[posguy]

Its depressingly popular in the US for small & mid-size retailers and businesses. NCR, Loc, IT Retail, et all are built for Windows, and in the pharmacy arena you've got major companies like CVS using stuff from companies like Integra (not the telecom company, the pharmacy one) that thinks moving to SQL Server 2008 and C# with a full rewrite is the route to go for their major PCI compliant products.

It confounds me that locking yourself into a shrinking platform is what these players choose to do. Walmart doesn't use Windows in PCI related situations, nor do the big boys, all are on SLES running a POS atop that.

If your gonna do a rewrite, why lock yourself into one OS and into one database? Database connectors are a thing, and they aren't hard to use...

[hvidgaard]

In all fairness, writing in C# and targeting SQL Server is not locking you into Windows unless you use WPF or other Windows specific parts of the framework.

[posguy]

O_o

Sure, you can technically run C# on a Linux box (eg: Debian), but the last few times I had to (to interface with some point of sale hardware) I literally ended up just rewriting the driver in python. No desire to maintain something so foreign to the rest of the codebase when python can handle serial devices just fine.

Wrt not using a database connector, just why? Your literally locking yourself to the SQL Server licensing model, which blows up when you allow BYOD on every android phone, and they're all connecting back to your SQL server. Postgres and MariaDB meanwhile have no issues. Let alone if you hit the 10GB DB size cap, or need more than 1 cpu core or 1GB of ram to cache your database.

[hvidgaard]

Are you aware that .netcore natively runs on a variety of systems now?

If you make your systems such that you are dependent on SQL Server and cannot switch it to something else, then it's just a shame, but don't blame SQL Server for that. Besides, unless you have massive performance requirements, it should be behind an API anyway. It doesn't take much to code, and it increases modularity a lot.

[taspeotis]

Minor point but it's four cores now [1].

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/sql-server/sql-server-2016-e...

[slowmotiony]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. We use .net core together with SQL Server on Linux boxes in production, no issues whatsoever and we can finally use a programming language which is actually pleasurable to code in.

[skrowl]

You know exactly why he's getting downvoted. Saying positive things about Microsoft is very unpopular here on HN.

[barfbuttface]

Yes down votes for positive MS, and bans for negative MS.