.NET Blog

> silverlight

Hah, I forgot about Silverlight - mainly because I never used it (did anyone?)

> razor/mvc

Eh? Razor is very much still alive, and MVC lives on as ASP.NET Core MVC.

> because in the real world, moving people from asp.net classic to .net core costs money.

Yes, I live in the same world, and have migrated several projects from .NET to .NET Core. If you were an early adopter, it could admittedly be a bit painful, but everything "just works" now.

> I mean, even .net standard came and went before we even started using it, considering it won't be part of .net core 3.0.

Really not sure what you mean here, and I can only guess that you've been thrown by Microsoft randomly releasing new .NET Core versions before the corresponding .NET Standard versions - releasing the implementation before the API. I don't like this myself, but it hardly means that .NET Standard has "came and went". Also, just a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft said ".NET Core 3.0 as well as upcoming versions of Xamarin, Mono, and Unity will be updated to implement .NET Standard 2.1"[1].

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/11/05/announcing-net-standard-2-1/

Does this mean .NET framework is being dropped slowly for new projects?

Yes.

It's not a secret. Microsoft has said that .Net Framework is basically in maintenance mode and "will move slower". They are moving EF6, Winforms, and WPF to .Net Core (Windows only).

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/10/04/update-on-net-core-3-0-and-net-framework-4-8/

I've been developing on top of Microsoft environments for over 20 years and .Net is by far my favorite language. But, the writing is on the wall. Anyone who wants a long term career in development needs to run away from Windows as fast as possible and slowly move away from focusing exclusively on .Net.

Linux even dominates on Azure.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/

Microsoft knows that Windows can't compete in the cloud and selling Windows for desktops is not the future.

> I was under the impression that .NET is fully open source: https://dotnetfoundation.org/

That's not of much worth if the design process remains firmly in corporate hands.

Microsoft is currently, slowly, opening the process to the community, but even then I expect corporate will continue driving most of the roadmap and keep veto on everything, very much like Swift — which is much much much further on that track than C# is, Microsoft having only created a C# design/evolutions mailing list and repository literally days ago, the ML was created on January 30th[0] and the repository was created and announced on February 1[1], the "community input" doesn't actually exit yet.

[0] https://lists.dot.net/pipermail/csharplang/2017-January/thread.html

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-language-strategy/

> If not what are the reasons for a startup to stay away from .NET CORE?

I've been using .Net for over 10 years now, and just launched a new product on Asp.Net Web API + SQL Server + Orleans.

Whatever Microsoft says, .Net Core is not at all ready. The tooling and libraries are still undergoing major (and breaking) changes. You'll spend more time debugging it than your own code.

I (foolishly) tried to adopt it a year ago (RC), and again six months ago (1.0). Each time I ran into a critical bugs and omissions.

.Net Core will probably, eventually be great. It isn't yet.

Edit: Here's an example of the fun you'll have, published today: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/01/30/announcing-net-core-net-native-and-nuget-updates-in-vs-2017-rc/

Announcing .NET Core RC2 and .NET Core SDK Preview 1
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/05/16/announcing-net-core-rc2/

Announcing ASP.NET Core RC2
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2016/05/16/announcing-asp-net-core-rc2/

Announcing Updated Web Development Tools for ASP.NET Core RC2
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/16/announcing-updated-web-development-tools-for-asp-net-core-rc2/

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.NET Core RC2 is supported on the following platforms:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2

Centos 7.1

Debian 8.2 (8.2, 8.3, 8.4)+

Ubuntu 14.04 (16.04 support is coming at RTM)

OS X 10.11

Windows 7+ / Server 2012 R2+

Windows Nano Server TP5

This page[1] (which was linked elsewhere in the thread) provides the following info:

> Since an expression needs to either have a value or throw an exception, a switch expression that reaches the end without a match will throw an exception. The compiler does a great job of warning you when this may be the case, but will not force you to end all switch expressions with a catch-all: you may know better!

I haven't used the feature yet myself, so I can't say it definitively - but it sounds like it does provide compile time feedback while still allowing you to compile.

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2019/01/24/do-more-with-patterns-in-c-8-0/