[bonesss]

IMO the issue isn't MS, really (though parts of the org are still worthy of strong skepticism), it's the cultural phenomenon of a certain generation of developers who essentially eat, breathe, and die by Microsofts product cycles...

There are those argued that any innovation is unneccesary until MS launches a product for it, when it becomes a "must", ad nauseum. I'm talking about the developers who never discovered ORMs until MS pushed theirs, who let their products languish for years waiting for MS to address issues, and move lock-step with them on all fronts.... You've seen major motion with "Alt.NET" groups, and some pretty major internal revolutions based on the displeasure of community technical leaders (and their willingness/needs to hop off of MS solutions), that stem from this dissonence.

It can create some cross-purposes in their tooling when they're aiming at conservative C#'ers who want a unified MS experience and look at no other technical sources... Especially for the Enterprise devs, cloud-native architect, and cross-platform engineers who have clear needs that don't jive with those assumptions.

F# and .Net Core are the only reasons I'm still on their stack. It's a dream to work with, and addresses critical issues of cloud and distributed engineering that previously would have excluded MS and .Net from the discussion. Particularly with scalable cloud systems, OS licensing fees are often show stoppers for NGOs, non-profits, academics, and researchers

[sjellis]

> IMO the issue isn't MS, really (though parts of the org are still worthy of strong skepticism), it's the cultural phenomenon of a certain generation of developers who essentially eat, breathe, and die by Microsofts product cycles...

Although to be fair, they were taught this by Microsoft. Before Microsoft saw the writing on the wall and changed approach not that many years ago, the strategy was to provide a Microsoft solution for everything. Useful stuff from outside Microsoft would be either be cloned, or MS would simply not implement compatibility or integration.

The .NET ecosystem was, and still is, utter dominated by Microsoft at every level, unlike Java where multiple vendors provide implementations, innovations, certification etc. It's a bit unfair to blame the developers in the ecosystem for not pushing back hard enough against the organization that provided literally everything, from the software licenses to the professional certifications.

[scarface74]

I'm talking about the developers who never discovered ORMs until MS pushed theirs

Because every ORM sucks outside of the ones built on top of Linq.

Linq is great because it makes a query language a first class citizen and it decouples writing the query and the implementation.

[Jallal]

In all fairness, you should consider Entity Framework, not Linq, when speaking about ORMs. And the first versions of EF sucked compared to the others frameworks that were available at the time.

[scarface74]

It’s not just about EF. The beauty of C# and Linq is:

Linq => expression trees => provider => native query language of data source => data source.

Written correctly, you can pass expressions around like:

repo.Find(c => c.age > 65 && c.gender == “male”)

And the expression can be interpreted at runtime by either EF creating native sql or the Mongo driver creating a native MongoQuery or even an in memory List for unit testing.

No matter how good another ORM may be for another language, what made C#s implementation better was Linq + expression trees.

[royjacobs]

Except EF is basically the only provider that works 100% robustly. I have some pretty bad memories of getting NHibernate's Linq provider to work correctly, since it would just randomly mistranslate queries or flat-out throw exceptions.

[osd]

As someone who has switched almost entirely away from .net to go, this is absolutely untrue. I'm fairly certain the issue was PEBKAC

[scarface74]

The Mongo Linq driver is excellent. It’s not exactly an ORM, but it does let you work with strongly type collections and the queries it produces are pretty good.

There was also another Linq/ORM I used back in the day for Postgres. I can’t remember the name of it.