STstuartd·Aug 22, 2019
> .NET developers love using the standard libs
I may not be a typical .Net developer, but my personal feeling is that this is too general and somewhat glib.
If you're inexperienced you will (and should!) choose the default option, if there's one available, and the most commonly used option if there isn't a default. So, if you wanted an ORM, then before EF there was NHibernate. But after a while you become able (from painfully gained experience) to determine what you want from a tool and what trade-offs you want to make, so you might use something like Dapper or no ORM at all.
Personally, I have found some of the MS provided implementations - shall we say - less than optimal. The Unity Framework. EF (which I dearly wish I have never had to suffer using). MSTest. Enterprise Library (oh god ugh).
So I make other - informed - choices about wh
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at to use. Some things I keep using because they are 'good enough' and I have a library of utilities and a mental map of how they work - log4net, NUnit - and some things I find I just don't need any more (mocking libraries, for one).
MS still support their provided implementations - as they should - but even their own projects can and do use third-party frameworks rather than the MS provided implementation (for example, Bot Framework used AutoFac (back when I was using it, anyway) [1]) - because their developers have been released from the requirement to exclusively use MS provided frameworks, and are making their own choices about what to use in their projects, and consequently what their users should use when using those tools.
Eventually, of course, if a tool is so crucial that it becomes part of .Net itself - the best example I can think of is dependency injection in .Net Core, which is in Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection - you'd have to be mighty stubborn to use anything else.
One other point: I wouldn't describe NHibernate as 'obsolete', but given their historic and chronic inability to keep their documentation sites live and working ([2] referenced from [3]) it's easy to get that impression. But people are certainly still using it [4]. Just not as many as there used to be.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/botframework-sdk/issues/938
[2] http://www.nhforge.org/doc/nh/en/index.html
[3] https://ayende.com/blog/4139/nhibernate-documentation
[4] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/nhibernate