.NET Hot Reload Support via CLI

Scott Hunter [MSFT]

Last week, our blog post and the removal of the Hot Reload capability from the .NET SDK repo led to a lot of feedback from the community.

First and foremost, we want to apologize. We made a mistake in executing on our decision and took longer than expected to respond back to the community. We have approved the pull request to re-enable this code path and it will be in the GA build of the .NET 6 SDK.

As a team, we are committed to .NET being an open platform and doing our development in the open. The very fact that we decided to adopt an open posture by default from the start for developing the Hot Reload feature is a testament to that. That said, like any development team, from time to time we have to look at quality, time, resources to make tradeoffs while continuing to make forward progress. The vast majority of the .NET developers are using Visual Studio, and we want to make sure VS delivers the best experience for .NET 6.

With the runway getting short for the .NET 6 release and Visual Studio 2022, we chose to focus on bringing Hot Reload to VS2022 first. We made a mistake in executing on this plan in the way it was carried out. In our effort to scope, we inadvertently ended up deleting the source code instead of just not invoking that code path. We underestimated the number of developers that are dependent upon this capability in their environments across scenarios, and how the CLI was being used alongside Visual Studio to drive inner loop productivity by many.

We are always listening to our customers’ feedback to deliver on their needs. Thank you for making your feedback heard. We are sorry that we made so many community members upset via this change across many parameters including timing and execution.

Our desire is to create an open and vibrant ecosystem for .NET. As is true with many companies, we are learning to balance the needs of OSS community and being a corporate sponsor for .NET. Sometimes we don’t get it right. When we don’t, the best we can do is learn from our mistakes and be better moving forward.

Thank you for all of your feedback and your contributions over the years. We are committed to developing .NET in the open and look forward to continuing to work closely with the community.

Thank you! 🙏

60 comments

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  • Víctor Martín Palacio 0

    I think the Microsoft authorities should be more sincere. .NET is open source or not? things like what happened don’t make Microsoft trustworthy. Having options like Go, Node.js and Java, they should really make things better, clearer, and if necessary, make decisions with measure, without later regrets, be clearer, not so ambiguous.
    .NET is open sourse or not? That is the question.

  • Andrew Mansell 0

    Great. Now could you please open source the debugger.

  • Ivan J 0

    “In our effort to scope, we inadvertently ended up deleting the source code instead of just not invoking that code path.”
    MS, we all know this is a blatant lie. Why was commenting disabled on that PR?
    If it wasn’t, many community members would have advised on this mistake before it was merged.
    This response is 100% PR backtracking.

    MS Open Source has lost a great deal of my respect with this stunt.

  • kayes 0

    Trust is the new Gold, especially in a world with growing physical disconnection among people. It takes years to establish trust but seconds to lose it. My day-to-day dev workflow is built around CLI tools, e.g., git, docker, k8s, .NET etc. and I’ve never built and run a .NET project from within Visual Studio in the past couple of years. So I welcome the decision to bring back Hot Reload.

  • Super Coco 0

    This is the same like the removal of the free Windows Hyper V Server 2022 but in constrast, with lot of bad comments, bad cristicism, bad opinions and and hundreds of users complaining about this, the Microsoft response is that will not develop this version of Microsoft Windows Server and it recommends Azure Stack HCI to users, a very overloaded and bloated cloud-based subscription payment solution that requires at least one cluster with two servers to run:

    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-server-insiders/hyper-v-server-2022/m-p/2652790

    Now users are searching to move away from Microsoft to other virtualization solutions.

  • Pheakdey Tes 0

    To be honest hot reload is useless. It work only in hello world project with few ui file.
    Hope they can improve for big project asap.

  • László Szőke 0

    In the summer, I switched to Ubuntu and switched from Visual Studio to JetBrains Rider.
    The thing is, I made a good decision: Rider is a much better development environment than Visual Studio.
    If dotnet takes this direction, I will switch to JVM and use IntelliJ IDEA instead of Rider; the situation is that there will be no big change in terms of IDE because Rider = IntelliJ IDEA + ReSharper …
    I was very disappointed in Microsoft.
    I’m sure I’ll never go back to Windows from Ububtu again. I’ll be going from Ubuntu to macOS in the future, maybe, but I might stay on Ubuntu because I feel really good in this environment.

  • Kirk Wood 0

    Scott, your response is so disappointing. I thought you would be smart enough to know that we developers see through your politician like statements. But know that we do.

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