Can I run Visual Studio on my macbook? Does any of the companies developing webapps in C# actually deploy on Unix?
MS might aspire to have that broadness of platform but it is not actually there. It is in the Java world.
Visual Studio Code, yes. People do that. I see it at my employer.
But ultimately it's not tied to a particular IDE. You could e.g. use JetBrains Rider (1) on your mac. You could use the likes of Sublime text, the command line tools and a plugin (2) if you want.
> Does any of the companies developing webapps in C# actually deploy on Unix?
Some of them do yes, and more of them will. AWS Lambda functions too. (3)
I see both of those (.Net core web apps and lambda functions) at my employer.
> MS might aspire to have that broadness of platform
Correct, this a fairly new aspiration
> but it is not actually there.
You know, it's ok to say "I don't actually know that particular technology very well, I'm not keeping up to date with recent developments in that space." Nobody tracks everything. You don't have to make strong statements about things that you don't know much about.
1) https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/
3) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/aws-lambda-net-core-2...
I didn’t want to go into a detailed argument. Just look at the broad lines of what happens in practice. On one side you have a diverse environment with different development machines, deployment machines and so on. On the other side you don’t have diversity. It is as simple as that.
But did you miss the three other development options listed for .Net on mac? : Visual Studio For Mac, Jetbrains Rider, and bring your own editor.
> didn’t want to go into a detailed argument. It is as simple as that.
Things are usually only simple from a distance. How much time have you spent up close to .Net in the last 2 years?
For my part, I have spend no time close to Java lately, and that is why I don't hold forth strong opinions about Java: because I would be a fount of ignorance. I'd rather listen to those who have more experience with it.
> On the other side you don’t have diversity.
That might have been universal a while back, but it really is not any more. Facts have been laid out above and you keep repeating your assertion. It's just prejudice. Is this something that you want to be true?
Look, the .Net ecosystem is changing for very valid reasons, and in a great direction. It has changed a lot at a sustained pace over the last few years, and that will not stop. Some employers and industries have not changed yet, and that's fine, many places are happy in their niche, be it .Net and Windows or Java and Linux. However your universal assertions are outdated, and will be increasingly irrelevant.
There is Visual Studio For Mac [1], though I'm unsure how it compares to Visual Studio "proper".
Kind of.
First Google pulled an old style Microsoft move, by only implementing what they cared about.
With Android Oreo, they finally added proper support for most of Java 8, but given the fragmentation history, one only gets to use it fully when targeting Oreo or better devices.
Then now with Kotlin adoption, their silence on Java 9 support and the 6 months release plan for Java, I have this feeling Android will be stuck at the current level of Java 8 support.
How is that any different from .Net core? Open platform, check (1) productive on those platforms, check (2)
> buggled into a big IDE like it is on C#.
Nope. dotnet cli is fine standalone (3)
> Deploying on Unix is a standard thing, not an experimental feature.
Um, it might be fairly new but I would not call that platform target "experimental" any more. It's in version 2 now
> And finally there is Android.
Yes there is. I know teams that write in C# for Android and iOS. (4)
C# is late to the party in this regard. But what you are saying isn't correct.
1) https://github.com/dotnet
2) https://code.visualstudio.com/
3) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet?ta...
4) https://www.xamarin.com/