I agree 100%. My last place was a 100% MS shop and while .NET core seems like it will be great we ran into endless problems, specifically with compatibility and existing libraries. We couldn't get anything more than a toy project to work.

I recommend anyone looking at .NET core to use Java for now. The languages are basically mutually intelligible and while java is a bit less syntactically pleasant it gets the job done, and the tools are quite mature. Arguably Java has, and has had, 99% of what .NET core is trying to achieve for many years. Using the right frameworks it's incredibly fast, multiplatform, and even serverless.

The biggest problem that you run into with Java is too much choice, the opposite of the .NET framework. Deciding which tools to use takes a fair amount of research because the ecosystem is so massive. I've been cutting my teeth on it for the past couple months and I would say go with these frameworks:

DropWizard Play Jersey

running on Grizzly, Jetty, or Netty depending on which project supports what.

Database-wise for ORM nothing beats Hibernate. Entity framework is basically a slower more confusing copy of hibernate, coming from someone that's used both. The main advantage of EF is LINQ which Hibernate can't quite match in theory but usually does in practice(the queries generated by HQL tend to be a lot less....stupid)

>I agree 100%. My last place was a 100% MS shop and while .NET core seems like it will be great we ran into endless problems, specifically with compatibility and existing libraries. We couldn't get anything more than a toy project to work.

This has been my experience with MS in general. Initially everything seems great and you feel productive, but as soon as you decide to go off-road you lose all that you gained and more with buggy and poorly documented software.

Standard .Net is acutally one the most well documented and stable platforms I've used.

I agree .net standard is super well documented.

What? Just use .NET standard, no need to switch to a wholly new language (unless of course if your initial goal was some kind of cross-platform requirement).

EF isn't great, but there are a ton of ORM frameworks that blow NHibernate out of the water. These days I'm just using Dapper for most projects. It's small, fast and very easy to use.

Dapper isn't an ORM in the same sense as EF and nHibernate, it's not bad, just different. There is plenty of room for both on a project.

My experience over the last few months has been v. good. Earlier (maybe even 6 months ago), my sentiment would have more mirrored that of the parent. The main downside at the moment is many of the packages on NuGet don't target dotnet core.

The above opinion is based on my experience developing a Kafka client library (I use OSX / VS Code) for Confluent https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-dotnet as well as a substantial side project.

Can I ask what you ran into? I'm thinking about starting a side project with .Net Core for my API and React for my front end. I'm wondering if it's even worth it to use Core at this point or switch to Go or Node.

I personally hate node with all of my being, but Go is good stuff and Java has two very solid REST frameworks Jersey and Spring Boot. Depending on the project needs you could use DropWizard or Play which come with a really solid REST API framework builtin.

I was always partial to Pythons Flask as well

What did we run into? Tons of brokenness. Inability to use C# libs was the biggest problem, if you're trying to make anything significant you're going to have to roll your own everything. Java is the safest bet for large projects, I've never run into any issues finding a quality library to do anything. This is coming from a guy that's been a career C# dev for years and wishes he could defect to Java.

I have no clue if anyone really uses it, and it has a terribly un-googleable name, but the Java Spark Framework is the most beautifully simplistic REST API I have ever played with. It's the only time Java has ever felt like Node to me.

This is a little off-topic but can I ask how your experience with Orleans has been? And did you consider instead using Service Fabric Reliable Actors? If so, how did you choose between the two?