After pressure Microsoft reverses .Net 6 Hot Reload decision

Microsoft has been involved in a growing brouhaha over their commercially motivated decision to remove support for Hot Reload from the coming release of .Net 6.

Hot Reload is a useful feature that allows developers to modify the source code of an app while it is running and see the results immediately. Instead of shipping it with the open-source .Net 6 Microsoft instead decided to make it a paid feature of Visual Studio 2022.

After a growing backlash from both inside and outside the company Microsoft has now reversed their decision, with Scott Hunter, director of program management for .NET saying:

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.

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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.

It remains to be seen if Microsoft can win back the trust of the open-source community as quickly as they changed their plans.

via the verge