So many people would embrace a truly cross platform framework will all bells and whistles. But instead we have this disturbing split between .NET, .NET Core and Mono.

Long term Mono is probably just going to become a sort of .NET "distribution" on top of .NET Core, it will include things which Microsoft deprecated such as Winform. And it will probably be not maintained at the same level .NET Core itself is. I don't think there will be any reason to use Mono in the future, except for legacy Mono apps...

I'm going to be learning ASP.NET Core, but not even think about possible production use until after the next release. We will probably continue to avoid .NET for mobile, and I would not consider Mono for any other use case.

Anything outside of ASP.NET Core or small command-line tools is probably premature in 2016.

Take a quick scroll through here: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Drawing/commonu...

To re-use System.Drawing Microsoft would need to re-implement all those methods in a cross-platform, bug-compatible way. And there's a lot of code behind those methods.

In my opinion they made a reasonable decision to leave it out of v1.

Even for websites, depends on what sort of websites you do, but I often need to display charts, so being able to generate images on the fly.

Isn't SVG or canvas more suitable for that on the web?

I have written a few commercial cross-platform applications with Xamarin. They deal with images - and System.Drawing would not have been helpful to me. iOS has UIImage and Android has Bitmap.

Frankly, the thing I liked best about the whole .net ecosystem is that it didn't go for the open source "release early, release often, release incomplete and buggy" philosophy. I'm just very disappointed to see Microsoft going in this direction.

If Microsoft isn't providing a rock-solid, feature-ful framework with impeccable backwards compatibility, who will? Nobody will.

System.Drawing is a good example, if you read the msdn docs it is clearly not supported on ASP.Net or from a Windows Service.

Libraries like imaging should be a nuget package.

There's two types of programming ecosystem:

1) The wild west world. where there's no good tooling (IDEs, debuggers, etc), all libraries are provided by hundreds of random individual developers and of varying quality, vital tools (such as build systems) are a constant juggle of whatever's trendy at the moment, etc.

2) The world where there's a single comprehensive framework of extremely high compatibility managed by a single party, where tooling is excellent, where backwards compatibility is of paramount importance, and where everything you write is on a solid foundation that's not going to move out from underneath you.

If you want environment 1), you have a ton of choices. You can use Node.JS, you can use Python, you can use Ruby, you can use GoLang, Java, etc. If you want environment 2), you have exactly one choice: .Net. And in a year, based on everything I'm reading about .Net Core, you'll have zero.

The only saving grace is, being Microsoft, I can be confident that the .Net 4.5 stuff will work for at least another decade. Even if it's not the "trendy new hotness".

Maybe I'm a freak outlier, but I much much prefer the old Microsoft that wouldn't even think about releasing the product until it was 100% complete, tested, stable. I think they're moving in the exactly wrong direction, and driving full speed away from everything that made .Net such a great platform in the first place.

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Every time I've had to use a language where a lot of functionality is provided by "the community", it's been a constant cascade of buggy and badly-designed libraries. "The community" doesn't test their stuff before releasing it. Or the library works for the one tiny purpose it was written for, but isn't generic enough to be useful to anybody else. It's nobody's job to ensure quality or completeness, so it simply does not happen.

I'd rather have good code, even if I have to wait longer, than code from "the community".

A JAVA guy could probably make a good selection of corporate-supported frameworks that work as seamlessly as .NET.

And then, there's the Apple world, with their well designed mobile and desktop libraries, and a hot new C#-like language... Just saying.

The thought that Apple's Swift might actually come the closest to what I want after .Net occurred to me, also. Ugh.

Seriously, at this point, Jetbrains IDE-s are better than Visual Studio.