Programming

Or are in an abusive relationship with Microsoft

Please cite one example of Microsoft ever giving a fuck about users.

There aren't many examples, but one that comes to mind is the adaptive controller. It's not cheap, but it's also presumably low volume, and it's unbelievably configurable.

Outside of that, I'm out of ideas. Usually every good change comes in response to user backlash, from my experience anyway. I've moved over to Linux by now because I'm tired of dealing with what Windows has become.

If you are looking to learn a lower level language that c# and arent interested in rust I really recomend Zig. It feels a lot like c but with modern convenieces and with the footguns removed. It is still in development though do breaking changes happen in the stdlib on version changes.

Hell, I'd say its high time for most to switch off of Linux.

What do you mean by this?

there should be a fork of dotnet.

Dotnet is maintained by the .NET Foundation and is entirely open source. There are thousands of forks and local clones of the repos under that organization. Rather than hoping someone does this, it'd actually be a huge benefit to everyone for you to create a local clone of the repo and update it now and then, assuming you're worried it might go down anyway.

telemetry being totally removed

DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1, though it's lame that it's an opt-out and not opt-in. The CLI does give a fat warning on first use at least (which hilariously spams CI output). Opt-in would be so much better though, and opt-out by default is really not great.

an alternative to nuget.org

You can specify other package sources as well, so nothing technically stops someone from making their own alternative. That being said, you'd have to configure it for each project/solution that wants to use that registry.

Setting such a thing up could be insurance in case they pull anything in the future, too.

The main thing I'd be worried about here is nuget.org getting pulled. As far as I can tell, it's run by MS, not the foundation. That'd be basically the entire ecosystem gone all at once. Fortunately, it's actually super easy to create private registries that mirror packages on nuget.org, and it's actually standard practice to do this at many companies. This means that at the very least it would be possible to recover some of the registry if this happened.

For a fork, I would think these would be the main goals I'd look for:

• Default to opt-in for telemetry, or make it local-only. Telemetry should go to a sink owned by the forking organization if sending telemetry is even possible at all.
• Default package registry should be one owned and maintained by the forking organization. This would be incredibly expensive though, so they'd need funding for this.
• Organization should be independent, and not funded at all, by MS. Alternatively, MS can provide funds, but not a majority amount - instead, sponsors are limited so that no single sponsor can fund enough of the fork to have independent control over it. In either case, the goal is that no single company has enough control to shift the direction meaningfully themselves.

It is a great eco system with great tooling and language features.

That 10% is ideally “creating value” for the customer. Boilerplate code is not value, therefore outsource it to LLMs.

Yea I am not saying the tools are bad. Also use Claude mostly via our internal corporate tooling to do initial generation of things like unit tests and it helps sketch and brainstorm.

I will say it is crazy the amount of trust people/companies are putting in the tools though. It can and will make up straight lies out of thin air. At least with code things don't compile which helps a bit. Even then, have been watching a few MSFT repo's and they have devs just blanket approving copilot generated PR's that have bugs and breaking changes.

The tools are great, but they aren't an excuse to be lazy. And they aren't a replacement for that last 10% like you said, still need devs and real human problem solving.