alt Hacker NewsWe abandoned .Net years ago before our third major product rewrite prompted by withdrawal of various bits of tech they said was the next greatest thing. AppFabric, WWF, WCF and Silverlight hit us hard.
Once burned, twice shy.
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I used to be in the anti .NET camp but for Enterprise applications .NET has been delightful and upgrading between versions has been trivial since .NET 6.
> various bits of tech they said was the next greatest thing. AppFabric, WWF, WCF and Silverlight
Always just only stick to the actual framework itself and never rely on these offerings from Microsoft and you'll have a fine time.
We've always stuck to the server-side web technologies: WebForms (now very much obsolete), MVC, Web API + Angular, Blazor.
> Silverlight hit us hard.
So about that... when I started using .NET Core, it was bleeding edge and shiny, but it was to rewrite a Silverlight application, the only way to run it was Firefox ESR 54 (I think it was 54?) we thought "oh this is easy" only to find out that it was a colossal nightmare, EF didn't support some things, including Shapefiles, we had to force the support, get back a WKT from SQL Server, and send one back when we did updates, basically Entity Framework was mostly useless.
I also reverse scaffolded the existing database into EF compatible classes, so that saved us a ton of effort, the original idea was to be backwards compatible.
Best part? It never got used, when we found out they weren't using the project, my boss said, screw it, lets remake it in Python I know we can build it up quicker, and sure enough, it was done quicker than the C# rewrite, fastest rewrite I ever did, because he figured out the key things they actually needed, and trimmed the requirements to just those key things.
Sometimes rewrites don't need to be 1:1 especially if it's an internal only tool.
Anyway, lots of blood, sweat, tears, stress, etc from me as it was my first job in tech.
Never chase the shiniest toy at work! Give it a year or two to settle down first.
> Silverlight.
Boy do I have good news for you (I am half kidding). OpenSilver project lets you compile your Silverlight code to Web Assembly or iOS/Android/Windows/Mac.
You can dust off your code now.
WCF, Silverlight... They were terrible. New .net stack is much better.
That's fair enough, but the dust has largely settled on dotnet core. The death of Silverlight was long ago. I think the only thing at risk of abandonment is the native UI situation, which is a mess.