Why .NET?

The post explains why Pangea chose .NET and C# for a new project. It argues that Microsoft’s ecosystem has changed a lot, with open source tooling, cross-platform support, and a more favorable developer landscape than it had ten years earlier.

Reading notes

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• The author says .NET used to be unattractive because of Windows and Visual Studio licensing costs, poor interoperability with non-Microsoft products, and Microsoft’s anti-competitive posture.
• The post says Microsoft changed because Ruby on Rails, Django, and Node took market share, and that the current .NET landscape reflects that shift.
• For a greenfield stack, the author wants something open source, statically typed, mature yet modern, rich in ecosystem, and backed by a strong steward for at least ten years.
• The candidates listed are .NET and C#, Java, and Go.
• Go is described as rich but still young, with a steward that has a history of sunsetting products and making radical tooling shifts.
• Java is presented as having a strong ecosystem, but Oracle’s stewardship of acquired technologies and Java’s slow release cycle create concern about its future.
• .NET and C# are described as ahead in features such as LINQ, nullable primitives, true generics, generators, and async/await.
• The post says Microsoft’s push to open source and support .NET cross-platform makes .NET’s future look stronger.
• Pangea says it is not a Microsoft shop and uses a mixed stack including MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, git, TeamCity, EC2, S3, and Chef.
• The final point is that choosing a core stack means betting on the steward and the ecosystem, and Pangea keeps a living tech stack roadmap because no choice stays correct forever.