I can’t help but feel that .NET is slowly slipping back into its moated roots but in an open source fashion: documentation seems to prioritise mentioning Azure above all else; new application frameworks seem to be created with the sole purpose of promoting and coupling applications to Azure; successful open source libraries are being supplanted by Microsoft-owned alternatives; and a comparable non-proprietary LSP still hasn’t and isn’t likely to be released.

To those who have been living under an anti-Microsoft-news rock for the last few days, .NET 6 and all of its associated goodies have arrived, bringing with it C# 10, performance improvements and a boatload of new features.

Talk about .NET to anyone outside of the ecosystem (and some in it) and you’ll find they’re still confused by “what means what”, will ask “which version do I need” and will oft’ respond “is that the language you have to pay for the IDE to use?” to any news about it.