I don't have any .NET background or anything even particularly MS specific. However, I spent most of 2020 just playing tourist between different development / devops communities to get a feel for what are the main ideas, challenges, core truths etc in each.

I looked into Java, Ruby, C#, Dart, Kubernetes, Bazel, TypeScript, Flutter, Node, lots of CNCF stuff etc.

I have a bunch of interesting observations that I should probably write down somewhere at some point because I haven't seen people talk about them much yet.

However, one thing that kept coming up repeatedly is Microsoft is actually doing a much better job of thinking "beyond Windows" than I would have anticipated otherwise.

.NET is making its way into front end web apps now with Blazor, Microsoft has also just recently released something that they 100% do not market this way but I look at as almost a successor to .NET in some ways. The big difference is that it's language agnostic and it's entirely built around the concept of "distributed" applications. That came out of the Azure team I think and was based on everything they had learned about writing distributed / cloud native apps in the last 5-10 years. The project is called Dapr and was one of the cooler things I saw in 2020.

Given their history of abandoning front-end frameworks, I wouldn't put too much faith into Blazor.

And the Azure team is, frankly, grossly incompetent. I've never used a worse application than the Azure dashboards. It is by far the absolute worst piece of software I have ever had to endure. Pathetically slow, shockingly bad UX and incredibly inconsistent.

What did they abandon? Silverlight? That went the same way as Flash because plugins were killed by browsers and mobile. Blazor is much different and a core part of the web stack. Considering you can still run WebForms apps written in C# 2.0 today, support and backwards compatibility is actually a strength of this ecosystem.

But yes the Azure dashboard isn't great, however that's not relevant to .NET.

Everything. There isn't a single first-party desktop GUI framework left that is actively supported and developed. UWP is of course still available but modern apps have failed.

You can still use WPF and WinForms, but they have serious limitations and feel old. WPF for example makes G-SYNC switch to 60 Hz.

https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms

https://github.com/dotnet/winforms

>There isn't a single first-party desktop GUI framework left that is actively supported and developed.

This is demonstrably false...