Five myths about .NET and C#
Why is .NET not popular with startups? This was a question asked on Reddit, where the main theme in the answers was a lot of legacy thinking around C# and .NET.
1️⃣ Only for Windows
From .NET 5 and up .NET is multi-platform. It can build and run on Windows, Linux and macOS. Sometimes it’s even faster on Linux!
2️⃣ Closed-source
In the old era .NET wasn’t open source.
Nowadays .NET is open source and available on GitHub.
3️⃣ Not free, the tooling is expensive
.NET itself is free. You can run and build it everywhere without restrictions.
Visual Studio was quite expensive (>$2.000). Visual Studio is much more affordable now for $45/month (pay yearly to get $50 free azure credits/month!).
But for up to 5 users, you can use Visual Studio for free with the Community edition.
Visual Studio is unfortunately only for Windows. But JetBrains Rider, my preferred IDE, works on Windows, Linux and macOS.
Rider is $15/month and for startups there is a 50% discount. It’s free for students and teachers.
Don’t’ need a full-blown IDE, then you can use Visual Studio Code for free! VS Code also works cross-platform.
4️⃣ Legacy platform
.NET has been here since 2001, so yes, it’s old.
But it didn’t sit still. It’s very innovative and has evolved a lot since its birth.
Features like LINQ, dynamic and functional programming have been added. C# introduced the async/await syntax, that other copied.
It runs on any hardware, from a raspberry pie to the biggest server.
5️⃣ Microsoft is Evil
Yes, I get it. They screwed people over pushing Windows and IE.
But losing the mobile market forced them to change. Under the lead of Satya Nadella, the company is transformed.
In this new era, .NET is open source, they created VS Code and Typescript, and own GitHub.
