Is it though? Backends can be any language and there's a lot more variety there -- TS+node, Go, Python, Java. It's just .NET that's largely ignored for no real technical basis.
It really depends where you are. In the UK half the places seem to use .NET in some form or another.
I am pretty language agnostic and I am reasonably competent programming in C# (I worked with C# and VB.NET for about 15 years), Go, Python, TypeScript and C++ these days.
The issue with a lot of places that do C#/.NET stuff is that they will typically ignore new tech until it is officially blessed by Microsoft. You can have a piece of tech that everyone is using and works really well and it will be ignored if it isn't blessed by Microsoft.
The other issue with .NET is all the Microsoft gumpf that tends to come with it even with the newer versions of .NET.
I am also in the weird place of being a Linux user. I've had job interviews that wanted to do live coding exercise/take home code exercise and they expect you to do everything in Visual Studio with SQL Server.
They don't even know Rider exists a lot of the time. It is also quite different visually compared to Visual Studio code.
A lot of places have never used Linux at all and if they have they have it would be WSL or some RHEL box. So if you are screen sharing Gnome and with a totally different IDE and Terminal the person assessing you might not actually understand what you are doing.
> At least you can run SQL Server easily on Linux using docker.
1) They normally want you to use something like SQL Server Compact or SQL Server Express and a specific version. TBH I just don't bother anymore with these interviews because it takes like a couple of hours to get all this stuff working on Windows.
2) SQL Server Projects can only be used on Windows with Visual Studio. Some places do a lot of stuff "old school" and they want you to use that.
> It's just .NET that's largely ignored for no real technical basis.
As someone who has been developing primarily on .Net for the past decade this is absolute bullshit.
1. It’s only very recently that .Net became open source. Until then you would frequently hit issues where the only option was to rely on the few support calls you got with MS engineers with your $1000+ Visual Studio subscription to move forward. And believe me, this isn’t a pleasant way of debugging.
2. It’s only recently that .Net became cross platform. Until recently .Net meant you had to pay far more money for windows servers, get far less performance, and open your application to way more security issues. And when things broke they broke in highly inscrutable ways.
3. It’s still not a great platform. If you’re deploying on Windows, there are still things you will want to do that will require windows registry changes.
4. It’s only recently that the transition to an open source/cross platform framework has stabilized. Until now you had to deal with MS alphabet and naming goop, an absolutely muddy roadmap, and if you ever got thrown into a project you’d end up finding yourself in a mess of varying conventions, project types, incompatibilities, etc.
5. You know all those performance improvements they’re delivering with every release? There’s a reason for that. Until recently performance was so bad. Kestrel alone provider at least an order of magnitude of improvement.
6. Thank the lord for Jetbrains but other than them, to do proper .Net development you need to use Visual Studio. And Visual Studio is not a pleasant IDE or development environment at all.
There were a lot of technical reasons to not adopt .Net. Even today there’s the problem of MS losing interest or making the wrong choices and there being basically no alternative, because unlike even Java, the .NET ecosystem is completely dependent on what MS does.
By recently you mean a decade ago yeah? I mean it’s fair that it was only a half-decade (.NET 5) when it was genuinely complete enough, but lots of stuff was in good shape when it was called .NET Core.
It sounds like you’re projecting the problems of an existing .NET shop onto the shape of a startup without all that baggage. I can assure you, having worked with many customers running new business on newer .NET, it hasn’t been a legit technical concern since about .NET Core 3.
A decade ago is when they started the transition. It’s been painful.
If you’re a new shop that is making decisions without looking into how the company that pretty much runs the platform you’re basing your future on has acted in the past decade (we’ll ignore how they’ve acted beyond that because then it’s a no brainer) then you’re doing yourself a disservice.
I see that you’ve narrowed the goal posts to just technical concerns, which is fair, but isn’t sufficient to make a decision about what technology to choose.
Especially in a field where you have a similar alternative in Java where the sponsoring company doesn’t have half as much control, as well as several fully open source alternatives.
While suffering the performance loss of V8 versus CLR, JVM or any compiled language.
One of the reasons I am back to writing more C++ code is C++ addons for node.js, as several SaaS products now only care about Next.js as extension SDK.
I don't think it's about dreaming to be Google. K8s is pretty easy to set up now with a hosted cloud platform if you start with it, and helm takes care of pretty much all your infra needs. Migrating to K8s is what's awful. From there, the docs have most everything you need to know and there's an abundance of helpful information online that covers most problems you'll run into.
I would love this to be true, but it isn't. I've done generating types for the frontend multiple times, sometimes from C# (around 2016, using typelite), Java (openapi template generator) and most recently straight from OpenAPI spec files (.yaml) using Orval.
It always has been a shitshow. It works well for the 90% cases, but in the 10% edge cases, things break. It becomes impossible to fix generation issues, you will often resort in working around issues in your backend/openapi code. Sometimes you report bugs upstream and hope it gets fixed. In the current project we are stuck on a ~2year old Orval version (a typescript generator from openapi) because some features broke or were removed in the latest version, and the entire monorepo (15+ LoB apps) wouldn't compile and would require major changes. This simply because a never version of the generator was broken/removed features previously present.
No, that's not true. If you share code like this then you can do things like put the same validation code in the frontend and the backend: frontend to give a nice user experience, and backend to protect the endpoint.
OpenAPI does support patterns for fields and nullables/non-nullables - that already gets you very far regarding validation. A decently sophisticated generator (which don't exist IMHO) would generate the validation code for your respective language.
Still one lang on both ends is nice: there are some bits of code you want to run on both ends (like templating for SSR/SEO/caching; but also using them in the browser).
Not really? Having come deom a TS + Go startup it’s pretty trivial to wire up domain objects across each language and define a clean API boundary with some enforcement at build time. And Go was a far better choice for the backend than TS for some lower-level memory considerations.
With TS you don't have to "define a clean API boundary with some enforcement at build time". You can use the exact same types you're using to enforce endpoint schemas everywhere.
You don't need a middle man like OpenAPI (which I've used and it's a mediocre solution).
