I've specialized on a lot of Microsoft's technologies most of my career. I started to work with .NET when they were applying that name to anything that was a developer product. Now the term just refers to the stack of runtimes and frameworks that let you build stuff with a variety of languages, but mostly C#. When they went open source and multi-platform a few years ago, that transition was painful, especially in the pre-release cycle because things kept changing.
But last night I decided to start transitioning POP Forums to .NET 6, the release candidate bits, updating from 5, and I was done in about an hour. Everything compiled and ran locally, even with all of the peripheral stuff made by other companies (Redis, ElasticSearch). Even better, the Azure stuff all worked too, which means no weirdness with the storage emulator, and Azure Functions worked like a champ.
Surely this will break in Azure DevOps when I try to build and deploy, right? I added a step to my CI build to use the newest SDK, and the build completed. Surely the actual Azure service would not be ready! It has been easy to deploy app services with new framework versions, but Azure Functions have been harder because of some fundamental changes they made. They were months behind on the v5 release. But no, they're up to date, and I was able to deploy the build without incident. I just had to run a few commands to configure it right.
The .NET Core transition was hard, it hurt, and I know a lot of people were turned off by it all, but the results these days are fantastic. If you would have told me then that all of my stuff would be running in Linux containers with exponential performance improvements, I would say that's nutty. But here we are. And with this release, they've managed to get all of the parts, from the code to the SDK's to the cloud products in Azure, all ready to go at about the same time, with little friction to update.
I had an email exchange today in which I declared that I'm an Azure fanboy, and it's more true now than ever. The developer story is pretty great.
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