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Discussion on: The newly announced future of .NET - unifying all the things

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James Turner

That is my understanding of it otherwise these version numbers are going to get all sorts of confusing!

I think that if they hit their goals for .NET 5, it might not actually be that difficult to migrate from .NET Framework to it due to the sheer number of APIs available.

There might be some limitations around the simplicity of porting something like WinForms (need to do more reading up on that) and I saw a tweet talking about WebForms not being supported.

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Bojana Dejanović

"Not that difficult" is always tricky :)
Ok, I guess that make sense, in regard to "traditional" .NET Framework. But a lot of enterprise bussineses rely heavy on technologies like WCF, etc. for which there is no suitable replacement in .NET Core. (not all APIs can be rewritten using Web API). So it will be interesting to see how this will be handled. For now it's far more safe to stick with old and proven .NET Framework.

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turnerj profile image
James Turner

Yeah, there is so much variability with enterprise stacks that makes it difficult to know with any certainty that it will or won't have issues. Whether that be something like WCF or using COM components.

From the cover image I took from the blog, other technologies like WPF, Windows Forms and UWP are planned to work for .NET 5 but I have no idea about WCF.

What got me excited with .NET Standard was the ability to target both from a library point-of-view without really needing to do extra work. I could see that opening the door to get large parts of enterprise workloads ready for a future .NET Core/.NET 5 world but yeah, you're still stuck with having things like WCF in .NET Framework.

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Chad Smith

Microsoft has commented before on that, but can't remember where or what they said fully, but they did talk that they also as a company would be in the same boat about WCF as they are also have a lot of legacy applications using WCF.

Either way as a full-time .net developer I am excited to see the future of this. I definitely see a lot of movement in the right direction.

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bojana_dev profile image
Bojana Dejanović • Edited

While some of the low-level libraries needed by WCF have been ported to .NET Core and/or added to .NET Standard, no real progress has been made on WCF hosting itself. In March a separate thread titled Call for Decision: Server-Side WCF was created and tagged with the .NET 3.0 milestone.

More recently Immo Landwerth wrote, “We won’t bring [...] WCF hosting in the .NET Core 3.0 time frame but depending on customer feedback we’ll do it later.”

The source code for WCF is available on GitHub under the MIT open source license. So in theory a community sponsored version of WCF for .NET Core is feasible.

link

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Multi

COM is supported in .NET Core so it will probably stay like that.
I am wondering how will they ship windows-specific features (WPF, WinForms, WCF) if at all, will it be with desktop packs? Or perhaps just included in the .NET 5 windows installer.
Questions like that are hanging in the air..

I personally hope .NET 5 will encourage / introduce a XAML cross platform powerful UI framework (Preferably WPF, or a new one?), that will be able to compete with the PWAs and Electron desktop "web" apps (that drain your memory usage).

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Bojana Dejanović

I am sorry to quote so many articles, but this one from Scott Hunter is interesting:

After .NET Core 3.0 we will not port any more features from .NET Framework. If you are a Web Forms developer and want to build a new application on .NET Core, we would recommend Blazor which provides the closest programming model. If you are a remoting or WCF developer and want to build a new application on .NET Core, we would recommend either ASP.NET Core Web APIs or gRPC (Google RPC, which provides cross platform and cross programming language contract based RPCs). If you are a Windows Workflow developer there is an open source port of Workflow to .NET Core

link

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James Hickey

Just read that one too:

.NET Framework 4.8 will be the last major version of .NET Framework.

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Bojana Dejanović

Yes, everyone speculated for a long time about this, but this an official confirmation they are going to freeze development (besides bug fixes) on the .NET Framework. And with announcement of .NET 5 and WSL 2 clearly stating plans for the future :)