v2 ... v3 ... v4 will eventually overlap with .NET Core 5? Because .NET Core 5 hasn't actually been released yet.

I think it's worse. When you will be googling a question for .Net core 2.0, you will find responses for .Net 2.0. But .Net core is not backward compatible, they removed lots of stuff. We would have been better off if they had called it "Monkey 1.0" instead of ".Net Core 1.0".

Even if it had shipped, what's stopping them from skipping 5 and "turn it up to 6"? ;)

dotnet is replacing dnx/dnu - the dnx concept impressed and so has been more widely adopted within the .Net chain.

Having had a play with the RC2 CI build it is considerably more streamlined than ASP 4.X development. I'm really looking forward to starting to use it in anger over the next few months.