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by wslh 3427 days ago
They used to choose very bad names like .NET or COM [1] (this predates Internet) makes searching information very tricky. MSDN doesn't help.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

4 comments

.NET is still rough naming-wise. We're porting a project to .NET Core Runtime which requires porting over to EF Core and ASP.NET Core (neither of which require being on Core Runtime).

Our internal libraries need to be compatible with the Core Runtime, so we have to have them target .NET Standard, which is compatible w/ the full .NET Framework or .NET Core. To target .NET Standard, you need the .NET Core SDK/CLI which includes the `dotnet` tool, which is almost never clarified as "the SDK/CLI" in documentation or in talks, but usually just ".NET Core".

Another minor annoyance: to build a .NET Standard-compatible library, you reference the "NETStandardLibrary" NuGet package. Makes a fair amount of sense, but is hard to talk about.

If you're running on Windows and want a smaller server footprint, you can use Windows Server Nano, which requires your apps to target .NET Core Runtime (not .NET Full Framework). Note that this requirement is not true for Windows Server Core. -_-

A few years ago I had to do some interfacing between python and some modelling software. I went through a COM interface, and it was a bloody nightmare to find docs.

I later found out I could have looked for "ActiveX" and found similar results.

A few years ago your best friend would have been https://www.codeproject.com . The issue of searching difficult questions using another keyword (e.g. ActiveX) is that you can miss the only answer available. For common questions (with answers!) you can find an answer with all the variations.
Their relational database is called SQL Server, which might otherwise be a colloquial generic name for an RDBMS.

They have a product in Azure named simply DocumentDB. I don't think "used to" is necessarily the best tense here (:

> NET or COM [1] (this predates Internet)

What could you possibly mean by that? The .com TLD was introduced in 1985, with microsoft.com registered already in 1991. Microsoft COM was created in 1993. (Of course, "the Internet" in any sense of the word predates all of this.)

.com was a command extension in DOS even before that.
And more fun, COM<number> is a special name, so you can't create e.g. a directory for COM2/3/etc. At least COM wasn't marketed like .NET.