[chocolatemario]

As a C# developer I could say the same about my experience dealing with my first foray into [insert random language] and my attempt to develop [something with a non-trivial framework].

The issues you had could be attacked by navigating through this section of documentation, diving into the tutorial referenced in the beginning of the Overview section and the subsequent sections: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/web-api/?view=a.... This is not necessarily in defense of c# and dotnet, but this reads like you barely spent any time trying to digest the documentation.

[EnKopVand]

I’ve been a C# developer for a decade and I still think it’s hopelessly convoluted for getting very simple things up and running. Maybe there is something wrong with me, but it’s just not intuitive to me and it has frankly never been. I do think the move to core and then core to .net has improved things, but it’s still a really weird and way of doing things compared to other languages that I have worked with, and most of the “boiler plate projects” are very rarely useful, so why are they there?

Then once you need to go beyond the standard libraries it becomes a nightmare to deal with. In some cases, like extending the AD libraries, it’s sort of easy to extend classes with methods but the documentation on how to do so tends to assume a lot of domain knowledge. In other cases like if EF’s standard functionality isn’t enough for you, or you need to deal with weirdly formatted XML or non standard SOAP requests (don’t ask) it can be such a nightmare that it’s sometimes easier to write a micro-service in another language to do the “translation”.

I think it speaks of a language that doesn’t see too much use by its own creators. I may be wrong on that, but having build a lot of things for Azure, Typescript has often felt more like a first class citizen than C#. Obviously not for everything, far from it, but sometimes and those sometimes are enough to make C# troublesome because unlike things like typescript that are great second class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem, C# isn’t. It either fits really well or you have to fight it.

[pionar]

I wholly disagree as a person who worked in C#/.NET for over 15 years and recently waded into Node/JS/TS dev. C# and .NET are hands down the easiest platform to start on.

[EnKopVand]

In my decade around management that was not my experience with onboarding new people.

Maybe that is because we didn’t have a fascist linter for C# the way we do with Typescript, but it’s always been much, much, harder to get people to make “good” C# code in my experience. It hasn’t been hard to have the build things in C#, but it’s been hard to get people to build things the same way so that they can work on each others code flawlessly. So hard that I would never again consider using resources on it until developers drop significantly in pay, which isn’t likely to happen until I’m retired, if ever.

I wonder if it has to do with regional differences. I’m Danish, everyone (there are odd cases, but it’s more “everyone” than “almost everyone”) here has a CS degree and often they’ve been taught Java, sometimes C# but poorly, while obtaining it.

[Akronymus]

> I’ve been a C# developer for a decade and I still think it’s hopelessly convoluted for getting very simple things up and running.

For me, fsharp interactive is one of the best prototyping experience I have ever experienced.

[mccorrinall]

You are actually right. Today I opened the documentation again: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/web-api/route-t...

And it says right at the bottom, that OpenAPI and model binding is not supported in their route to code feature.

I initially googled how to create a simple json api, and that’s the documentation which I found. Looks really easy in the beginning, but after you’re done with your routes, you’ll read at the end of the documentation, that OpenAPI generation, model binding etc is not supported. I blame that the guide‘s title is misleading and - of course - that I should’ve read till the end before actually following any step of that tutorial.

[yyyk]

That's true (and minimal APIs help a lot) but ASP.NET still has a real problem with too much magic.

For example, the secret incantations required to output a mere string as raw json mimetype or log incoming deserialization errors* are unintuitive and very labourious - see InvalidModelStateResponseFactory. Or that I had to create a custom output formatter to output raw json. Why? Sometimes I just want ASP.NET to get out of my way and it's not trivial to tell it to let go.

* For example, url?parameter=1 for a boolean parameter, which would have worked with .NET Framework but won't for .NET Core/.NET.