Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

The trick with Microsoft is to very carefully separate the good parts from the bad ones.

Labeling all of Microsoft as banned is really constraining your technology options. This is a gigantic organization with a very diverse set of people in it.

There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.

Azure and Windows are where things start to get bad with Microsoft.

"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way."

I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.

To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app.

I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots.

It’s just… end-to-end bad. Everything from critical dependencies developed by one Russian kid that’s now getting shot at in Ukraine so “maintenance is paused” to everything being wired up with shell scripts that have fifty variants, no standards, and none of them work. I’ve spent more time just getting the builds and deployments to work (to an acceptable standard) for Node.js than I’ve spent developing entire .NET applications! [1]

I have had similar experiences every few years for decades. I touched PHP once and recoiled in horror. I tried to get a stable build going for some Python ML packages and learnt that they have a half-life measured in days or hours after which they become impossible to reproduce. Etc…

Keep on assuming “Microsoft is all bad” if you like. You’re tying both hands behind your back and poking the keyboard with your nose.

PS: The dotnet SDK is open source and works fine on Linux, and the IntelliJ Rider IDE is generally very good and cross-platform. You're not forced to use Windows.

[1] The effort required to get a NestJS app to have barely acceptable performance is significantly greater than the effort to rewrite it in .NET 9 which will immediately be faster and have a far bigger bag of performance tuning tools and technologies available if needed.

I tried developing an MS .NET app and it's indescribably bad. The deployment story is non-existent, monitoring, tracing, alarming is barely there. You have to work with MS libraries that are on life-support with glaring bugs still present.

Unless you found yourself in some bizarre dark corner of a huge ecosystem of products, that's just not true.

Deployments are just "file copy". You don't even need Docker, because Windows isn't Linux, it has stable user-land APIs so apps are portable.

Not to mention that the dotnet sdk can create container images directly without even needing Docker installed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/sdk...

There are pre-built Linux and Windows ASP.NET base docker images: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deplo...

Visual Studio's ASP.NET templates all have a literal checkbox for "Docker support" which is all it takes to have a hot-reload debugging/editing experience.

The dotnet runtime has very good Docker support, including automatic memory usage tuning to prevent it getting killed by Kubernetes or whatever.

The underlying "App Host" below ASP.NET has fantastic support for layered configuration, which by default supports environment variables, command line parameters, named environment configuration files, and "user secrets" in IDEs. All of it is strongly typed and supports runtime refresh instead of Linux style "restart the process and interrupt user file uploads to get a new config". There's plugins for Key Vault, AWS KMS, App Configuration, feature flags, and on-and-on.

Open Telemetry is fully supported and now the default: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/ob...

Everything in ASP.NET uses the standard built-in ILogger interface, so wiring up any kind of audit logging or custom observability is a piece of cake: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.exten...

The really fancy logging uses the high-performance ActivitySource APIs, which are used for lower-level tracing of dependencies and the like. Again, these are standardised throughout not just Microsoft libraries but most third-party packages too: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnost...

Aspire.NET can orchestrate multiple cloud emulators, multiple apps, Node.js front-end apps, and wire up the whole thing with Open Telemetry and a free local trace viewer (with span support) with zero config: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals...

Windows GUI App deployments use standardised installer packages (MSI) that have simple devops pipeline tooling: https://github.com/wixtoolset Now... name the one package format that you can use to distribute client apps to all Linux distros!

When you run "dotnet build", the result is built, unlike Node.js where you end up with 150K tiny little files that need to be rebuilt again "in production" because oh-my-god it's a scripting language with C code blended in randomly, so it doesn't... actually... build. I just had the fun of trying to figure out why PM2 doesn't like musl or running under non-root user accounts, why starting a Node.js app takes frigging minutes whereas ASP.NET starts in milliseconds, and on and on.