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Open Source Programming Microsoft

After Open Source Community Outcry, Microsoft Reverses Controversial .NET Change (theverge.com) 56

Posted by EditorDavid from the hitting-the-.NET dept.
"Microsoft is reversing a decision to remove a key feature from its upcoming .NET 6 release, after a public outcry from the open source community," reports the Verge.

"Microsoft angered the .NET open source community earlier this week by removing a key part of Hot Reload in the upcoming release of .NET 6, a feature that allows developers to modify source code while an app is running and immediately see the results." It's a feature many had been looking forward to using in Visual Studio Code and across multiple platforms, until Microsoft made a controversial last-minute decision to lock it to Visual Studio 2022 which is a paid product that's limited to Windows. Sources at Microsoft, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Verge that the last-minute change was made by Julia Liuson, the head of Microsoft's developer division, and was a business-focused move.

Microsoft has now reversed the change following a backlash, and anger inside the company from many of Microsoft's own employees. "We made a mistake in executing on our decision and took longer than expected to respond back to the community," explains Scott Hunter, director of program management for .NET. Microsoft has now approved the community's pull request to re-enable this feature and it will be available in the final version of the .NET 6 SDK...

This eventful episode came after weeks of unrest in the .NET community over Microsoft's involvement in the .NET Foundation. The foundation was created in 2014 when Microsoft made .NET open source, and it's supposed to be an independent organization that exists to improve open source software development and collaboration for .NET.
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After Open Source Community Outcry, Microsoft Reverses Controversial .NET Change More

After Open Source Community Outcry, Microsoft Reverses Controversial .NET Change

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  • Welp (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Subsentient ( 6901388 ) on Saturday October 23, 2021 @09:40PM (#61921181)
    This kind of thing is what you get when you're stupid enough to write software for a proprietary environment. If you really need to use C#, use Mono or at least .NET Core. I find it inherently dangerous to allow any one organization to control a language entirely, much less a malevolent corporation like Microsoft.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 )

      C# isn't good enough for me to even bother writing a Hello World program in it. I will touch nothing Redmond has any role in.

      • Really? Can you explain more?

        C# seems to be dominating game development now. Personally Java can be heinous but maybe the VM for resource allocation was a step in the right direction for most code. Likewise it's much easier to create memory errors or security issues for moderately skilled developers in C or C++. I know people who aren't coders in any real capacity but have been brought into the domain of C#. C# seems like the perfect culmination of years of lessons learned in developing programming language

      • So you admit that your opinion is based entirely on ignorance then!

        Personally, I switched from gcc years ago because C# takes all the drudgery out of programming. No need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something . The .NET runtime is so rich in features that you can focus on writing your app, instead of writing the components to eventually create your app.

        • There is a big difference between C# and the .NET runtime. .NET is for all intents and purposes a closed source library for the C# language. As recent events have shown, Microsoft is once again trying to close up and monetize that part.

          C# is objectively useless without the Microsoft libraries. C++, Rust etc are better alternatives if you want your project to remain free in the long term, delegating C#/.NET to a toy language for those purposes.

          • .NET is open source, here is the GitHub project: https://github.com/dotnet?WT.m... [github.com]

            Just as C# depends on .NET, C++ depends on its own runtime library. Every compiled language is useless without one.

            All of Microsoft's development tools and languages are completely free to individual developers, and have been for years. You may think of Microsoft as the "enemy" but whatever, it works, and it works well.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
            You are thinking of .NET framework not .NET core (renamed to .NET ( without core) as of the release of .NET 5 last year). .NET is fully open source and cross platform ( well apart from the GUI stuff, until .NET MAUI drops in in few months)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by guruevi ( 827432 )

              I guess Microsoft makes it intentionally confusing, but .NET core is an entirely different library than .NET framework. They even point it out on their documentation that none of it is compatible, it's not even a subset of the other, so they came up with .NET standard, but really what people have been using for Windows development thus far is .NET Framework.

              Also, MIT licensed, not GPL licensed. Future development can easily be taken back by Microsoft and all contributions from the community would be lost. U

      • C# isn't good enough for me to even bother writing a Hello World program in it. I will touch nothing Redmond has any role in.

        people will be writing drivers with it soon enough....

      • Lol, nobody should take you seriously then, you're just an angry old fart of a tech dinosaur. Real tech people use the best tool for the job and aren't irrationally blinded by geeky angry dweebness.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Motard ( 1553251 )

      Has anyone ever figured out what .NET is?

      • It's what Java would have been if Sun hadn't stopped innovating.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          .NET is a inrermidiate language, a set if dev tools and a class library as far as I understand it, but if I'm wrong ( I'm nit an expert so I probably am ) please feel free to correct me

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Entropius ( 188861 )

        I have no idea.

        Anytime someone tries to explain windows programming to me my head explodes. I don't know if it's just too fucked up, or if I'm stupid, but it makes no sense to me.

        Like ... maybe I am just a stupid physicist. But I understand a compiled language: you write some C code, you compile and link it with gcc, you get a binary, run the binary. And I understand an interpreted language: you write some perl, you say "perl something.pl", and it interprets and runs it. But I can't figure out what the fuck

        • Actually, in C#/.Net it is the same.
          You write a program and get an *.exe.

          No idea what your stupid problem is.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by trylak ( 935041 )
          I guess that's because you are a physicist and don't work in IT? Or you are just trying to be willfully ignorant? Visual Studio is a development tool, I don't know why you think Windows boxes are always installing C++ runtimes?? There is plenty of information to be found about what ".NET" is.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward
            That was true at one time maybe his experience is 6 years out of date. If you built your program with non-static linking you'd have to include the right version of the MSVC DLL. Now Windows includes it with the OS and it is no longer possible to make a statically built application. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com]

      • Absolutely! .NET is the thing that makes it possible for me to focus on writing my app, instead of focusing on writing the components so I can write my app.

    • .NET 5 and above is under MIT license. The only thing proprietary about the environment is Visual Studio. The issue here seems to be that Microsoft was trying to cripple other IDEs. I agree that this is a dick move, and would make Gates and Ballmer proud, but that's a lot different from calling .NET 6 a proprietary environment. FWI, .NET Core was renamed to simply .NET 5 and Mono is no longer needed since the whole stack is Free and Open Source.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

        Except that the 'proprietary' approach to 'embracing' open source is to release the bulk of your package as open source, but retain a crucial piece as proprietary - with the option to make that piece more crucial at whatever time you think being open source has outlived its usefulness. You either tie the OS part to a tool like VS, or in a more extreme case, you fork the original into a closed source version and walk away from the OS version.

        If the Open Source version of the project has truly developed a cr

  • Just because a corporate sponsored product is open source doesn't mean that every feature in that product must be open source. Many products work on this model where there's an open source version and a proprietary branch of that open source version. There needs to be some business model in order to sustain the project.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MTEK ( 2826397 )

      Evidently developers weren't expecting to get dicked over so soon by this new and improved, open source friendly Microsoft. It's kinda funny and kinda sad, yet here we are.

      • What part of "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" did they not understand?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by trylak ( 935041 )
        Here we are... MIcrosoft changed course in response to feedback.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MTEK ( 2826397 )

          It should never have happened, or at least not for a long while. There are trust issues when it comes Microsoft and open source. This was bad PR-- too soon, Microsoft!

    • 100%. Only thing they did wrong imo is change their mind who gets what feature. IMO but I don't run a multi billion dollar business, best to try to get these things right the first time and if you screw up and don't have enough extras on the paid thing vs the free thing eat it. Not worth the bad press. Ship a little feature light and tout a .1 release with another tasty feature for the paid crowd as a bone to throw them instead of taking the "opps" away from the free folks.

  • Microsoft Reverses Controversial .NET Change " For a little while! It's Microsoft after all!

  • Can someone summarise what is the state of .NET? I got the impression that Microsoft had lost interest in .NET as their official windows platform in favour of... I don't know, some kind of javascript thing or something. Unlike MacOS I can't even figure out how MS would like one to develop apps.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      Seems to be quite healthy, really, at least if you're not writing cross-platform GUI apps. MS is pushing it in Linux command-line and server space. Recently they ported PowerShell to Linux, and it's all running on dot net core. Not something I'd ever use, but I understand it is used in mixed enterprises and is a valuable tool to help script and manage servers

      In the GUI world, dot not core doesn't fair so well in a cross-platform way. WinForms was never cross-platform (Mono's implementation notwithstandi

    • Re:What is the state of .NET (Score:4, Informative)

      by JorkutSind ( 8712287 ) on Sunday October 24, 2021 @12:52AM (#61921441)

      Microsoft is still fully invested in .NET .NET is a language platform and runtime similar to Java. It can run a number of languages (C#, VB .NET, Python, Managed C++, F# etc...) but the flagship language and most natural one to use is C#.

      Microsoft continues to make massive investments in .NET and C# (in the billions/year I think).

      The latest development is the .Net Standard and the .Net Core. Along with the purchase of Mono.

      It gets complicated, but the .Net Standard is a way to improve compatibility between what was the growing number of implementations of the .Net: I believe there was Mono (it was a third party, open source cross platform implementation), .Net Framework (Microsoft's windows only implementation) and the Compact Framework for small devices.

      Microsoft bought Mono, which is still supported. And started work on .Net Core which is cross platform and open source like Mono but supports more functionality than Mono but isn't fully compatible with the .Net Framework.

      The "old" .Net Framework is now discontinued. The latest version: .Net Framework 5 is actually a continuation of .Net Core which has been renamed to .Net Framework to indicate that it is considered full featured and fully capable of replacing the "old" .Net Framework.

      So all the various different implementations are getting merged into .Net Core which is also a bit more modular, so it's easier to just use some parts of the framework for when memory is at a premium (e.g. on small devices).

      I'm also fairly certain that .Net Core is 100% open source.

      IMO C# with visual studio is really the top of the line in terms of development productivity, in theory. But it is struggling to compete in terms of library support (it has ASP .Net for the web and XAML based UI for the desktop).

      Also another interesting development is Blazor. Which lets you build reactive web apps that run on the web browser 100% in C# (the .Net runtime is compiled to webassembly and executes the application).

      • Blazor sounds interesting. Wonder who the target audience is. Also wondering how that works with server-side code. Seems like you could develop a dumb terminal kind of design but at that point, you would think it's cheaper just to get a JS coder and go with a framework.

    • As someone who has actually learned how to use .NET, I couldn't be happier. Microsoft continues to robustly support and improve the .NET Framework. Perhaps the transition you are referring to is their move from .NET Framework to .NET Core. .NET Core is an incremental update to .NET, with the major differences being that it is now cross-platform (natively runs on Linux and Mac), and is built on dependency injection. .NET is far from dead, it's thriving.

    • Microsoft certainly hasn't lost interest in .NET, they are investing heavily in improving the platform and a sizable amount of Azure and other services is written in C#.

  • Hot reloading is way cool! Cuts out a bunch of mind numbing steps... speeds up work... It's precisely the sort of thing I'd have paid for, just to reduce the daily grind....

    • Absolutely! It's one of the best features of Visual Studio. I'm glad to see that it is now included in Visual Studio Code.

  • So microsoft announced they where going to remove hot reload from anything but Visual studio 2022, got a lot of flack for it, realised they where wrong, and hanged their plans. I don't see why this needs to be atlked about much any more, other than a åpossibøle reminder that when changes are made the we don't like, we need to push back against them. Hvat am I nissing here?

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:4)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 ) <bjarne-disc@holmedal.net> on Sunday October 24, 2021 @06:00AM (#61921661) Homepage
      damit I never notice typos before it's to late, sorry about that. And to whom ever owns Slashdot this week; would it kill you to add an edit button almost every other forum/discussion site has one?

      • Edit buttons would kill the moderation system. Or you would need to remove all modding after editing.

        And only arsine assholes care about typos anyway.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          You have not seen my worst posts, ofthen don when I'm tiered, quite a few people have actually asked me if I was having a strike wule typing the peticular post, anyway. An edit button is alkso an ipeficuant way of amending a reply when you realize you where werong or you come across relevant info, or need to reprace yourself. Ye moderations would probably need to be re avaluated. Oh on the subject of the moderation system, is it just me or is it broken. I never end up using my mod points anf here is the fe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nhtshot ( 198470 )

      Exactly. Microsoft MIT licensed the thing, so there's nothing precluding a fork from enabling that feature for all IDEs and offering a competing build.

      Yes, there are still some remnants of old Microsoft floating around in new Microsoft. Change doesn't happen instantly and occasionally old habits come back. But, the way they open sourced it ensured that at least for current versions, they can't go back on that if old habits come around again.

      As a fairly regular user of C# on Mac and Linux, I'm thrilled with

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