Ask HN: Advice on Transitioning to C#?

2 points by smorgusofborg 4 years ago | 6 comments

In recent years it seemed to me like C# has become the cleanest choice among the mainstream languages one encounters in local job ads, etc. As someone who has used a lot of different languages I'm wondering what the best path is to getting a sense of being a C# developer. I would appreciate it if anyone is interested in answering some of my questions like: If you switched to C# what resources did you use (would the same resources still be appropriate today), what IDE, how would you categorize the type of projects you've worked on in industry in C#? If your background was not on windows, did you fully transition over and how did the transition go?

fendy3002 4 years ago |

My experience was from 2013ish so it may not be applicable here.

Best IDE and environment for C# is Visual Studio (not vs code) on windows. For me, C# is the best if you want to handle monetary transaction, due to it's native decimal data type. It is the worst to handle frontend (html) due to their static data types (cmiiw).

PaulHoule 4 years ago | |

Visual Studio is the way to go.

Decimal types are common in other languages like Java and Python.

Years and years ago I worked in a very sophisticated geospatial support application in C# with the back end in ASP.NET and the front end in Silverlight.

My take on ASP.NET was it had the most advanced templating system I ever saw but the mechanism used to make components (that look like an html element) that had both front end and back end behavior was terribly flawed because it was not compatible with what people call a ‘model view controller’ architecture which more importantly lets you decide which view to render based on what decision the controller makes from processing a form.

There was ‘ASP.NET MVC’ which was nothing special and threw the baby out with the bath water in that it didn’t support the really unique features of ASP.NET and was just another bad framework written by systems programmers who never coded up an application.

fendy3002 4 years ago | | |

ASP.NET MVC isn't the best but it isn't the worst either. In my short experience with it around 2014ish, the default works well with /{controller}/{action} routes. But yes, the rendering engine still feels worse than PHP's twig or NodeJS's Nunjucks.

I imagine it's better to use ASP.Net MVC as rest api and use react on the front/client with Next JS.

mardiyah 4 years ago |

"what resources did you use (would the same resources still be appropriate today)"

worry on them?

they're as many as that of Java's, just differs in pushing us to grope a bit more into our pockets