What Parts of C# Are Obsolete? Should I Even Learn The .NET Framework?

welcome to this episode of dev questions with tim corey join us as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development understanding the industry and new technology now here's your host expert developer and online educator tim corey what parts of c sharp are obsolete should i even learn the.net framework with net six coming out this question is coming up over and over again about what versions are obsolete or which ones should i not learn or should one should i ignore so let's talk about the different versions of net and which ones you should learn and which ones you should just bypass now let's look first from a business perspective is this the important when you are learning c sharp when you're growing in c sharp when you're improving your c sharp most likely it's because you want a job now some people don't want a job they just want a hobby they want to do something for themselves or they're just you know having fun and that's fine and this might not apply as much to you but it's still good to know these things so for the people who are looking to get a job you've got to think from a business perspective about programming because when you are learning programming the the thought is the latest and greatest stuff the coolest stuff the stuff that you really find the most fun and with net six right around the corner this is a great time you're thinking about the latest and greatest stuff and the new stuff that's coming in the cutting edge but that's not what business thinks about a typical business let's talk about not a business is starting today not a startup not a a business that's been around for less than a year but a traditional business is going to be one that probably has a number of years into.net maybe 10 plus and if that's the case they probably have an application built in the dotnet framework at the time that was cutting edge they started out but 10 years later a million plus lines of code many many millions of lines possibly of code that's not an easy ship to turn that's not something where you say okay we're going to take a weekend and upgrade from.net framework to.net core it's not that easy even though that upgrade process is pretty clean for such a major upgrade process it's still not something that a business just undertakes on a whim it may take months or even years to upgrade to a.net core 3.1 or net 6. so are they going to do that it's a hard sell and i have this conversation with people a lot i had what a conversation this week about it where a person was saying i really want to sell the idea of upgrading but you know it's going to be a six-month process and the end result is from a user perspective the same exact application there's nothing seems to have changed no new features it just took six months of time to do nothing and that's not really an easy sell to a boss and you know hey boss i want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of man hours and and you know and push off all of our other projects in order to stay in the same place not a great sell now there are ways you can sell that but that's why businesses don't run on the latest software they don't run on the cutting edge it takes a lot of time a lot of money and the end result is they don't see much of a difference now again there's performance improvements for sure huge ones just by moving from.net framework to net core or from moving from net core let's say 2.1 to 3.1 3.1 to five five to six there's always improvements always happening so performance wise you're gonna see an improvement but again that's a more invisible thing unless you're the one watching the server statistics or unless you are hitting the the upper edge of a of a hard barrier like a server's total processing power you're probably not going to notice it as the end user so with that knowing that businesses aren't moving quickly they aren't going to just turn on a dime they're not going to just upgrade for the sake of upgrading when it comes to looking at the versions of software that you're gonna need to know going into those businesses it's a pretty wide range and really as i see there's about nine different versions you should be paying attention to primarily now i say paying attention to does not mean you have to spend all your time there in nine different versions but you should be able to move into those versions and not have a lot of of brush up time okay so essentially when you come across tutorials in these older versions don't shy away from them maybe just focus on a few and i'll talk about a few to focus on but the nine different versions are there's foreign.net core that'd be net core 2.1.net core 3.1.net 5 and net 6. now net 5 is going to fall off the radar after probably a year or so because net six is coming out just around the corner and once it does that's the long term supported version thus dot net five will probably fall off since it's not the lts version but for right now there's those four dot-net core versions but there's also five at least five maybe six versions of a dot-net framework to also know about and that is the one that's uh maybe is dot net framework 3.5 that's it's a very old version but it is one that there's still major products in but then dotnet4 for sure net45.net dotnet45.net46.net47 and net48 the latest version of net framework is net framework 4.8 so that's the one will be installed on windows 11. so when you get your cutting edge machine that's still going to have net framework 4.8 on it and there's a key point here to remember that microsoft is still fully supporting that framework that does not mean they are putting new upgrades out to it does not mean they're going to be adding new features or changing how things work or bringing the latest features from net 6 into net framework at all they're not doing that but they are still supporting the operation the running the helping you if you have a problem with net framework so that's still being supported will be supported for a very long time which means that as a business you don't have as much incentive to move off of net framework because it's still supported and will be supported for a very long time so again there's some major versions you're going to have to know about now which versions should you pay most attention to well the cutting edge is always good knowing the cutting edge because if you do get into a startup if you are asked to create a new project today uh dot net six is the way to go so net six is is the thing to know going forward as the cutting edge that's definitely one to know also though no dot net core 3.1 if you know that you know the the rest of net core essentially you'll be able to handle most things.net core but then also know the.net framework what version.net framework isn't as important if you do four or four five four six four eight um not as important because the there's not a ton of movement there that will cause problems with you to back up you'll learn a few things that you have to lose but knowing the net framework is still important to know if you're going to get a job at a real business because you will still be confronted by these for a long while now do you want to be probably not and you know it may be a choice where you say hey i'm going to limit my field by just saying no.net framework stuff that's perfectly okay you are narrowing your field of potential options but you are saying i'm going to stay on the latest version or a later version of net rather than just the dotnet framework it's up to you but when it comes to actually learning from tutorials so i have a lot of tutorials out there i have 300 plus on youtube and not all of those are in dot net core six in fact right now i don't think any of them are um i'm getting some soon but most of them are in older versions of dot net by older i mean.net five dot net core 3.1 or even.net framework 45464748 so should you not watch any of those should you not should you ignore all those well no and here's the reason why because the c sharp code in those for the most part hasn't changed now yes user interfaces have changed so if you're watching a ui project yes there'll be some major changes if you're looking for for example mvc well mvc for net framework and mvc for net core are pretty different now the actual mvc portion is pretty similar but the setup how it works what the you know built-in depends the injection and app settings and all the rest for net core versions or net you know five and six versions those are different than uh web.config is for the net framework mvc so you might want to learn both or at least be exposed to both but then pick the one that's going to be what you most want to focus on going forward okay so there is a little bit of difference in ui and if you say hey i'm focusing on net core and above well then you wouldn't watch a dot-net framework mvc project but you would for link link hasn't changed that much and so yes maybe some new features some new tweaks but you can watch a net framework video on link and follow along in dot net six it'll still work um the same is true for most actual c sharp stuff i have videos on dapper that stuff will work whether it's dot net framework or dot net six same stuff so there's a lot of things that transfer over with my my course on foundation c-sharp where i walk you through from you know the start of just installing visual studio all the way up through you know career development in c-sharp basically taking you through junior level or maybe even mid-level c-sharp developer from start well that i started with net framework and i didn't change until we got to the ui project since okay now we're going to change to.net core because now it matters until that point it didn't matter you can follow everything in net core or in.net framework it'll work the exact same way so for six modules we go through net code and it would not matter if you're in net six or in actually.net five or in um net framework so those are still apply even though it's an older version and i've debated do i even upgrade or not i actually am going to i'm in the process of upgrading that to the latest version we're going to cover um.net 6 pretty soon in that course if you already have a course don't worry it's free you get the newest stuff for free but there are some changes in net 6 they'll have to look at compared net five and below um but also just the fact that you know it's it's later versions of visual studio with later options and i want you to feel comfortable but really the content is still the same the content is still valuable i'm going to keep those videos in the courses the older videos because they're still valuable even though they're in a dot-net framework so don't just discard tutorials because they're net framework look at the content and see now there are some things that you should avoid when learning c sharp so there's some things that have not made the jump from net framework to net core and beyond those things you should probably avoid because they are on their way out now i will say that you should avoid them but maybe it's an opportunity to have a little niche that not everybody does so a void does not mean never do them it just means unless you want to have that niche don't go this route okay so the things to avoid are web forms so before we had when we first started off on the web with c sharp we had web forms it was the the equivalent of win forms but for the web kind of a drag and drop creator and they're very very popular but they don't really fit with the modern web standards that we have today and they were developed 15 years ago so they have not moved over from.net framework to net core there's no uh desire to move them over we now have blazer server and blaze web assembly these really replace the need for web forms and do so in a modern way wcf windows communication foundation this is a a pain point there is a wcf core that's an open source community project not a microsoft project but community project that they're working on to replace wcf with a net core version but don't learn the net framework version unless you have again that niche need it was half replaced with grpc not fully replaced and it's not going to be fully replaced all right also windows workflow and net remoting neither of these are going to be replaced in net core or moved over a.net core so if something isn't in.net core then learning.net framework isn't going to benefit you unless you're working in a company that is still heavily invested in these things at that point again you can support that company if you want and you want that that niche ability because that point there's less and less people doing that therefore you're more and more in demand to an extent until companies move off of them but at the same time it kind of limits your career because if you spend all your time web forms what's your next job going to be because it's not going to look great on your resume to say okay i've got 10 years c sharp experience which is good and there's still a lot of value there but when you spend most your time on web forms it's not going to be as enthusiastic a response from a hiring manager because they're looking and go yeah but that's not modern web development so it's not as valuable to me as a person who's got eight years experience in in net core and net framework web stuff so that's where i would be cautious don't put yourself into a dead end career because it's a niche unless you really understand the repercussions and even so i would focus on still learning outside of work learn.net core and the latest.net stuff and keep yourself active creating uh sample projects in.net six okay so there's definitely things to learn you can definitely learn across the board in.net there are some things to avoid those four product types also the idea of avoiding uh focusing too much on a ui project type the is.net framework so um dot net asp.net mvc maybe not spend as much time on that as you do asp.net core mvc which is up through net six so that's that's my thought now if you're starting a new project okay so if you're starting today on a new project even though it's not quite out yet start in.net 6. start in.net 6 right now don't start an older version unless there's a absolute need to do so always start your projects in the absolute latest version because if your project becomes that project that a uh a company is still working on 10 years from now how you start in.net 6 gets you a little bit closer to modern development versus starting in a previous version that's now way obsolete now another nice thing is net5.6 easy easyupgrade.net60.net seven hopefully an easy upgrade they're supposed to be so if you can do so keep your projects upgrading now i have had some pushback on this well you know there's all this testing and stuff has to go on for sure and that's not something to be taken lightly by the same time you need to think through do some work now or get so far behind that you just can't do it and if you just can't do it then you're stuck so it's better to invest smaller investments over time rather than getting stuck and just staying on a version that's going to limit you and pass the world's gonna pass you by all right so that's my thoughts on uh what's obsolete and what's not in c-sharp what you should learn and what you should avoid thanks for listening to this week's episode of dev questions if you have a question about be a developer or be a c-sharp developer check out the previous episodes this is both a podcast and a youtube video series so check out both and if you have any questions you can also go to devquestions.com and check out where you can find this as a podcast or my youtube channel and look for the dev questions playlist have a great day and as always i am tim cory [Music] you

Channel: IAmTimCorey

Views: 26,743

Keywords: c#, c# developer questions, dev questions, dev questions series, developer questions, how do i, iamtimcorey, learn c#, tim corey, obsolete c#, .net framework, .net core, .net 5, .net 6, should I learn .net framework, should i learn .net core, should i learn .net core in 2021

Id: hrg9kno7dxM

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021