Every large enterprise I've worked at in the last say 10 years, has software deployed across multiple dev stacks, with .Net being just one.

This very moment consulting at a large insurance firm I'm firmly entrenched in .Net as well as React and Python.

What you described may have been true in the distant past but you might need to update your views.

So if I am the only one who mentions a problem then it is well grounded and valid criticism, but if I am one of many developers who raises attention to the same problem then the issue loses credibility?

Your experience from already 10 years ago is truly remarkable. Given that before .NET Core you were tied to IIS, and therefore tied to Windows Server and also tied to Visual Studio and for that reason also tied to Windows as a development machine, and therefore automatically limited to what other software you could smoothly run in order to connect to databases and other technology it really surprises me that 10 years ago you were developing .NET in a complete non MS tech stack.

Re-read his comment. And be less angry. He wasn't saying that he worked on cross-platform .NET projects 10 years ago, just that big companies generally had/still have .NET projects, besides other tech stacks.

Anyways, my initial point was that .NET folks are less likely to look outside the MS bubble when making technology choices.

The other commentator said that he/she worked at large enterprises which had .NET teams and other development teams employed. That is great, but I don't see how that is relevant to my initial comment, because the question still stands if those .NET teams within those large organisations worked mostly within the MS stack or not.

My second comment was aimed at suggesting that I think it must have been the latter, given that before .NET Core many tech choices were forced upon those developers due to .NET being very tightly coupled to MS technologies.

So I take your point that large organisations might have many different dev teams, but that doesn't really say much about my point, which I still think can be true at the same time.

Didn't say anything was tied to .NET. I said Microsoft educated a whole industry of .NET developers to never look outside the MS stack. That's two different things.

Which MS technologies I consider inferior to non MS alternatives, but .NET developers insist on using despite them being inferior?

Let's start with the elephant in the room: Azure...

Azure Web Apps. They are slower than ElasticBeanstalk or AppEngine and only run on IIS, so .NET Core devs can't even run their .NET Core apps to their full potential by running it on Kestrel or Kestrel behind something like nginx. This itself is embarrassing and the fact that still so many people don't look beyong Azure Web Apps just because it's Microsoft is just mind blogging.

We love azure at our company. For one project One dev running Windows, a few running MacOS, one running Linux all coding our .net Core web application. Simple check-in to github kicks off a QA branch build of our app hosted on Azure web apps.

AWS is the default cloud stack. It's more mature, more companies run on AWS than on any other cloud platform, it has full .NET and .NET Core support, it even supported things like .NET Core or F# much earlier than Azure did. There is more resources online, more courses, more talent and more books on AWS than on any other cloud platform.

So how is Azure the default stack? You call it default, because Microsoft has spend so much marketing - aka educating you - to believe that Azure IS THE DEFAULT thing to use.

It's sad honestly, because it makes .NET development a lot less fun and I really like .NET otherwise.

EDIT:

Comment below me:

> I think rather because it is integrated into Visual Studio and SQL Management Studio out of the box.

This is another example that precisely proves my point, that .NET devs have been educated to stop looking beyond what Microsoft puts on their plate.

AWS also has fantastic Visual Studio support. It's only one plugin away. It's like installing a NuGet package, hardly any effort. But the default .NET developer rather uses an inferior cloud stack, because the effort to install an AWS plugin into Visual Studio is seen as more effort than having to deal with all the inabilities of Azure in the long run. That doesn't make sense. It's irrational and only because Microsoft has done such a great marketing it doesn't even occur to the majority of .NET devs.

CosmosDB is inferior to postgres or cassandra depending on use case.

Azure functions is inferior to lambda/cloud functions.

Azure in general is vastly inferior to aws/gcp. That's a point which is reiterated on a monthly basis on HN.

None of these three points are opinion. They're well covered facts.

We use RabbitMQ hosted on Azure via CloudAMQP. We had almost half a day of downtime because Azure performed maintenance on our instance, involving a restart.

CloudAMQP told us that Azure do this without notifying them, or us! We got told by them if we moved to AWS rather than Azure this wouldn't happen. AWS notifies you two weeks in advance and can allow live migrations without any downtime.

They said they don't actually recommend hosting on Azure!

I don't know for the other ones but the tooling for lambda is definitely better on aws, I had to patch around 500 lines of serverless-azure-functions to allow for missing features & fixing bugs. I should probably do a cleanup & do some pull requests one day.

How are those distributed cluster queries going on Postgres?

How do you plug a graphical debugger into lambda/cloud functions like I can do in VS?

GCP is so good that it is lagging behind Azure.

https://hackernoon.com/help-my-azure-site-performance-sucks-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16099729

https://dvt.name/2018/02/27/microsoft-azure-sucks/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19056911

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19658553

Azure's woes are well documented. I've experienced them first hand. In fact you'll find me with ~hundred upvotes describing my experience with Cosmos in one of these threads. Most engineers will take take aws/gcp without GUI tooling any day over Azure and its sea of undocumented bugs, performance issues, unlogged failures, and blown SLAs.

The only reason to use Azure today is either because it's the only thing you know or because there are external forces making you do it.

Or some other ones about the automated replies and lack of human support on GCP.

> The only reason to use Azure today is either because it's the only thing you know or because there are external forces making you do it.

Sure, that is why GCP is playing catchup with Azure and Microsoft had such a huge loss in Azure profits during the last years. /s

Anecdotes stop being anecdotes when you're looking at well over a hundred consistently negative experiences from different users across a number of unrelated discussions. At that point those anecdotes become the consensus. Try to find 1/10th of this many HN users shitting on aws or gcp, you won't be able to.

I didn't pick up azure looking for excuses to shit on it, like you appear to be doing and confirming in your profile bio. I came ready to deliver on the next round of projects, expecting something resembling parity with the other cloud vendors. And walked away feeling borderline defrauded by the delta between how MS markets azure and what it actually is.

"Said someone that never used either SQL Server or its GUI tooling."

You just sound like an angry teenager lashing out because their one and only skillset was shown to be poorly chosen. I'm pretty sure I've been using SQL server longer than you've been in the industry. It's middle of the pack at best today, sorry.

My profile bio is what I do in 2019, not what I have done since mid-80's.

In fact I have my share of delivering projects in AWS, across multiple kinds of stacks, all the way back when EC2 was started.

As an rdms? In what way? I mean, I do personally prefer Free software - and while it's possible, I think it'd be a bit premature to run ms sql in production on Linux - but "inferior" seems a bit harsh?

At what scale? For what kind of workloads? Use cases?

When engineers see a new project/problem, they start picking best tools for the job. When .net developers see one, they start picking items off the azure architecture templates.

I love C# and F#, C# was the first language that I truly enjoyed using. But I don't lock myself into tools or languages. Meanwhile .net shops actively train .net developers to only learn the MS stack and ignore all else.

I think if one takes a second to look at the amount of downvoting on both sides of this discussion, it's pretty clear that there's a distinction and polarisation between .net developers and modern full stack software engineers.

The first language I learned was Python and then I got a job in a .NET shop and I've been .NET since, to declare my bias. But I'm not dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft stack, I think Postgres is better than SQL Server for almost every use case (though SQL Server is superior to Oracle or MySQL for most others), that something like Rust is better for embedded or systems programming, that if you need cross-platform UI you're better off using something outside the Microsoft stack and that it makes a lot more sense to host a .NET web app on a Linux server and I have no interest in Azure, or indeed any cloud vendor's properitary tools.

I think there exists a trend, as in Oracle shops or IBM shops, for some large/corporate companies to tie in to a tech stack and consider, for example, Sharepoint or CRM or SAP, to be the solution to everything. I think this has less to do with individual developers and more to do with sales pressure. A lot of developers just code for a job, they have no interest in it outside of it being a tool to work with and since .NET is (in the studies I've seen) within the top 3 techs by number of jobs in most of the Anglosphere it tends to be overrepresented in corporate environments where development is 'just a job'. But there are also many companies using whatever tool is best for the job, within the constraints of what their team knows, or cost, or whatever those might be and to tar every primarily .NET developer with the same brush is going to annoy people.

I still regard .NET and particularly .NET Core to be one of the best environments I've used to build Web Apps in. You get great performance [0], type safety, memory safety, in my view the best IDE available, an excellent quality standard library, access to F# as you mention, etc.

I think stereotyping a ".NET crowd" is unhelpful, as is a stereotype about front-end developers all being boot-camp trained developers with little experience or C++ developers all being cranks who refuse to work with modern technology.

[0]: https://www.ageofascent.com/2019/02/04/asp-net-core-saturati...

I think it's pretty clear there's a polarisation between people who say "M$ trains sheep, .Net developers are dumb and blinded by marketing" and people who downvote that as a low quality comment.

Even you throwing "modern" in here, as a quick insult.