Yesterday I wanted to start doing a little hacking on Jellyfin’s server (and maybe frontend) so I needed to setup a development environment. The thing is it’s in C# and .NET. In a life long ago I spent several years as a C#/.NET developer (as a C++ developer) and I didn’t mind the experience especially since Mono existed at the time and gave at least some of the functionality available on Windows to the Linux world. I thought a lot of decisions made for the C# language were great early on (not to say later ones were bad I’m just not in the loop). The last version I probably looked at seriously was C# 5.0. But realistically the platform I was working on did not start to leverage this new capability so it was more like C# 4.0.
This is a long lead up to say that I was quite impressed by the ease in which I could install the .NET 8.0 runtime on Linux. Then combined with Jetbrains Rider and a solution file already in the Jellyfin code I was up, building and running the server in less than 10 minutes. Color me impressed.
I don’t know how much extensive C# programming I’ll be doing in the near future but it was/is a bit nostlagic to be looking over C# code again and looking at all the new things added since I left that world.