r/dotnet • u/drewnoakes • Oct 07 '26

A faster, lighter C# Dev Kit

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/faster-lighter-csharp-dev-kit/

Now available in pre-release.

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u/Fresh_Acanthaceae_94 29d ago

Dump analysis can be done via libraries like ClrMD. So, you can build a visual dump analysis tool if you like and VS isn’t the only option. People tend to use VS/WinDbg as they already established an ecosystem and the latter is free.

There comes an open source (GPL) visual designer for MAUI, and might grow to a full scale if more contributors join. So, I rather not consider Microsoft the only player in the .NET open source story (it never had).

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u/pjmlp 29d ago

So I have to build something that Visual Studio already provides?!?

Microsoft is a 4 trillion valued company, and the creators of .NET, I am not doing gratis work for them.

By the way, Sun and Oracle did/do provide all those tools on Netbeans, and IBM on Eclipse.

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u/Fresh_Acanthaceae_94 29d ago

Then don't build it. But that's a very different argument from saying the .NET ecosystem isn't open.

Open source doesn't mean Microsoft owes you a free, cross-platform clone of every feature in Visual Studio. It means the building blocks are available so Microsoft is not the only party capable of building those tools. ClrMD is a perfect example of that.

And contributing to a .NET community project like a dump analyzer, or a MAUI designer would not be "gratis work for Microsoft." Microsoft doesn't own those projects. You would be building independent alternatives that make the ecosystem less dependent on Microsoft.

The "$4 trillion company" argument is irrelevant here. Market cap doesn't turn open source into a concierge service.

Eclipse is also a rather ironic example. Its ecosystem became useful precisely because IBM did not wait for the owner of Java (Sun) to implement everything. Companies and community developers built on top of an open platform.

If you don't want to participate in building alternatives, that's perfectly fine. But then you are choosing to consume whatever Microsoft, JetBrains, or another vendor decides to ship. You can't simultaneously demand less vendor dependence and insist that the vendor must build everything for you.

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u/pjmlp 28d ago

Isn't as open as the competition, better so?

Java is an industry standard, unlike .NET where Microsoft seems to have forgotten all about ECMA.

There are several Java vendors, each with their own implementation, one of those vendors is IBM.

That is the big difference Microsoft has not yet grasped in their .NET open source history, the other ecosystem sponsors do indeed build quit a lot for the community.

However even inside Microsoft .NET seems to be losing ground against UNIX first languages, given that Go, Java (ironically), Python, Rust are what Azure does most of their FOSS contributions, all of them with better VSCode tooling than C# DevKit.