HN Reader

I have a lot of respect for the .NET team. They often publish great in-depth articles and their pursuit for performance is relentless (e.g. see Kestrel and Entity Framework evolution).

And ASP.NET is one of the few large projects which managed to survive a large breaking changes. Almost to Python 2->3 level. You had to change how your web app behaved completely if you relied on their magic session which worked hard to keep state synched between back and front.

Feels good to have 3 trillion dollars interested in improving the stack you use and actually care.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

one thing that struck me was that the foundation for this effort was the linux distro build system. in other words, the work they put into making .net open-source and cross-platform eventually made everyone's lives easier.

Must have been an amazing effort to be involved in.

Oh, wow, I didn't expect that the best thing I'd read about software engineering, like, this year would come out of Microsoft! Don't get me wrong: I like .NET, especially its recent incarnation, but until just now, I would have expected its robustness to be an against-all-odds under-the-radar lucky escape from the general enshittification that seems to be the norm for the industry.

Reading something like this, which outlines a coordinated effort (diagrams and even a realistic use case for agentic LLM usage and all!) to actually and effectively make things better was a breath of fresh air, even if towards the end it notes that the remarkable investment in quality will not be in full force in the future.

Even if you don't care about .NET and/or Microsoft, this is worth reading, doubly so if you're in charge of re-engineering just about anything -- this is how it's done!

> We’re asking how much it will cost to build 3-4 major versions with a dozen .NET SDK bands between them each month.

Why so many variants?

.NET was a solid choice for backend builds before Node became so popular (And .NET is generally more performant than Node).

I hope this churn in .NET builds is temporary because a lot of people might be looking to go back to something stable especially after the recent supply chain attacks on the Node ecosystem.

I can see that high level overviews of complex systems are useful to get some insights, but in the same way I have the feeling that this mentality of high level, abstract organization is the root of the problem. If you have a complex system and simplify the components into abstractions, you will repeatedly run into difficulties because you've actively ignored the dirty bits. It's an top down approach that tries to tackle all issues, but an bottom up approach could even eradicate myriads of issues.