[neonsunset]

Troubleshooting vendor WCF SDK version mismatch was not fun, and the guy who had to reverse engineer it to attempt a .NET Core port probably lost a few years off his lifespan (this was before CoreWCF was a thing).

When people bash gRPC today, they don't know of the horrors of the past.

[brogrammernot]

Yeah, I’ve lived the life of straddling .NET Core and ASP.NET while also dealing with React vs Angular2+ and having half of the system in the script bundling hell that was razor views and all sorts of craziness.

That experience is actually what led me to switch over to Product among other things, I get it when people joke (half joke) about considering retirement rather than going through that again.

[neonsunset]

At the time, we had already been using React for front-end widgets so migrating most other parts to then latest .NET Core 3.1 went surprisingly smooth. There were a couple of EF queries that stopped working as EF Core disabled application side evaluation by default, but that was ultimately a good thing as the intention wasn't to pull more data than needed.

Instead, the actual source of problems was K8S and the huge amount of institutional knowledge it required that wasn't there. I still don't think K8S is that good, it's useful but it and containerized environments in general to this day have a lot of rough edges and poorly implemented design aspects - involved runtimes like .NET CLR and OpenJDK end up having to do special handling for them because reporting of core count and available memory is still scuffed while the storage is likely to be a network drive. The latter is not an issue in C# where pretty much all I/O code is non-blocking so there is no impact on application responsiveness, but it still violates many expectations. Aspects of easy horizontal scaling and focus on lean deployments are primarily more useful for worse languages with weaker runtimes that cannot scale as well within a single process.

I suppose, a silver lining to your situation on the other hand is that developers get to have a PO/PM with strong technical background which makes so many communication issues go away.