While I agree with most points, .NET or JRE introduce additional complexity that may not be welcome in every setting. I've worked for several companies where upgrading to a newer version of .NET was always a major pain point, especially for applications that weren't very actively developed. There is limited security support for each major .NET version, so at some point, you and your customers need to upgrade. Such problems are non-existent if you don't have a separate VM runtime dependency.
> I've worked for several companies where upgrading to a newer version of .NET was always a major pain point,
This was so difficult for the teams I work with that the person who became the team specialist in MSBuild, dotnet, and C# basically punched his ticket and received a couple of promotions. The work is so miserable and challenging that basically no one else Will take it.
I've struggled to understand why .net upgrades are so painful and laborious despite the maturity of the languages and ecosystems. I had assumed that, as with Powershell, C# and .net behind the scenes are undergoing enormous changes as Microsoft attempts to improve or add support for historically neglected platforms and hardware, and so I had assumed also that these were temporary problems, just badly managed growing pains on a path to major improvement, but I gather from your comment that the problem has a long history and is systemic. Awful.
MSBuild has been a huge source of the suffering I've experienced while working on these projects. The documentation is, in my experience, a nightmare: exhaustingly verbose, full of jargon, and uncanny in its ability to talk around an issue, concept, or functionality without clarifying anything conceptually or practically. I find this throughout Microsoft docs.
Upgrading a modern .NET (Core) version often means changing just versions in the project file. Upgrading from the old .NET Framework is bit more challenging, but we have also successfully upgraded a couple of Framework projects to modern .NET without too many issues.
Huh, maybe I misunderstood the nature of the .net work the guy I mentioned was doing. All I know directly is the pain of MSBuild itself. Thanks for the correction.
I don't think so. Upgrading to a newer major version of the C++ runtime essentially involves recompiling, unless you're dealing with an application that's 15 years or older. You can even instruct the compiler to use an older C++ standard if your code won't compile with the newer one. There is also an option to compile the runtime statically, though it is obviously not recommended.
