Microsoft is changing its judgment to eliminate the hot reload code feature from the upcoming .NET 6 following public protests from the open-source community. This function allows developers to change the source code while the application is running, and preview the effect quickly.
Moreover, as a feature that many developers are looking forward to can be used on Visual Studio Code and on multiple platforms, Microsoft made a questionable decision in the final stage last week that the hot reload code feature will only be available on Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio 2022 is a paid software and is limited to the Windows platform.
An anonymous Microsoft insider told The Verge that the decision to change the final stage was made by Julia Liuson, the head of Microsoft’s developer department, and this was a business-led decision. After arousing strong protests, Microsoft has canceled this controversial decision at this stage.
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During this period, many of Microsoft’s own employees also expressed anger within the company. .NET Project Management Director Scott Hunter explained: “We made a mistake in the execution of the decision and took longer than expected to respond to the community. Microsoft has now approved the community’s request to re-enable the hot reload feature. And will be available in the final version of the .NET 6 SDK.”
The Verge asked Microsoft to explain the change in its executive decision, but Microsoft did not want to discuss this controversial decision. “We have taken measures to solve the problems encountered by some community members,” a Microsoft spokesperson stated in a statement to The Verge. “The hot reload function will be normally built in the .NET 6 SDK released on November 8. Restored in the version.”
But Microsoft’s blog post did not talk about this controversial decision and stated that deleting the hot reload code was just a mistake, not a commercial decision. Scott Hunter said: “We inadvertently deleted the source code, instead of not wanting to call the code path.” Although for the .NET community, the final result is worth celebrating, for those who value decision transparency. Said that the official explanation surrounding this matter and what happened in the middle did not satisfy them.
Scott Hunter said: “Like many companies, we are learning to balance the needs of the open-source software community, and as a corporate sponsor of .NET sometimes we can’t handle these issues properly. When we don’t do a good job, what we can do is learn from our previous mistakes and move forward better.”
Besides, .NET Foundation was created by Microsoft in 2014 when .NET was open-sourced. It is essentially an independent organization and its purpose is to improve the development and cooperation of .NET open-source software.
