I have had the opportunity to see dotnet evolve from it’s early days in the 2000s to the latest dotnet 8 core framework at the time of writing this. I haven’t continiously worked solely with microsoft dotnet over the course of my career, rather, I have worked with multiple programming langugaes and technologies such as Java, Python, Scala, Node/Javascript. In addition, even though I was educated in OOD, I have explored functional paradigm over the course of my career. The exposure to multiple programming languages and programming paradigms has formed some of my opinions and points of view.

My encounters with dotnet

My first encounter with dotnet was while helping develop a desktop appliction in C# for the secondary mortgage industry. Back then C# and dotnet was just another object orieted langauge competing with Java. The decision to choose C# dotnet was already made when I joined the company. The main reason for choosing dotnet was better support for runtime relfection and code generation. This feature was absolutely crucial for our product.

My second encounter with dotnet was when developing a small web application using ASP.NET in C# while working for a consulting firm. Here the choice of ASP.NET/C# was made because my team was focused on Microsoft solutions and we could choose any programming language or technology as long as it was Microsoft.

My most recent encounter with dotnet consisted of migrating and rewriting/redesigning a legacy monolith application written in dotnet framework to the latest dotnet core. While migrating/rewriting the application the design was modularized with a number of microservices and an API first approach was adopted. The API’s were all gRPC. In addition to gRPC providing synchronous request-reply we used NATs for asynchronous messaging between microservices. In addition, the applications’s persistenc layer was revamped and based on SQL Server.

My reasons for why not to choose dotnet core for startups

Most of my experience is in backend engineering and I’ll be speaking from a backend development perspective.

  1. Bloat and Ceremony
    • Environments: Convoluted way to differentiate environments and reading configuration values from files and environment variables with different prefixes.
    • Middleware: Ceremonious middleware that forces you to use the middleware pipeline for things such as routing, authentication, authorization etc..
  2. Runaway DI
    • I am all for separation of concerns, inversion of control and encapsulating interfaces/behavior. However, the opinionated nature of DI containers just adds a lot of bloat as well as what I call a runaway DI: where as long as we can use constructor injection to associat with any other object of any class, leads to a plethora of classes/objects.

There are also some reddit blog posts that details some reasons for why dotnet is not popular among startups.

In this article, I have expressed my opinions around the choice of programming language and technology and I’ll finish this with an ‘it depends’ discalimer: As with all things technology the final choice of programming languages and the technologies depends on your specific requirements and contraints.