In May 2019, Microsoft officially announced .NET 5, the future of .NET: it will be based on all the .NET Core work already achieved. Here is the schedule announced:
On one hand the future of .NET has never been so bright. On the other hand this represents a massive move for all .NET development shops, especially for those that still target .NET Framework 4.x that won’t evolve anymore. But not everything is clear from this announcement. Such massive move will have many collateral consequences that we can only guess by now. Certainly many points are not yet cast in stone and still debated.
Hence for large .NET legacy code bases some predictions must be made to plan now a seamless and in-time migration toward the future of .NET. So let’s do some predictions: it’ll still be interesting to come back in a few years and see how good or bad they were.
.NET Standard won’t evolve much
.NET Standard was introduced as a common API set that all .NET flavors must implement. .NET Standard superseded PCL (Portable Class Library). Now that several .NET frameworks will be unified upon .NET Core bases, and that the .NET Framework 4.x won’t support future versions of .NET Standard anymore, it sounds like the need for more .NET standard API will decrease significantly. Actually .NET Framework 4.8 doesn’t even support latest .NET Standard 2.1: “.NET Framework 4.8 will remain on .NET Standard 2.0 rather than implement .NET Standard 2.1”.
However .NET Standard is certainly not dead yet: it is (and will be for years to come) an essential tool to compile code into portable components that can be reused across several .NET flavors. However with this unification process the future of .NET Standard is compromised.
Visual Studio will run on .NET 5 or 6 (and in a x64 process)
It has to. Imagine the consequences if in 3 years from now (2019 Q4) the main Microsoft IDE for .NET professional developments still run on .NET Framework v4.8:
- Engineers working on VS would lack access to all new .NET APIs, performance improvements and langage improvements. They would remain locked in the past.
- As a consequence they wouldn’t use their own tool (dogfooding) and dogfooding is a key aspect of developing tools for developers.
- Overall the message sent wouldn’t be acceptable for the users.
On the other hand, if you know a bit how VS works, imagine how massive this migration is going to be. For more than a decade there have been a lot of complaints from the community about Visual Studio not running in a 64 bits process. See some discussions on reddit here for example. If I remember well this x64 request was the most voted one when VS feedback was still handled by UserVoices. Some technical explanations have been provided by Microsoft like those ones provided 10 years ago! If in 2019 Visual Studio still doesn’t run in a x64 process, this says a lot on how large and complex such migration is.
It seems inevitable that this time the Visual Studio legacy will evolve toward what will be the future of .NET. One key benefit will be to run in a x64 process and have plenty of memory to work with very large solutions. Another implication is that all Visual Studio extensions, like our extension, must evolve too. Here at NDepend we are already preparing it but it will take time, not because we’ll miss much API (we’ll mostly miss AppDomain) but because:
- We depend on some third-parties that we’d like to get rid of to have full control over our migration, and overall code.
- For several years we’ll have to support both future Visual Studio versions and Visual Studio 2019, 2017 and maybe 2015 that runs on .NET Framework v4.x (btw we still support VS 2013/2012/2010 but this will have to be discarded to benefit from .NET Standard reused DLLs)
We cannot know yet if Visual Studio vNext will run on .NET 5 or if it’ll take more years until we see it running upon .NET 6?
Btw here are 2 posts Quickly assess your .NET code compliance with .NET Standard and An in-depth analysis of .NET Core 3.0 support for WPF and Winforms APIs that can help plan your own legacy migration.
.NET will propose a cross-platform UI Framework: WPF or a similar XAML UI Framework
On October 4, 2019 Satya Nadella revealed why Windows may not be the future of Microsoft’s business. In August 2019 Microsoft provided a .NET Cross Platform UI Framework Survey. Clearly a .NET cross-platform UI Framework is wanted: the community is asking for it. So far Microsoft closed the debate about WPF: WPF won’t be multi-platform.
Let’s also be crystal clear. This (WPF cross platform) is a very hard project. If the cost was low, this would be a very different conversation and very likely a different outcome. We have enough trouble being compatible with OpenSSL and that’s just one library. Rich Lander – Dec 5, 2018
But given the immense benefits of what WPF running cross-platform would offer, I wouldn’t be surprise to see WPF become cross-platforms within the next years. Or at least a similar XAML UI framework. Moreover WPF is now open-source so who knows…
The Visual Studio UI is mostly based on WPF hence one of the benefit of having WPF cross-platform would be to have a unique cross-platform Visual Studio: the same way Microsoft is now unifying .NET Frameworks, they could unify the Visual Studio suite into a single cross-platform product.
Xamarin Forms and Avalonia are also natural candidates to be the .NET cross-platform UI Framework. But it seems those frameworks doesn’t receive enough love from the community, this is my subjective feeling. Also we have to keep in mind that Microsoft did a survey and that the community is massively asking for it.
Blazor is promised to a bright future
If you didn’t follow the recent Blazor evolution, the promises of this technology are huge:
- Run .NET code in all browsers (like Silverlight)
- with no browser plugin needed (unlike Silverlight)
- with near-native performance
- with components compiled to a compact binary format
This is all possible thanks to the WebAssembly (Wasm) format supported by most browsers.
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable target for compilation of high-level languages like C/C++/Rust, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.
Blazor was initially a personal project created by Steve Sanderson from Microsoft. It was first introduced during NDC OSLO in July 2017: the video is worth being watched, also read how enthusiastics are the comments. However Blazor is not yet finalized and still has some limitations: it doesn’t offer yet a decent debugging experience and the application size to download (a few MBs) is still too large because dependencies have to be loaded too. Those ones are currently being addressed (see here for debugging and here for download size, runtime code will be trimmed and cached and usage of CDN (Content Distribution Network) is mentioned).
The community is enthusiast, the technology is getting mature and there is no technological nor political barrier in sight: the Blazor future looks bright. Don’t miss the Blazor FAQ to learn more.
Let’s start from start: MS has NO good, high level professionals who can evolve .NET; Indian dancers they hire just a bunch of programmers, not ENGINEERS.
Second, whatever standard MS creates, Windows.NET (4.8) is THE ONE platform with the most covering API, from IO till WinForms/WPF/Database/etc. Ridiculous .NET Core has no even UI! (show me your Linux app written on WPF!)
And one more important factor: We ALREADY HAVE everything we need: Windows 7, .NET FW(4.8), Win32 interop + thousand libraries written for the past 15 years. Tell me AT LEAST ONE reason I should migrate to .NET Core?!! Nothing except empty mantra “yeah, it’s multiplatform”. Multi, OK, so what? All our clients are on Windows. We’re on Windows. And future also hardly moves away from Windows 7. We reached point of satisfaction, all we need is KEEP MS AWAY from their “improvements”, EACH of ’em breaking existing good stuff.
So yes, .NET has future if .NET will be isolated from MS! 🙂
I’ve discussed with hundreds of MSFT engineers for the last two decades: many are extremely skilled and wise. Sometime MS does bad choices but engineers are not responsible for it, often the management is.
I agree to some extent that Windows / .NET 4.8 as a platform for professionals is far from being dead. But on the other hand I doubt .NET Core is the next Silverlight: it is here for good. Planning to be Windows .NET Fx4.8 centric for the next 5 years is a risky choice but depending on your industry it’ll take more or less time.
@The Sharp Ninja Thanks for mentioning WinUI, at this point it is pretty unclear which multi-platform UI will make it. It won’t necessarily be the one Microsoft choose.
https://blog.nature.org/science/2017/06/28/how-desert-toad-survives-drought/
That river isn’t coming back to your pond, Gogi…
I expect MS will betray and abandon the dot net platform. It’s what they do. They have zero respect for their clients’ investment. Quality is plummeting; they’re so cheap, they’ve abandoned testing and turned it over to the crowd. The adventurous part of the crowd. Non-adventurous parts of the crowd – like business users – are vastly under-represented.
not sure if silverlight problem was the plugin, maybe they had to much expectation about people doing websites with silverlight instead of html5. Microsoft just kill it letting all developers that invested time to learn surprised and sad by that decision. Blazor is gonna have the same things, there ton of html, javascript, and other web technologies why people should now do frontend development on somethings that Microsoft has an history of leaving to die soon as a new popular tech thing comes to the community. Dotnet core as a feature because is now crossplatform, not just crossversion of windows as before. HTML5 javascript and friends have being cross platform from the beginning, bazor is not gonna get any relevant market in the browser and blazor like silverlight, knockout and other tools that microsoft was pushing it gonna have the same future, not being a so popular thing to microsoft.