DotNet appreciation

As you know, I am a big fan of openness:

• I want knowledge to be open, which is the essence of my work at Microsoft Learn,
• I want technology to be open, which is why I love the developments here,
• and I want to be free to choose tools that best fit my needs.

In previous posts I used Windows Subsystem on Linux and Windows Terminal to access Azure from any platform, that you can run Linux on Surface, and that dotnet runs in Linux containers.

I don’t talk a lot about dotnet, or powershell for that matter, because I think we should talk more about all other languages and their use on Azure. However, this week I saw a social media post of someone creating fear, uncertainty and doubt for using dotnet; that it is tight to “Microsoft”, SQL, and license costs. This made me want to publicly appreciate dotnet, so here we go:

• [Dotnet is opensource](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/platform/open-source?wt.mc_id=pdebruin_content_blog_cnl_csasci)
• [Download dotnet](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet?wt.mc_id=pdebruin_content_blog_cnl_csasci)
• [Get started](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/learn/aspnet/hello-world-tutorial/intro?wt.mc_id=pdebruin_content_blog_cnl_csasci)

This was different when dotnet started over 20 years ago, when it needed Visual Studio and Windows, both licensed products. Lots of things changed after that: Visual Studio Community edition, VS Code, dotnet core, and making it open source. Granted, we are still learning about dotnet and open source, so things are not perfect but this the way forward.

Mostly I create simple web apps and command-line apps, which you can with dotnet. It is a comfortable idea that dotnet is fast and secure. And I think it is cool that you can create webassembly, minimal apis, and self-contained deployments.

Find out more dotnet features in dotnetconf videos

In short, dotnet has all ingredients to be the tool of choice in your next project :-)

Thanks for reading! :-)