Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by devwastaken 825 days ago
.NET with vscode C# extensions has not worked on Mac for some time. It's broken and cannot debug, it also features a fun warning from MS that their tools are proprietary.

Theyve really botched it and I can't find any reason to reach for poor quality tools over existing OS ones.
2 comments
kieranbenton2 824 days ago
They work perfectly, certainly since Devkit went GA back in Oct 2023 - use them on a M2 Macbook Pro every day.
link
devwastaken 822 days ago
Running with the dotnet executable works, debugging in vscode does not. It's readily reproducible and likely an effect from an obscure and common issue. (Maybe the "proprietary" nonsense) I could dig in and waste my time on the issue tracker, but I'm not the mega corp with a money printer.

Microsoft has many low quality teams, especially in some of their dev tooling. The natural consequence is that it's primarily tested on Windows, and has evolved many failure edge cases on other platforms.

The proper conclusion is - c# is for windows, just how it's always been. Using it is selling the business's products to Microsoft and forever ties it to their endless tech debt.

link
neonsunset 825 days ago
What? I am using it in parallel to writing this comment. Without DevKit just plain C# extension (but newer Roslyn LSP).
link
pjmlp 825 days ago
With or without the features that require VS Professional licence?
link
neonsunset 824 days ago
Commercial license is not required for the plain C# extension, which is distributed under a custom license for extension install[0] and under MIT for source code[1].

The features of DevKit (which is uninstalled on my system) are as follows[2]:

- VS-style solution explorer

- VS-style test explorer

- Intellicode (extra extension that integrates with DevKit)

I don't have use for any of these, preferring folder style navigation and CMD+T/P/etc., and GitHub Copilot autocomplete does way better job for any text than Intellicode. The "intellisense" VS calls it is just a base autocomplete feature in VSC that works for any language provided it has a back-end that integrates through LSP.

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/vscode-csharp/blob/main/RuntimeLic...

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/vscode-csharp/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...

[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...

link