A little oversimplified - Visual Studio Community can be used to develop commercial software, with restrictions to (summarizing) 5 conccurrent users in non-enterprise organizations. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/mlt031819/
Hi, I'm on the .NET community team. Here's what we see as the happy path for .NET:
- .NET website (https://dot.net) - High level info on different workloads, 5 minute in-browser tutorials, links to live shows and community
- MS Learn (https://aka.ms/mslearn-dotnet) - Interactive tutorials with learning paths built from 30ish minute learning tutorials
- Docs (https://aka.ms/msdocs-dotnet) - More in-depth documentation on specific tasks and features, e.g. API documentation, performance optimization, security guidance, etc.
While you can go directly to any of them, the dot.net site will link you to Learn modules that will link you to docs, so hopefully you can start on the dot.net site and it will help you find the right place.
One thing I really like (and I'm totally biased because I've helped set it up) is https://live.dot.net. Those are all our live shows with the PM and dev teams. We've got a show every day of the week, and there's always really good Q&A in the chat.
I guess this is as good of a chance as I'm gonna get - the docs experience in non-anglosphere countries is dreadful, the website keeps pushing a localized version with absolutely garbled machine translations which are never going to be even passable for technical documentation. It's just a completely miserable experience without the "FFS MSDN" browser extension.[1][2]
At least that was the situation a year or so ago - all my computers are now 100% English locale so I have no quick way to check.
Hah, I hadn't realized there was a dedicated browser extension for this. I've been using the Redirect plugin for Firefox to regex-rewrite the URLs - because obviously, the machine translated documentation is useless at best (and harmful at worst).
Indeed ridiculously annoying though. For some reason, Google also started to show the titles of English-language YouTube videos in machine translated German for me, usually completely garbling the meaning - and the video is in English anyway! It's not like I could watch it if I didn't already understand the original title!
Who would have thought that managers in primarily monolingual cultures (i.e. the US) don't understand the actual needs of an international, polyglot audience? The techbro-ism behind these decisions is palatable. "That's a technological solution to what I, without actually asking any of the people affected, imagine to be a problem, so it must be good, right? I mean, it has ML?"
Here's a really simple example of something that would benefit standard websites, not just complex web applications: image lazy loading.
<img src="..." loading=lazy>
Sure you can handle this with JavaScript, etc. The point is that this is one of countless papercuts - standard, useful behaviors that work everywhere but Safari.
WebKit already has experimental support for this, just needs to be enabled in Dev tools. Which means it will be rolling in to Safari and other WebKit browsers soon.
I think this is a good partnership. One of the goals of open source software foundations is to eliminate risks due to dependency on a small developer team. In this case, HIBP is a fantastic resource being maintained, and paid for, by one developer. That's not good for the maintainer, it's not good for the community, and it's risky to the community. If the sole developer wins a spot on the next flight to Mars or time travels to A.D. 802,701, the code becomes unmaintained and the site hosting payment expires. Software foundations governed by rotating teams and aren't dependant on a single individual. This is an example of something that's relatively low investment for an established software foundation - some legal fees and discounted cloud hosting from a sponsor - and benefits the whole community.
Issue is that .net is a language oriented foundation, not a cyber security one. Sending the project there looks like an ad for a Microsoft initiative and not something done with the best interest of HIBP in mind. Just an example, there is foundation literally called Open Source Security Foundation.1 If I write a python security tool and it is useful for the community, I'd think first of transferring it to them, not to the Python foundation.
Hi Jon, ... it is definitely a good thing for the project to be guarded by more than Troy's private money and legal situation. I do not disagree on these benefits. It is more about the focus of the foundation.
Brief mention in the post, but FYI to the thread - .NET Foundation is an independant non-profit (501c6) foundation that supports the .NET open source community. It's run by a community elected board and funded by member donations and a diverse group of corporate sponsors. This is a great example of the kind of work they do to support the community.
Disclaimer: I was on staff at .NET Foundation 2016-2019.
Here's the customer showcase on the .NET site (with links to more at the bottom of the page). It lists some of the biggest enterprise adopters: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/platform/customers
