[cyral]

> C#, .NET/FCL, and the associated ecosystem doesn't feel good to work with, out of date, and in desperate need of modernization.

I recently built a company over the past year with .NET (after not using it for 5+ years) and felt the total opposite. I suspect you may be referring to the old .NET back when you needed Mono to run it on anything but Windows? .NET Core has been out for a few years and is an amazing improvement, the APIs (especially for web dev) feel very complete and modern, and there have been a lot of neat language features added in the recent major versions. The old .NET was definitely clunky though for targeting anything but Windows apps or servers.

Not sure what you are referring to for the paid products - .NET Core is now open source and even accepts PRs. Although there is no official YAML support still, so maybe the third party library was paid? JSON is a great option these days and .NET's new JSON parser is really fast and uses much less memory (Years ago C# got support for the new Span<T> and Memory<T> types which allow type-safe access to the underlying memory, making serialization operations much better since there isn't a bunch of copying and allocating involved any more)

[Mertax]

This is our experience too. We have 5 software engineers maintaining 3 mobile apps, 1 desktop app, 1 SDK product, and 1 web-app (Blazor) all with a shared C#/.NET code base that is bringing about $6M annually if you include the associated hardware product revenue. I’m not aware of many other tech stacks out there that can “natively” integrate with hardware/sensors and get that level of code sharing maintained by such a small team.

[cyral]

How is your experience with using Blazor and also creating the mobile apps (not even sure what .NET tech is used for that these days)? I maintain a web and mobile app so using C# across all platforms would be amazing, but I thought Blazor was still too new so I decided to use TypeScript & React for the web and mobile apps.

[billfruit]

Not exactly related, how is Xamarin integrated into this ecosystem. Does Xamarin have a future?

[Mertax]

While Xamarin has some pain points it definitely satisfies a market need for “native” cross platform development. My company uses it quite a bit. With .NET MAUI on the horizon as the evolution of Xamarin it has a future. Although I do wonder if the Blazor (mobile bindings) might end up having the brighter future. Kind of seems like the back up plan to appeal more to the HTML/CSS web devs who don’t want to adopt/learn the XAML UI markup.

[crobibero]

The “next” Xamarin is Maui, which has been delayed until Q2 2022

[weq]

.net7+ is basically .netcore + xamrain integrated into a single product. MS are evolving xamarin into a new UI framework called MAUI