[supertron]

I am. I've been developing with .NET since the start and my current workflow is really the smoothest and most productive (and most enjoyable!) I've ever had:

I develop solely on Mac (JetBrains Rider), compiling/debugging Mac binaries locally - no containers - unless I need any external dependencies like eg. Postgres.

On M1 MacBook Pro the experience is blazing fast - and Rider can be pretty heavy but Apple Silicon eats it up. (And to be fair to Rider, it was still pretty good even on Intel machines).

Everything is built and tested on Linux (and sometimes Mac) runners in GitHub.

Then I deploy direct to cloud-based "disposable" Debian VMs. If it's a small/hobby project, I can get really great performance out of even the smallest VMs.

For those interested in the details; I most often run production .NET ASP.NET apps as a systemd service on Debian using the native/in-built .NET Kestrel web server, and almost always (currently) use Cloudflare Tunnel as a reverse proxy for ingress traffic. No inbound ports open in Linux. I've got multiple production systems running like this including some load-balanced using Cloudflare Tunnel load balancing features, and it works really nicely.

The .NET team have been laser focused on performance since the early days of .NET Core and they haven't let up on this. The whole experience is night and day compared to "legacy" .NET Framework development.

My entire workflow is now Windows free - and for me there are no longer any compromises compared to developing/deploying on a Windows stack (in the early Mono days, there used to be a lot of compromises compared to a then first-class Windows experience, but no more...)

I have some strong (negative) opinions about what Microsoft is doing to the Windows ecosystem - which is partly why it's been a delight to no longer have to use it in any part of my day-to-day - but I will extoll the benefits of .NET all day long. The .NET team really do an amazing job. *

* For the purposes of generosity, I will briefly overlook MAUI and the slight mess that is the .NET GUI based app story...

[biglyburrito]

My first experience developing for .NET on a non-Windows OS had me running Visual Studio & SQL Server Management Studio in a Parallels virtual machine (VM) running on a Macbook Air with only 8GB RAM, targeting .NET Framework. My most recent non-Windows experience had me running JetBrains Rider & DataGrip natively in macOS on a (Intel, non-Apple silicon) Macbook Pro with 32GB RAM, targeting .NET 6.

The experiences were night and day: while my first experience was serviceable, my most recent experience was great & comparable to the work I'm currently doing in Visual Studio 2022 & SQL Server Management Studio 2019 in Windows 10 on a Lenovo Thinkpad w/ 32GB RAM, targeting .NET 7. And the macOS laptop + multi-monitor experience on a Macbook Pro is so nice that I absolutely prefer coding on Macs now instead of Windows.

[supertron]

> My first experience developing for .NET on a non-Windows OS had me running Visual Studio & SQL Server Management Studio in a Parallels virtual machine (VM) running on a Macbook Air with only 8GB RAM, targeting .NET Framework.

I'm actually amazed that you got away with that on an 8GB (presumably Intel) MacBook Air!! :)

[solarkraft]

> Rider can be pretty heavy but Apple Silicon eats it up. (And to be fair to Rider, it was still pretty good even on Intel machines).

Rider (like all JetBrains IDEs) gobbles RAM and sometimes needs its time to think.

But what makes it so, so much better than Visual Studio (besides a minimum of effort spent on usable design) is that it doesn't randomly completely lock up the UI for several (sometimes tens) of seconds.

Unlike Microsoft apparently, they know not to do their heavy computation on the UI thread.

[ComputerGuru]

I haven’t had VS lock up on me in ages. Probably since version 2019. A ton of work has been done to move everything out-of-process (and in doing so, make it async) and remove synchronous hooks.

Are you using 3rd party extensions? ReSharper? Lots of badly written (even tiny extensions that you’d think would be basically no-ops) can make VS lock up again.

[biglyburrito]

The startup time of JetBrains Rider is so nice & quick. Going back to using Visual Studio 2022 after two years on the latest Rider version felt sluggish in a bunch of ways.

[ygra]

This hasn't been my experience lately. Are you perhaps comparing VS 2022 with Resharpen against Rider? Stock VS 2022 is quite a bit faster than Rider for me. And for the missing refactorings there is Roslynator.

[scns]

Thats crazy. VS is written in C++ and Rider in Java.

[solarkraft]

It turns out that you can have badly architected software in "fast" languages and well architected software in "slow" ones.

[hailruda]

Most of Visual Studio is written in C# since VS2010. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio#2010

[kmac_]

I absolutely agree, .NET is so well designed on many levels: portability, core framework, documentation, support since the beginning. MS has proven that they can provide stable development platforms (well, except UI). If someone rejects .NET just because it's from MS, they are missing out.

[noahjk]

Same workflow here on Mac. Working with a few windows devs and don’t have any issues. We deploy into Microsoft .NET containers currently.

Side note, great website! It’s so rare to see such an aesthetically pleasing site on here! Do you happen to have any open source repos where you implement a lot of what you talk about? I’m interested to look under the hood at your code and your versioning system (I’m sure more, too, but I only spent 15 mins on your site so far)

[supertron]

That's very kind of you to say, I appreciate that. It's relatively new and still quite a bit unfinished (in my eyes...)

Having spent the last decade or so buried deep in quite a big project, I have shamefully very little to show in terms of open source - but that will likely change quite a bit over the coming year.

I do plan to talk more on my blog about my approach to versioning and various dev/CI tooling.

Always happy to chat to like-minded people so feel free to ping me a message via my contact form if you'd like to talk more tech :) Happy to share a bit more about versioning - the approach mentioned in my article still works really well for me.