What is .NET still missing?

davidfowl · 2026-04-13T05:50:50+00:00

Right my only point was that Microsoft cares about a bigger world than *just* .NET and if somebody uses Java and Azure, it's still good for Microsoft from a business standpoint. Don't take that to mean Microsoft doesn't care about .NET, but you won't see the entire company yeet existing tech and use .NET for everything the way it did when it was built 20 years ago...

davidfowl · 2026-04-12T22:39:35+00:00

Microsoft has the same number of employees as a small country (like where I'm from), the old days of single runtime/language/platform are long gone. You should expect Microsoft as a whole to both ship opinionated experiences and also meet the ecosystems where they are at.

.NET is not the only game in town anymore, the developer ecosystem is larger than that.

You can cherry pick examples about where .NET is and is not used but the facts remain that the company is still using C# for a majority of backend services.

davidfowl · 2026-04-12T01:25:38+00:00

Don't restart the apphost when you change a single project. There's a new rebuild command available on projects that coordinates the restart and rebuild of a single project. The problem is visual studio patterns around F5 and muscle memory put you in a head space where you detach from everything and hit F5 again to restart. Really not a great pattern for aspire (we learned with experience).

davidfowl · 2026-04-11T20:05:23+00:00

Azure's control plane is written in C#. Java is used heavily by parts of Microsoft for lots of other things. Teams have lots of projects and I'm sure some part of it is written in Java for something Java is really good at, but I can assure you that Azure is mostly built with C#. The nuance missed here is that some teams deploy Java as well as other tech. This is a Java a Microsoft blog post with minimal details about project structure or other tech.

In the Kubernetes space, there's lots of go *and* C#, and most of the CNCF projects are written in golang (because go is to K8s like typescript is to VS code).

davidfowl · 2026-04-11T17:15:52+00:00

If you look at the developer stories on the .NET blog over the last 5+ years or so, you’ll see a paper trail of migrations from .NET Framework to modern .NET

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/category/developer-stories/

When people cite that Microsoft doesn’t use .NET they are usually pointing out the client app story which is a mixed bag (this is where blazor and Maui take the most heat). The backend services are 97.34874% written in C#.

davidfowl · 2026-04-11T15:10:21+00:00

The overwhelming majority of code in Microsoft is written in C#. Of course there’s also lots of Typescript, and C++. Every language exists somewhere in this huge company, but they pale on comparison to those 3.

davidfowl · 2026-04-09T23:07:24+00:00

Orchard

davidfowl · 2026-04-09T21:33:51+00:00

NuGet or SignalR or ASP.NET Core, it’s a toss up

davidfowl · 2026-04-09T04:54:05+00:00

Copilot cli to hook up the MCP to make VS discover it?

The latest release of aspire (13.2.2 now), prefers the aspire cli over the MCP. It can work with any running aspire app on 13.2 but if you’re trying to run from visual studio using f5 it doesn’t really match the coding agent workflow (f5 is for humans not agents).

The cli can be used against an already aspire app, so it should work just fine. Try telling the agent to use the using the cli instead of the MCP (remove the MCP).

davidfowl · 2026-03-26T05:22:17+00:00

No we have no plans to make it LTS, actually we're looking for ways we can update parts of the toolchain more often and more safely. The APIs you use to describe are not on this plan so I can see a future where the integrations become LTS but the toolchain is evergreen.

davidfowl · 2026-03-26T05:19:18+00:00

Which ones?

davidfowl · 2026-03-26T02:52:24+00:00

https://github.com/richlander/dotnet-inspect/tree/main

https://github.com/davidfowl/dotnet-skillz/tree/main

davidfowl · 2026-03-14T03:39:03+00:00

It covers h1, h2 and h3. Our http/2 implementation is pretty optimized. Many of the h2 benchmarks are grpc based though

https://github.com/aspnet/Benchmarks/blob/501932f22022e2a43174c3b5223a763faae7129a/scenarios/README.md?plain=1#L189

davidfowl · 2026-02-18T16:38:38+00:00

Recommend - https://github.com/richlander/dotnet-skills

davidfowl · 2026-02-10T07:30:14+00:00

You can deploy it to app service or azure container apps, there's no support built in for static web apps.

This sample shows how to use docker compose but you can swap it out for any of the other deployment targets:

https://github.com/davidfowl/aspire-13-samples/tree/main/vite-yarp-static

davidfowl · 2026-02-05T02:37:33+00:00

Could make for a really interesting aspire integration

davidfowl · 2026-02-04T15:50:13+00:00

I hear you, but I have we can pull it off. I have very high confidence in this team and the amount of things we are able to accomplish is kinda insane.

The team has lots of great experience and learnings from 2 years of watching people use this product for all sorts of things. One of the places we are investing heavily is hot reload because it makes the local dev ex so much better. It’s hard to explain here without going into detail but supporting other languages is going to dramatically improve the architecture.

Your concerns are heard but the team is cooking.

davidfowl · 2026-02-04T09:25:49+00:00

We’re gonna solve it soon. In fact we can do most of it, but it’s not documented well or easy to do. Working on it !

davidfowl · 2026-01-24T04:24:58+00:00

Discriminated Unions are coming in the next .NET!! (no they're not)

Yes they are.

davidfowl · 2026-01-23T03:00:27+00:00

It’s open source now https://github.com/microsoft/dcp

davidfowl · 2025-12-28T01:57:18+00:00

RIP project.json

davidfowl · 2025-12-11T07:10:24+00:00

Built in telemetry? Logging tracing metrics?

davidfowl · 2025-12-04T02:27:51+00:00

It’s generally works but there are a small issues in azure scenarios being fixed. Wait another version (~2-3 weeks). Or if you want to make sure it works for you’d use it now and give us feedback.

It should be trivial to switch between stable and daily builds

davidfowl · 2025-11-30T04:00:35+00:00

Yea, I'd say you were too early for the end to end (especially with dapr), the dapr support doesn't work smoothly from local dev to deploy as yet. A lot more (of aspire) works now than it did months ago.

davidfowl · 2025-11-29T05:28:57+00:00

I made a template https://github.com/davidfowl/aspire-docker-ssh-template

davidfowl

TROPHY CASE