This is blatantly false. Just on my current project I'm using :

* OpenTK - opensource API around OpenGL

* ReactiveUI - opensource MVVM framework using RX for databinding

* Command Line Parser Library - opensource, does what it says

* NLog - logging library

* sqlite-net - micro ORM for sqlite

I excluded :

* RX - opensource but comes from Microsoft so not a community, but also a nice counterexample of porting from .NET to JVM as RX was innovated on .NET and later ported to other platforms

* system.data.sqlite.org - opensource .NET sqlite implementation, arguably a port from a bigger project

And that's just the references I have in my current project, there are a bunch of open source .NET projects that do cool things, for eg. MonoGame, bunch of MVVM frameworks, etc.

I agree that .NET has less opensource tools because a lot of things are just provided by Microsoft out of the box, and there are many areas it's not popular - but there are many OSS projects and they match the things I saw in Python and Clojure community.

I would say his posts proves another point - a lot of people in open-source are unfriendly to .NET because of Microsoft origin and they like to spread FUD. I remember when Mono was getting started and every thread on every news board would bring up how it's "patented/copyrighted" even when Microsoft gave .NET community patent promise and made CLI a standard.

When I contributed patches to Mono and talking to other .NET developers on social networks I never saw this "unfriendliness towards OSS".

    - IDE Visual Studio 2012 & 2013
    - Framework Microsoft ASP.NET (version 4.0) on .NET 4.5
    - Web Framework ASP.NET MVC 5 with MiniProfiler
    - View Engine Razor 3
    - Browser Framework jQuery 1.7.1
    - Data Access Layer LINQ to SQL and Dapper
    - Cache / Additional Data redis 2.8.4 via StackExchange.Redis, with serialization via protobuf-net
    - Source Control Git using a self-hosted GitLab instance (previously Mercurial from 2010–2014, Subversion from 2008–2010)
    - Compare Tool Beyond Compare 3

[1] http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10370

[2] http://stackexchange.com/performance

[3] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/5/7/update-on-disqus-it...

You're going to have to link me to the comment where you "referred to" and "said" all of that, because this was all I saw:

Where's the Django for .NET? and Does the same sort of thing, but is not nearly as good.

So maybe I got foolishly got myself into this by bothering to respond to two zero-effort comments. It wasn't a dick measuring contest, the point of the exercise was to examine that a .NET stack (including ASP.NET MVC at its core) can be executed upon with finesse and tuned to efficiency at high operational capacity. Futhermore, other frameworks (i.e. Django) aren't short of their own troubles.

As for open source community, we have real data available so there's no need for debate: http://githut.info/

As of Q4 2014, C# was number 10 in langs by number of active repos, with 56k (compared to, say, 85k for C++). Came in ahead of ObjC, R, Go, and others.

It may not be JavaScript, but it's active. If you look at the other stats you'll see these really aren't dead repos either.

A lot of people choose ReSharper for "nice" things that often times aren't buying them a whole lot in terms of productivity (e.g. "turn this foreach() loop into a Select() statement" really doesn't buy one much). I'd hardly say that one needs ReSharper to get the full Visual Studio experience.

Regarding the LINQ refactors you mentioned, I'd say those are less about gaining productivity than it is to educate the developer in how code can be refactored. A lot of times, those LINQ refactors turn out considerably less readable, but it's a moment to learn other ways of solving problems.

That's a fair point, but even so, I've yet to find an IDE/editor/whatever that compares favorably to the combination of Visual Studio + Resharper + NCrunch.

I am really a total C# fanboy, though was reared on unix and c/c++/python/java.

> The answer in my opinion is yes. This may change, given recent efforts by Microsoft, however evolution will be slow because the whole ecosystem has to change, not just Microsoft.

A suspicion gnaws at me. I try to rid myself of it but alas, it holds fast and unyielding. That suspicion being: you know very little about the F# community. What statements you make, they seem descendents of generalizations from your experience with the .Net community. Happily, F# is not like the stereotypical .NET community (I must be so specific, in order that I not offend the subset to whom your claims do not apply). There is a strong culture of embracing open tools and code; Microsoft is not looked at for direction beyond what basic support they provide.

The community is neither lacking nor is it unfriendly. It is small, yes. Uncool? Opposite of! But opinions run with tastes. Incomplete is a tricky matter. Certainly it's not going to have as many libraries as Python or the JVM, but neither is it some kind of backwater.

There are excellent build tools like FAKE and paket. Awesome ideas like—why, take a look at how fantastic the HTML type provider is, and it works in real life too! Most of the time =) [http://fsharp.github.io/FSharp.Data/library/HtmlProvider.htm...]

There are tons of cool libraries available, most of them open source, with generous licensing terms. Stuff with Haskell heritage like fparsec, fscheck, the blazing fspickler combinators (serializer) or more computation oriented tools that let you target and run on the GPU or Here: Automatic Differentiation (after which, loss minimizing Machine Learning algorithms are made much easier) [http://gbaydin.github.io/DiffSharp/]. Or the DataFrames library: http://bluemountaincapital.github.io/Deedle/

Type providers also allow easy use of UI builders. Web frameworks and also, js targeting can be reached here: http://fsharp.org/guides/web/. You can target Unity3D and apparently, also the Unreal Engine.

There are interesting projects looking at distributed computation (https://github.com/fsprojects/Cricket and ilk) or light weight concurrency, in Hopac's take on the Pi Calculus.

F# was one of the earlier languages with light weight threads, a solid async story and first class events (pre-reactive trend). Active Patterns (not unique to F# but more common in) take us close to Predicate Dispatch (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PredicateDispatching). There is much more I could list and hopefully, I have piqued some interest.

But it's not perfect. Adding Functor support would be very useful. A while ago, in an early Active Patterns paper, there were hints that generalized algebraic datatypes might soon be introduced. Nothing came of that. Higher kindedness is nice but not as much missed—it is my suspicion that, the gains from each level of types that can be parameterized over, quickly saturates.

There are lots of cool projects going on in F#, and while, as a language it's definitely not as powerful as say Scala or Haskell; the tools, libraries and environment, alternate ideas as well as breezy syntax, do make up. Having used them all, I wouldn't say it is any less expressive, it just...prioritizes differently beyond the core functional ideas (REPL, sum/product types, currying, closures, point free application where possible, Hindley Milner inference, immutability by default, pattern matching and deconstruction, etc., etc.).

It strikes a lot of middle ground across many planes, in terms of pragmatism vs functional purity—that is its ML heritage (but perhaps even more so, bargained in exchange for the .NET ecosystem). Most functional languages focus on types in terms of algebra, F# does too but only basically, instead it focuses more on the easy bridging of types with unruly data.