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Ask HN: How do I get back into .NET development?

15 points by jsamse ↗ HN
I'm 38 and started my developer career 15 years ago. 10 years ago I switched from .NET to Golang. And for the past 5 years I have primarily worked with mobile apps (Kotlin/KMP) and transitioned more into a manager role.

Now I'm looking to focus more on the coding and I'm interviewing for a senior .NET backend position tomorrow. I'm hoping that my experience in the field will make up for most of the .NET-specific things I have missed or forgotten about. Do you have any advice on what I should prioritize to read up on before the interview?

I will very much appreciate any suggestions, thank you!

14 comments

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ameyv
Most backend interviews will ask following 1. OOP concepts 2. System Design 3. Database Modeling

But specific to .net would be 1. Asp.net core MVC pipeline 2. What are new changes or improvements in .net 6/core 3. Dependency injection 4. Authentication - JWT, OAuth, Cookie based. 5. What is middleware and give me few example where you would use this?

Also most probably they will ask about Azure specific services like 1. Service bus concepts 2. Queues 3. CosmosDb 4. App service 5. AKS - managed Kubernetes.

C# concepts - Interface vs Abstract class, Collection interface differences like IEnumberable vc ICollection vs IList, when to use what?

Hope it helps, Good luck!

jsamse
Great, thank you! I am confident about my understanding of the language agnostic core concepts but I will start by exploring how you actually implement the things you mention, for example DI. And I'll try to top it off by reading up on the things Azure offers. It's great to have a few things to go on. Much to learn and not much time. Thanks again!
d--b
You missed the introduction of .Net core which is the Python3 moment for .Net

This is going to be annoying to learn about.

If anyone has a good summary, please send, cause I don’t know of any, and it’s complicated.

jsamse
The fact that .NET Core came to be, and that there seems to be a lot of improvements regarding cross platform and tooling etc is the reason I find .NET to be interesting at this point. But I don't know much of the details. And I agree, a summary would be very nice.
UglyToad
I can try but will doubtless miss something.

.NET Framework was the .NET we all knew and tolerated. It was on version 4.6/7 or so. Windows specific, requires a full install of the framework on the machine to run. Support for Winforms, WPF, WCF, Webforms, ASP.NET MVC/API etc.

Microsoft wants to make a play for the cloud. Windows Server is expensive and no one likes it. Luckily for Azure OS is irrelevant, whichever server Microsoft still gets paid.

Step forward .NET Core. This takes the .NET runtime and makes it cross-platform (and open-source). Only really supports ASP.NET in the beginning. There are some libraries/APIs that are available in both .NET Framework and .NET Core runtimes. This common interface is .NET Standard, you can basically ignore this now I think but it means libraries can be used from both.

.NET Core goes through multiple versions, 1, 2 and 3. More things are ported to .NET Core but Winforms, WPF and Webforms are left behind. Meanwhile Core becomes a better and better platform for web servers.

.NET Core drops the 'Core' naming, becomes .NET starting at .NET 5. .NET Framework is legacy but gets a bump to .NET 4.8 or so. So basically unless you're doing Winforms/WPF/Webforms you can be on .NET Core/.NET 5+ with minimal issues. Hopefully that clears something up.

neonsunset
You can use .NET 6/7/8 together with WPF or even WinForms if you want to. Everyone is happy to see WebForms die and the other two run on new targets out of the box.
UglyToad
Presumably that's only when using the Windows platform identifiers? This is news to me, thanks for the correction.
codegeek
Microsoft docs are really good for .Net Core tutorials. I am more of a newbie to .NET even though professionally programming for 20+ years in general and the microsoft tutorials have been really effective at getting started:

Note that .NET Core 8.0 is about to be released so you may wanna start with that at this point.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/?view=aspnetco...

jsamse
Thanks! I found some of these yesterday and I agree, they are good.
aregsar
Many places also require Azure knowledge related to microservices communication. So you might want to learn about basics of azure functions, service bus and queues
solardev
Out of curiosity, what kind of projects or companies tend to use. Net (sorry, my autocomplete won't let me type that lol) these days?
jsamse
I'm located in northern Europe and I would say .NET is very common in most types of businesses.
solardev
Interesting. You think there is a regional component to it, or is it more about industry? Here in the US I haven't met anyone working in .NET since it first came out, or anybody who's even used it in the last decade or so. Maybe it's my profession (web dev) or vertical (renewables).
lexoj
I think a lot of government projects use .Net