.NET 5.0
The future is very bright for .NET. It has the right <i>raison d&#x27;etre</i> - .NET is part of the growth story for Nadella-Microsoft.<p>They already have you programming in their editors (VS&#x2F;Code) and pushing to their VCS (Github). They&#x27;re even teaching you the C# type system with TypeScript :) If they can just convince you to use their stack, Azure will win you over from AWS every time.<p>As a result, I really wanted to adopt .NET earlier this year. But they have some work to do to make the ecosystem approachable to newcomers.<p>One of the core issues feels so... trite. But experiencing it, I realized how real it really was:<p>The Names. Microsoft has created a Ninja Warrior obstacle course of proper nouns.<p>It is comical. It is worthy of parody.<p>.NET, the CLR, and their relation to C# and F#. ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Api, Blazor vs Razor, .NET Core vs .NET Framework vs .NET Standard.<p>I think I could draw the lines between all those with about 50% accuracy. And I read like 3 books on .NET before diving in.<p>It&#x27;s bad off the top when you&#x27;re trying to figure out which way is up in the ecosystem. It goes from bad to worse when you&#x27;re looking through docs and Stack Overflow answers.<p>It was almost never immediately clear if a document I was looking at <i>on Microsoft&#x27;s own website</i> applied to me or not. That is a cardinal sin of technical documentation.<p>Ultimately, this meant that .NET Core Web API (or whatever I was using) felt poorly documented.<p>I&#x27;d find myself looking at docs that mention .NET Web API - but I can&#x27;t remember if that rolls up to .NET Core or Framework -- or both? Am I using MVC? Is Web API a subset of MVC? No clue.<p>It&#x27;s definitely a hard problem. Here&#x27;s to hoping that now that everything is unified, they can work on paving clearer roads into their ecosystem.