I’ve been maintaining a toolset written in Python for my company for a while now (GIS work, specifically ESRI arcpy) and this week decided to dip my toes into the C# extension world and my god is it a mess lol. I understand the OOP concepts, but trying to get all the xaml and daml stuff to line up with your classes is a pain.
Visual Studio isn’t helping either, I usually use VSCode or Vim, so a full IDE feels clunky and weird to use.
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Why do C# developers wear glasses? Because they can’t C#… sharp.
No idea what a gis extension is, but c# is the GOAT oop language for many reasons. AMA
It’s just plugin writing for ArcGIS Pro. They have an SDK and Visual Studio extension. The SDK lets you use C# to write extensions for their desktop mapping software.
I’m mostly following the C# syntax rules, having the linter on is fun though since everything been be written a half dozen ways so no matter what I write it gives me the option to switch haha.
The other pain point is daml/xaml bindings, and working with very large, deeply OO frameworks. When I have to rename or remove something Visual Studio will frequently miss a single string in one of the files and break the app.
Ah not familiar with DAML either, never even heard of it lol. VS/C#'s remove/rename functionality has never failed me before, but if the DAML file doesn’t have strong typing, then that would probably miss it.
DAML is their own proprietary XAML alternative that lets you write conditional context into the XAML that rewrites it at runtime.
This means the strings in that file are turned into a generated package at buildtime and a bunch of artifacts are made with strings like
Module1_App_Pane1_ViewModel_SelectorI’m probably just gonna write by business logic normally and keep it as far away from that system as possible lol.
I’m probably just gonna write by business logic normally and keep it as far away from that system as possible lol.
This is always the correct decision when working with some bespoke standard
Of course all their example code is just a pile of files with default names and all the business logic inside the button classes.
Might try and find stuff other people have shared. A lot of those are just a mess as well, but there might be a good one somewhere lol
It was the goat back when i was churning out winforms slop with DataTable and DataView it was so easy to slap together some crappy desktop app to sell and DataTable let me query data in memory instead of manipulating via code which was fun.
And i have never used it since. Its ok for when you need to do something specifically Microsoft but I can’t think of any general thing its good at. It does generally look and feel nicer than java though but kotlin beats both.
Entity framework and linq was a decent orm for sql server but it only had the full feature set for sql server.
If you want a nice OOP language, it might be worth considering one of the Java compatibles like Kotlin. Kotlin for example is a bit more ergonomic than C# and the Java ecosystem is a bit more commonplace than .NET
I am only using C# because it’s the language needed to write extensions for ArcGIS Pro, I’ve never been much of a fan of OOP languages.
I had a class that used it in high school. I remember, like, none of it. I think we played with Unity and used C# in it. We also dabbled in C++. Nowadays I just know Python, Rust, and C.
Python + Rust/C is amazing. Pyo3 and Cython/Cpython modules fix the “speed issue” that Python has while still letting you use Python to orchestrate.
