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by crispyambulance 1976 days ago
> hefty amount of boilerplate to achieve practically nothing

It depends on what you mean by "practically nothing". If you're going to deliver a non-trivial commandline application to do something useful for other people, it needs to have robust input validation, proper auto-complete and help that's sensitive to what command subcommand/option you're trying to invoke. Would also be nice to also get an --update option more or less "out of the box"(+).

Those things add up!

(+) With .net 5, I now see that clickonce allows you to publish a console app from visual studio, but it doesn't seem to work the way one one would expect. The console app is launched from a start-menu application ref, just like a wpf app. I would have liked it to add the command to the user's path so they could just use once they installed it.
2 comments
mattmanser 1976 days ago
I really do disagree with you. Most of the example code that comes out of ms is just downright terrible, and encourages terrible code. They're always writing as if you're working for Reddit or Facebook scale, not the code 99.99% of their customers should be writing. I downloaded a random git project to load test a signalr app yesterday because for whatever silly compile reason I couldn't get the one inside aspnetcore to compile (which is a whole massive problem with "modern" .net in itself, how are we back to DLL hell?).

It was hundreds of lines long, didn't work properly, and once I'd culled the crap, pointless, boilerplate was a whole 20 lines.

C# really is great, you can write a lot with some really clear, obvious, terse code. But the awful, over-engineered, useless code that seemingly 75% of C# developers write is not, it's unreadable crap that adds nothing to performance, massively hinders readability and tarnishes the language.

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gnud 1976 days ago
Robust input validation and help, sure. Never had a massive use for auto-complete. Maybe my console applications are just too small in scope. I write multiple programs rather than one program with "sub-operations".

I've always used the (rather dated) library NDesk.Options [0]. Even though it was written way back in the .net 2 days. For me, it seems to hit a very nice sweet spot between power and complexity.

[0]: http://ndesk.org/Options

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crispyambulance 1976 days ago
> auto-complete

I think now folks have gotten used to auto-complete in powershell commands. It's really harsh to not give that to them when they're expecting it. :-)

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