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Ask HN: What do Asp Net engineers struggle with the most?

4 points by kirillzubovsky ↗ HN
I have a friend whose company is built in Net, a thriving successful business. They want to hire more engineers, but are worried that Net isn't an attractive technology anymore. I am thinking this could actually be their advantage, as there are thousands of Net engineers.

If you are a Net engineer, what do you struggle with about your job and/or with the technology that you might want to see fixed?

If you were to consider changing your current job, but still sticking with Net, what would you want to exist in the new company which would improve your day?

Am I asking the wrong question?

6 comments

[ 63.0 ms ] story [ 1111 ms ] thread
rails
Old, and/or outdated documentation is my top struggle. With all these different versions of .net framework/core, asp.net with and without core, entity framework and all the other stuff in the ecosystem you always have to check if the documentation fits the .net (framework/core) version you are currently using.

On the first look it seems like there didn't change a lot between the old net framework and net core 1,2,3 and now .net 5 but once you get into the details each time it is a changed world.

kirillzubovsky
Oh yeah, I can relate. There is a ton of change between version and very often new plugins don't support old versions at all. Would sticking to one, say most progressive implementation (Net 5 at this point) help you feel more confident that the job can be done?

Although at this point Net 5 isn't going to be documented because it's so new, and next year they will release Net 6, which will be the actual long-term support version.... this is how their mess with docs happens in the first place.

uncheckederror
Make sure you have a plan to upgrade all your projects to .NET 5.[1]

ASP.NET is quite fun, if you can keep your work up to date. Opening up a project that needs bug fixes, but doesn't have access to the latest tooling in VS2019 or language syntax because it still on the old .NET Framework is a bummer.

Any company that was willing to update their .NET apps regularly, and treat development of the app as a service rather than a one time project would make me jump ship.

[1] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-5-0/

kirillzubovsky
Seems like companies that are not updating their apps is more common than those that do. I wonder why.

When you say `ASP.NET is quite fun`, what's your favorite part?

uncheckederror
My favorite part is the tooling. For example when you hover over a method name in VS 2019 it will show you its signature and what parameters it takes. If you right click on it and select "Go to definition" it will show you the code for the method. Just above the method name you'll a little chunk of text that says "2 References" which you can click on to see all of the places in your project where the method is invoked and links to review them. What makes ASP.NET fun is the quality and completeness of the tooling.
the_only_law
> Seems like companies that are not updating their apps is more common than those that do. I wonder why.

I'm guessing this is just a product of .NET being big in the "enterprise" world. I dont mind modern Java, but I remember when I was working with Java around Java 7 people would complain about being stuck maintaining Java 1.4-1.5 apps.