[quadrifoliate]

I am like the "before" version of you, so I have a question.

How did you get around the problem of not having any integration with Unix tools (or did you just not bother)? Maybe I'm not familiar with .NET. I see you can run it on Linux or Mac, but I don't imagine you can use Make or helper shell scripts if you want developers who use Windows to be able to build your code.

Quite apart from my loathing for Microsoft products, the reason I don't try things like .NET is that building for Windows when you're developing on Linux or Mac seems like POSIX, but 100 times harder.

[adamnew123456]

You could use nmake and use a build.sh (well, build.cmd) if you wanted to, although it's not really common. My sense is that the hierarchy of build tooling goes something like this depending upon complexity:

1. Hit the "Build" button in Visual Studio with the MSBuild file it generates for you.

2. Write a custom MSBuild file that embeds your logic in XML and run it via the msbuild CLI.

3. Write the build script with something like Cake. Closest to writing sh to perform your build except that your script is done in C#/F#/etc. the same as your app. More verbose than sh for simple things but you get the same tooling assistance you would writing normal code.

> Quite apart from my loathing for Microsoft products, the reason I don't try things like .NET is that building for Windows when you're developing on Linux or Mac seems like POSIX, but 100 times harder.

It's actually less bad than you think. At the low end it's just `dotnet build` everywhere; maybe a `dotnet publish` is involved but you can cross-compile fairly easily. At the high end the build libraries are cross-platform, and should work anywhere dotnet itself does as long as you avoid embedding any platform-specific assumptions into your logic.

> How did you get around the problem of not having any integration with Unix tools (or did you just not bother)?

Emacs with Omnisharp gives you the usual autocomplete/inline docs/semantic rename/etc., although I'm not sure if you'd consider Emacs a Unix tool ;) I'm told it works well in Vim though I've never used it myself.