| The entire cross-platform path is extremely rocky. Let me give you an example: My home automation system runs as a .NET Framework WinForms app written in VB. I'm interested in moving it into two directions: I would rather run it as a service, and I would like to be able to run it on Linux. VB .NET works on .NET Core in Linux environments, without a UI framework like MAUI, this should be trivial to accomplish both... right? RIGHT? Visual Studio happily provides a .NET Framework template for building a Windows Service (for C# or VB), which my app could work under pretty easily. Or there's a Worker Service template which is cross-platform .NET Core (for C# or F# only... for no technical reason whatsoever, Microsoft just didn't want to bother) The Windows Service template provides basically the scaffolding entry points for every way you interact with a Windows Service, you can pretty much just paste the code in for what happens when the service starts and stops. This is straightforward and easy and you can tell was designed by the same sort of people who came up with the WinForms editor: It's simple, it's obvious, and anyone can do it. I wrote my first practical Windows service one day, and it was done that day. There's instructions for turning a Worker Service into a Windows Service here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/extensions/wind... I think it's safe to say, this is not simple or straightforward in any way (especially since "Rewrite the entire worker class" is a step here... And that gets you back to... a Windows-only service? What the actual heck? So here's what I am mind-boggled hasn't happened here: Microsoft should have a cross-platform service template (in all supported languages, please and thank you), and it should give you entry points for starting and stopping the service and such which are all pretty much the same between operating systems, and then it should handle the scaffolding to translate it to the appropriate OS out of the box. |
At this point, personally, given the choice, I'd rather just create boring CLI applications that I can stick in cron jobs (or Windows Scheduled Tasks) than ever create another Windows Service if I can avoid it.
Given how dumb it is to create Windows Services and how dumb it is getting to create systemd-style services for Linux I can't possibly imagine how anyone could abstract that well cross-platform. That sounds like an awful minefield to create lowest common denominators that no one likes.
I think we already have such a cross-platform abstraction: it's classic CLI apps and whatever task runners you can find/stomach. .NET Core/.NET 5+ is great at cross-platform CLI apps.