Microsoft pulls the sheets off first .NET 6 preview and... it's still a mess. Native Apple Silicon support, though Microsoft has shipped the first preview of .NET 6.0, the first long-term support release of its newly unified application platform, promising native Apple Silicon support, desktop applications on ARM64, and a ton of updates to key frameworks like ASP.NET Core. Program manager Richard Lander described .NET 6 as "the final parts …
From the vibe of the article, I'm not sure who would start using .NET 6 who wasn't using .NET before, or why previous .NET users would want to update to .NET 6. If sounds like a half-way-house to doing some new stuff - but not very well yet - so why would you bother? Perhaps it is intended to prove they are following a roadmap to a better mutliplatform IDE, though perhaps not a version to actually use?
Every version of .NET has felt like a halfway house to anywhere worthwhile, but never getting there and feeling like it never will. So many damn versions of just the major .NET versions, let alone the point versions and the tens of thousands of support libraries in many duplicated versions that now infest any Windows system that has ever had anything that uses .NET installed on it.
<RANT>... This sounds bloody awful. I hate MVC and Blazor. So much so, that I build my own .NET Core API system that excludes all of MVC.
The thought of building desktop applications using Blazor is the stuff of nightmares.
The main bugbear for me is that they still haven't created a GUI interface to Mac or Linux native platforms. Xamarin is slow compared to native frameworks on all platforms and given Microsoft's direction in moving towards a Linux kernel, I don't get why they don't provide better quality options for cross-platform development.
.NET 5 was a step in the right direction, however this sounds like all the departments are clamouring to get their technology included without thinking about what's best for quality software going forward. I can't say I'm entirely surprised though. With this effort I don't see Win32 being replaced fully any time soon.
The attraction of both Blazor and MAUI is full-stack C# so that developers need only work with C# and .NET.
ASP.NET Webforms did this 20 years ago. It was still a perfectly good system at what it did until they decided it had to go. Much as there was a lot of bad webforms code, I've seen far worse with MVC and javascript, wide open APIs with all the trust on client side code that is trivial to bypass.
.NET 6.0 introduces Blazor desktop applications, which still use web technology but are wrapped to run as native applications. "It is primarily aimed at web developers that want to provide rich client and offline experiences for their users," said Lander."
Jesus Christ, not satisfied with kneecapping web development options, now they're going to try to do the same for desktop too?
So apparently, the desktop development analogue for the web (webforms) is fitting a square peg in a round hole, and needs to be taken out and shot.
But fitting a round peg in a square hole, they're now trying to push the web model onto desktop?
I really can't help thinking at times that Microsoft spends 90% of its time trying to find new, different ways to do exactly the same things that can already be done perfectly well, while forcing developers to constantly learn new technologies, just to stand still doing the same things.
They'll no doubt highlight performance gains, but it's disingenuous, because they'd have had similar gains on existing technologies if they'd put the effort into improving those.
Sounds like the plan... Microsoft have managed to produce an entire generation of "web developers" who are so clueless that they still consider that a web page is a modal system application and that standards, accessibility and having a flying hope in hell of supporting a product post "release" (as in something delivered, not necessarily working and usually not) are something that other people care about.
ASP.NET Webforms is clunky and slow. It's totally impossible to produce the sort of active UI demanded by today's users and the postbacks to retain state break navigation in complex systems. The idea of a desktop application model on a web application was just a bad idea.
Webforms had to go, it was outmaneuvered by everyone. And of course it's possible to build a bad product with anything, but working with webforms today is like having both your hands tied behind your back.
I'll just keep using good old Swing and create sane, truly cross platform, user interfaces that doesn't suck the juice out of your eyeballs if you're over 35.
BTW, fuck mobile. They can go and use the web site. The people living in a world of hurt trying to get a web page mangled in to an application, always needs a bit of comfort ;-)
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