I'm still confused by .Net Core, .Net Framework, and .Net Standard. The diagram in this article made me ten times more confused:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/05/07/net-core-...

It seems to contradict itself so many times.

Little off-topic: Is there any work being done with Visual Studio's integrated Code Review system[0]? You cannot even run the solution (inc. changes) from it!

We're stuck on TFVC, is the planned solution to move everyone to Git and Pull Requests? The recent Visual Studio Live Share is really kick butt, but doesn't solve traditional "offline" code reviews.

Also we're using O365 Planner and Teams, but there's no integration into Team Services at all. Any chance we'll see Planner plan tasks as a work item in Visual Studio/Team Services?

[0] https://i.imgur.com/LNeTASv.png

.NET Standard is an interface. It describes a specification that must be met. .NET Framework, Xamarin, UWP and .NET Core are implementations. Both have APIs that are specific to the implementation (for example, .NET Framework has APIs that are specific to Window, while .NET Core is cross-platform and doesn't have them, and Xamarin has mobile-specific APIs that don't make sense on desktop). At a minimum they both implement the APIs designated by the .NET Standard specification. It is a guideline for you to write libraries that can be shared anywhere without recompilation.

You should be because the concept of .NET changed over the years. When first announced, it was supposed to be Microsoft's alternative to Java. In their internal documents, they defined it as infrastructure centered around MS SQL Server. With time, things developed and the initial vision changed a few times. So yes, it's a mess name-wise.

dotnet Standard is the core of everything. The underlying code for both the dotnet Framework and dotnet Core. What the differences between the dotnet Framework and the dotnet Core is I can't tell you. All I know is that dotnet Core is cross platform and the cool kid in town. Use Core if possible.

Curious, what aspects of the process do lead to the suckage? Committee-driven decisions? Existing ecosystems and conventions? Politics?

I remember at some point there was a popular theory that if you add an "X" to a name, it appears more modern to the customer. So Microsoft started to brand different technologies in this way. The data exchange mechanism became "ActiveX". Their abstraction layer for graphics cards became "DirectX".

Is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k still a good description of how things mess up?

Skype is the one that blows my mind. You had another product that doesn't work with Skype, so you renamed it Skype. WAT?