Experienced Devs

.NET has been around for two decades. It's a well established technology with plenty of resources, documentation and libraries and frameworks. I guess these are in part the reason it's still thriving.

You're thinking about .NET Framework reading your opinions on it, .NET (Microsoft is terrible at naming) is the "newest" standard and it's fully open source and cross platform. They removed Windows only APIs and embraced the open source way.

While Microsoft is indeed full of shit they did a great move with .NET in the last 10 years.

You don't even need Visual Studio, I use Rider for instance and I love it! I cannot stand Visual Studio either, mostly because I hate its UI/UX.

At the end of the day is matter of preferences, I like .NET and C# and I work with these technologies daily for instance.

and buggy dependencies

??

They don’t open source much of their technologies

???

https://github.com/microsoft/

You want to have a superficial little rant about how much you hate microsoft. It's uninformed and boring, and you're not going to learn anything in that mindset.

C# is an excellent language for many circumstances. If you knock off the attitude, I'd be willing to explain to you why it's so widely used.

Your views of Microsoft and dotnet are very outdated, as you've been informed. You can develop dotnet code on Linux/Mac, Intel/arm using whatever editor or ide you like. The tooling is comparable to other language (i.e. dotnet add package ..., dotnet build, dotnet test bla bla), it's performant and imo fun.

You should check out the ASP .net core 7 minimal api, it's a great way to run a backend api (no IIS required), or write some code to control gpio on a raspberry pi, you could try out F# in vs code(ium) using the polyglot Jupyter notebook extension, or just use the repl shell...

Anyway, I just wanted to address the 'fun' factor.

Is this "experienced devs" or "incoherent ramblings from a teenager"?

Microsoft has done some pretty shitty things before, like buying and extinguishing many competitors. But it's pretty telling that you are NOT an experienced dev if you are criticizing the one thing MS has done really well. .NET is a rather mature framework with multiple seasoned languages under its umbrella.

Having used C# and .NET for many years, it's easily one of Microsofts best decisions they have made. C# is arguably one of the most dev-friendly languages on the market right now. With each iteration offering many quality-of-life improvements, I can't think of many languages that offer the amount of improvements that C# has had over the last 10 years. Compare that to seasoned languages like PHP, Golang or even Java and I think C# is still the easiest to use in terms of terse (but still understandable) syntax, generics, data structure improvements, general iterators syntax and can't forget LINQ improvements. I've often felt left behind when using Java, as it plays keep-up with some of the changes in C#.

I've been developing stuff with .NET and F#. For the most part the experience with the compiler, libraries and IDEs + tools has been good. Haven't had to touch visual studio or windows. Most devs run Linux or MacOS and the end product is deployed on servers running Linux and open source dotnet. I'm about as far as you can be from a Microsoft fanboy but you might want to get up to date with the ecosystem. Is it my favourite tech stack? No, but I've experienced much worse.

I for one hate Microsoft Windows a great amount, yet am in love with C#... Just because a company has one terrible product, doesn't mean everything they make is terrible.

Also... What everyone else here already said. No reason for me to rinse and repeat what's been said lol.

Here’s a news flash from 1990: Lots of businesses use Microsoft Windows

If your org is all Windows there's not really an easier way to make Windows desktop applications than c# and .NET with winforms. If a team is making any internal tools for Windows users there's a good chance that's what they'll be using.

Because code written 20 years ago on .NET and C# still works today, showing the stability of the platform.

Microsoft certs were all the rage twenty or so years ago and as such a lot of now mid to upper management, tooling and legacy projects are based on these.

The enterprises are not going to change their attitude, you might want to. There's plenty of fair criticism to level at Microsoft, but this is uninformed, inaccurate and even if it weren't, kind of obnoxious.

First, every company uses Windows, you can't avoid this and you'll have to learn how to use all the tools (Visual Studio, Office365, everything else). Yes it sucks, no you can't use another OS if you want to eat.

As for why .NET and C#: my shitty theory is that companies used to write software in C++. Then Java came along but it was not evolving fast enough, and Oracle was suing the whole planet. Microsoft invented C# to annoy everyone (both C++ and Java) and it worked because C# is actually a good language. You have a big SDK, you can do everything that Java does, it's easier than C++, and you can use your C++ code with C++/CLI. C# was a good alternative and people used it.

Do you think enterprises will make a turn in this attitude?

C++ is too hard (I know, I use it daily), and Java is dead. I don't think companies who use C# will go back to using an older language. That would be suicidal.

Don't take issue with the platform. Take issue with companies that are so fanatical with "we're a microsoft/java/javascript/esperanto shop!" that they'd cram it into medical devices and nuclear reactor controls before doing some sort of sober domain analysis.

Everything has its own set of problems.