Reinventing how .NET builds and ships (again)
11 comments
·November 25, 2025N_Lens
chokolad
> I hope this churn in .NET builds is temporary because a lot of people might be looking to go back to something stable especially after the recent supply chain attacks on the Node ecosystem.
Can you elaborate a bit? This article talks about internal machinery of building .net releases. What does that have to do with "this churn", whatever that is?
SamuelAdams
I love working with dotnet, but lately I’ve been writing more backend applications in Python. The code is simpler, testing is simpler since method privacy doesn’t really exist, and code is quicker to deploy because you do not have to compile it.
This could also change but in my experience AI is better at generating Python code versus dotnet.
martinald
This isn't really anything user facing. It's just yet again an example of why monorepos are better.
jerezzprime
Anything is a monorepo if you submodule hard enough lol
tonyhart7
.Net need a "node" level of developer experience and perfomance of rust/zig since node/python ecosystem rewrite make it more perfomance than ever
I cant see .net win againts those odds tbh
ZeroConcerns
Oh, wow, I didn't expect that the best thing I'd read about software engineering, like, this year would come out of Microsoft! Don't get me wrong: I like .NET, especially its recent incarnation, but until just now, I would have expected its robustness to be an against-all-odds under-the-radar lucky escape from the general enshittification that seems to be the norm for the industry.
Reading something like this, which outlines a coordinated effort (diagrams and even a realistic use case for agentic LLM usage and all!) to actually and effectively make things better was a breath of fresh air, even if towards the end it notes that the remarkable investment in quality will not be in full force in the future.
Even if you don't care about .NET and/or Microsoft, this is worth reading, doubly so if you're in charge of re-engineering just about anything -- this is how it's done!
cadamsdotcom
> We’re asking how much it will cost to build 3-4 major versions with a dozen .NET SDK bands between them each month.
Why so many variants?
martinald
Well you've got .NET 8 (LTS), .NET 9 (standard support), .NET 10 (LTS). These are all supported at once.
Then you've got the .NET SDK/aspnet/runtime (on x64/arm32/arm64 linux/mac/windows), and also the various SDK packages themselves.
cadamsdotcom
3**4 = 81 builds - but aren’t all of those independent and thus parallelizable?
yodon
Must have been an amazing effort to be involved in.
.NET was a solid choice for backend builds before Node became so popular (And .NET is generally more performant than Node).
I hope this churn in .NET builds is temporary because a lot of people might be looking to go back to something stable especially after the recent supply chain attacks on the Node ecosystem.