"Framework" is such a poor differentiator to contrast with modern .NET (owing to the original poor naming decision in the first place--it's not like ".NET" itself is amazing) that it's hard, from a casual reading, to pick up on the fact that "Framework" is even being used a differentiator.

I propose that when people want to differentiate between the modern .NET Core vs the legacy closed source .NET implementation, the latter is referred to as "OG" .NET (in casual and business-casual contexts, at least).

I get where people are coming from, but I honestly don't think it's that hard. If someone is new to .NET, all they need to care about is .NET 6 and later, so it doesn't matter much.

Microsoft has documentation for the history. Here's one: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/introduction#ne...

I think everyone is honestly too harsh on Microsoft. They are the best at evolving software (not perfect) while keeping backwards compatibility. Apple and Google just throw things away or suddenly change things and say "deal with it". Of course it's easy to keep naming simple when you do that. There's no way Oracle, Apple, Google, etc. could have managed the transition from .NET Framework to .NET 6 like Microsoft has. Apple would have just changed to something completely different and thus named it something new, just like they did with Swift.

Whether new developers need to worry about developing for OG .NET or not (I agree that they shouldn't) doesn't really have anything to do with what people who talk about OG .NET should call it in order to make it clear that OG .NET is what they're talking about.

> If someone is new to .NET, all they need to care about is .NET 6 and later, so it doesn't matter much.

That is an optimistic viewpoint in some ways; Lots of shops still have FW projects around, possibly ones older than they should be, but the workflows have enough differences that I'd say you should know NET6 and the gotchas between that and FW.

Unfortunely anything related to UWP and WinUI seems to have plenty of folks on the teams used to the Apple and Google ways.

Also there are plenty of .NET Framework libraries on the enterprise space that are yet to work properly on .NET Core infrastructure, or outside Windows, as they are mere wrappers to native Windows APIs.

Since Java 6, Oracle has managed to evolve Java with less breakage (there is some specially on the Java 9 transition) than .NET Framework => .NET Core, or .NET Native => .NET Core.

IMHO, they should have just named the new one .CORE and called it a day.

It would have made it immeasurably easier to google, and could have been be incorporated into other names to differentiate them from old versions: ASP.CORE, ADO.CORE, WinForms.CORE…

No, it's in their DNA to name things like that. "Windows" ... nuff said.

Yes, it is terrible. I think you need to be an active .NET developer to communicate those subtle differences clearly.

But we’re used to it being bad at this point. .NET Framework, Microsoft Teams, Visual Studio Code…

Microsoft is so incredibly bad at naming things it'd be hilarious if it wasn't so frustrating.

It feels like it must be a company policy. When needing to compete with other major tools, choose a name so generic and so easily confused with other things that people who have no knowledge of the product will assume they need it. I can imagine some IT conversations 20 years ago along the lines of ".Net? I must need that for internet access!", just like I'm sure there are discussions today where managers assume they need Azure DevOps to get this new-fangled DevOps thing.

I've taken to calling it "Legacy .NET".

Or my favourite "full framework"

Nuh-uh! I had to fight that term at Microsoft for a few years because it was obvious that .NET Framework was legacy but some people were afraid to say it for fear that some customers would leave (as if leaving is somehow easy to do).

I was ironically saying it was my favorite. It's the worst because it implied the "Core" in use at the time was somehow a "lite" version.

Please, no more name changes.

Not a name change, just an editorial prescription for discussions. The proper name is .NET Framework (just don't call it that!).

A suggestion I liked was to call ".Net Framework" ".Net classic" a la "ASP classic", nicely honors the original .Net while properly suggesting it is not the "new" .Net.