Microsoft .NET 8 Will Bolster Linux Support (infoworld.com)
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An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld:
.NET 8, the next planned version of the Microsoft's open source software development platform, is set to emphasize Linux accommodations as well as cloud development and containers.
A first preview of .NET 8 is available for download at dot.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and macOS, Microsoft said on February 21. A long-term support (LTS) release that will be supported for three years, .NET 8 is due for production availability in November, a year after the release of predecessor .NET 7.
The new .NET release will be buildable on Linux directly from the dotnet/dotnet repository, using dotnet/source-build to build .NET runtimes, tools, and SDKs. This is the same build used by Red Hat and Canonical to build .NET. Over time, this capability will be extended to support Windows and macOS. Previously, .NET could be built from the source, but a "source tarball" was required from the dotnet/installer.
"We are publishing Ubuntu Chiseled images with .NET 8," adds Microsoft's announcement.
And when it comes to the .NET Monitor tool, "We plan to ship to dotnet/monitor images exclusively as Ubuntu Chiseled, starting with .NET 8. That's notable because the monitor images are the one production app image we publish."
A first preview of .NET 8 is available for download at dot.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and macOS, Microsoft said on February 21. A long-term support (LTS) release that will be supported for three years, .NET 8 is due for production availability in November, a year after the release of predecessor .NET 7.
The new .NET release will be buildable on Linux directly from the dotnet/dotnet repository, using dotnet/source-build to build .NET runtimes, tools, and SDKs. This is the same build used by Red Hat and Canonical to build .NET. Over time, this capability will be extended to support Windows and macOS. Previously, .NET could be built from the source, but a "source tarball" was required from the dotnet/installer.
"We are publishing Ubuntu Chiseled images with .NET 8," adds Microsoft's announcement.
And when it comes to the .NET Monitor tool, "We plan to ship to dotnet/monitor images exclusively as Ubuntu Chiseled, starting with .NET 8. That's notable because the monitor images are the one production app image we publish."
"Long Term Support" (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft must be trying to out-Google Google, what with calling three years of support for a software development platform "long term support".
On the other hand, that makes it clear to developers exactly how much Microsoft expects them to dance to its tune and accommodate its gyrations.
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Re:"Long Term Support" (Score:5, Informative)
Oracle promises to provide updates for JDK 8 into 2030. JDK 11 will get updates through at least September 2026. Python looks like it provides five years of support for each dot release (currently: 3.7 through 3.11), although lots of people are still salty about the 2->3 transition -- and Python 3.0 was released 15 years ago. Go guarantees source code compatibility (unless you do something inherently fragile like writing an untagged structure literal) as long as it's called "Go 1", which so far has been almost 11 years and looks to be a long while yet.
So, yes, the .NET SDK offers much less than other languages.
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Time to wake up.
Anything written since 2010 should be runnable on Linux. The things .net core doesn't have are: Winforms, WPF and Webforms. Winforms and WPF are for building Windows desktop apps. Webforms is an abomination that I don't think any new development has happened on since the 200x era.
Speaking about your customer, their webapp (if it was written in the last 13+ years), should just run on Linux. As long as it doesn't depend upon gobs of SQL-Server dialect specific stored procedures, the DB should
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That's using Mono to run the .net application, which has several drawbacks. For one thing, it (the Mono version) was abandoned years ago and will not receive bug fixes. For another thing, performance is dramatically worse than modern releases of .NET.
Of course, Microsoft's support for Linux UIs is pretty terrible in general. They made a big deal about their new .NET UI framework being "MAUI", the Multi-platform App UI. It doesn't support Linux and there are no official plans to do so.
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It used to, but that's not the case anymore. Are there some limits on the multi-platform functionality? Yes. Are they relevant to 95% of development being done now? Nope. That's exactly why they didn't take the time to build a .net core implementation of the legacy GUI platforms. Hardly anybody is building desktop applications that way anymore, the handful still being developed are being done in JS and an embedded browser.
Aside from the GUI toolkits, .net core treats Mac, Windows and Linux all as first clas
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I'm happy that .NET now supports Linux, and I've run my .NET code on Linux (even on a Pi 2 running ARM Linux), but GUI toolkits rule out using .NET for a wide class of applications if having those applications being cross-platform is a goal.
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MAUI is supposed to support Android and iOS. My Xamarin experience has been less than stellar, so I won't get my hopes up, but I know that my company is planning to evaluate it.
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Of course with Linux or BSD they would pay $500/mo to run their LOB app and that's it...
Except now you have to hire admins who are familiar with all that infrastructure, retrain everyone on the workstations and generally upend their established business practice.
Now you could definitely make a convincing case for swapping to Linux but it's far more nuanced than "license costs versus no license costs" and calling the devs "incompetent" for developing on the system most of their customers use and many would probably demand isn't going to go far in making your case...
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Existing rich-client apps tend not to work. Some may work on WINE, but they also may not work on the next version of WINE, or that same version on a different distro.
However, you can write .NET Core apps that will run on Linux. Unfortunately, there is no single blessed Microsoft rich client UI. In Windows, we can choose between WPF and Windows Forms, but neither works on Linux.
Avalonia, the UNO platform, Xamarin.Forms are several of the options available. They are all cross-platform and I believe th
Deadlocks fixed? (Score:1)
Are thread deadlocks fixed?
The one .NET app I have to look after needs restarts whenever some threads deadlock and the github issue is like "lol, yeah, that's a problem."
Smells like Microsoft is looking to acquire Ubuntu tho.
Re: Deadlocks fixed? (Score:2)
A deadlock comes from programming error, not the framework. Any threading system can deadlock if you code it poorly.
Re: Deadlocks fixed? (Score:3)
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The framework itself doesn't have any thread deadlock issues.
Re:Microsoft is looking to acquire Ubuntu (Score:2)
I think that this is what Canonical would love to happen.
I am not a Ubuntu (or any of its flavors) user and IMHO, it will be a dark day when this happens. Yes, I have said 'will'. I think it is just a matter of timing.
I'm in the process of removing 'snap' packages from my servers. I think that it is just about the worst packaging ever designed apart from .msi.
laughable (Score:2, Insightful)
Why anyone would volunteer to check-in to the .NET asylum to run applications on Linux is a mystery to me. There are much better solutions out there that don't rope you into Microsoft's dopey behavior.
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> There are much better solutions out there
There is ONE *comparable* solution out there. JVM.
Python, Go, JS etc aren't really in the same field.
> Why anyone would volunteer to check-in to the .NET asylum to run applications on Linux is a mystery to me.
I'd imagine an important reason is to run an application originally built to run on a Windows server, on Linux. Organizations have a lot of .NET code. I preferred .NET in early 2000s, but chose JVM because I already chose Linux for servers and CLR (Mono
Re: laughable (Score:3)
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I hope that's a rhetorical question.
If not, well, I never fully trusted Microsoft, and still don't, but there is simply NO COMPARISON to Oracle, which behaves more like an extortion racket than a software company. (As did Microsoft, back in the day, but never nearly as bad as Oracle.)
I won't even willingly use OpenJDK nor MariaDB. I don't trust Oracle not to sue over either, even though both are GPL. They tried to sue one of the biggest companies in the world over use of their APIs. And the whole point
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Why anyone would volunteer to check-in to the .NET asylum to run applications on Linux is a mystery to me.
Will I be able to run Paint.NET on it? I enjoy it. Disk space is cheap, I have a ton of it compared to the size of programs, if I use something seldom I can always put it on the rust.
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Modern C# and .NET Core are both open-source, and mostly cross-platform (with some unfortunate exceptions including WPF and Windows Forms).
I would consider it a waste of time and effort to try to independently re-implement C#/.NET Core, but the specs are out there, and anyone is welcome to try.
On the other hand, I DO very much wish there were a port of WPF to non-Windows platforms. There are several things out there that do something similar (MAUI, UNO, Avalonia) but nothing that would let us port our very
Wake me up when Windows go-gos. (Score:2)
I don't care until support is good enough to finally dump Windows for good.
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I still use Microsoft technologies, but, increasingly, fewer and fewer that are tied to Windows. For instance, a current project involving ASP.NET Core and a WebView to do the rendering, both proven to run perfectly on all major versions of Linux, minus a few stoopid bugs caused by inconsistent filename cases.
I'm pushing for Postgresql over MSSQL wherever possible; management was not interested until we started hitting DB size limits with MSSQL Express and having to buy expensive licenses that we weren't p
Good (Score:2)
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because more and more the Windows UI becomes dumbed down (but better looking to some extent), less poweruser friendly
Bollocks. As long as Microsoft continues to employ Ux designers to make the UI flat and add ribbons to everything they are very definitely anti-user. They make it harder to do things, not easier. Try finding a clickable area inside a Microsoft 365 application's title bar so you can actually click-and-drag a window around. Try finding the "Resend message" command in Outlook 365, seems like they move it with each and every update.
macOS may still be using an old UI having a single menubar across the top of the
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but better looking to some extent
The only time Windows got better looking in the last 20 years was Vista to 7. At this point you have to go back to Windows 2, yes, Windows 2, to find a version that's uglier. And the Windows 2 desktop UI was a lot more customizable.
Call me ... (Score:2)
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Literally everything you wrote is false.
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Let's break it down, then:
This new Linux version of .NET is proprietary, closed source, and only comes as binary blobs.
Code: https://github.com/dotnet/runt... [github.com] .NET 8 (with source): https://github.com/dotnet/runt... [github.com]
Release of
That's not a problem, as long as they provide proper support. However, these blobs are built to run on one and only one version of Linux. Not only Ubuntu, but a proprietary, closed-source version of Ubuntu owned by Microsoft. .NET is widely available in package repositories for most majo
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Incorrect on just about every count.
I've made a sample ASP.NET Core service, of moderate complexity and including lots of code ported from .NET Framework, that will run on Arch, Alpine, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Rocky, and Ubuntu, among others. Mostly I'm using the dotnet packages from the respective repositories.
I've also built, though not extensively used, the .NET SDK and runtimes from source, on Gentoo.
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Understood. A lot of folks who don't use the open-source and cross-platform versions of .NET Core and C# missed that these things even existed.
I still use and advocate strongly for Linux myself. But Microsoft started behaving a lot better - not perfectly, but better - once there was real competition in some of its core markets. They came to realize that making great tooling, and selling cloud services (many of which run Linux), were more likely to make money in the short- to medium-term, than relying sol
Just ported to .NET 7 (Score:3)
I just ported an app I've been developing at work from .NET 6 and its "long term" support to .NET 7. At the time I started development .NET 6 was the right answer. Now it isn't. I'm following .NET 8 with interest.
We're using MAUI - a can of worms in its own right - so I'm not concerned with Linux compatibility. Just Android and iOS. The closest I came to having to do any real work was porting code that used MessagingCenter to use WeakReferenceManager instead.
...laura