Typhlosion
November 12th, 2014, 04:15 PM
Welp, this is probably not interesting to most of VirtualTeen, but this is sure very interesting news. In the same time period, Microsoft both announced plans on making their .NET framework opensource and cross platfrom, with help from the Mono guys, as well as launching a full version of Visual Studio (their IDE) for small projects for free!
You have no clue how much will I be able to fanboy now. :P
Sources: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-takes-net-open-source-and-cross-platform/ & http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-makes-visual-studio-free-for-small-teams/
For more than 12 years now, the .NET framework (http://www.microsoft.com/net) has been the programming model for developers who want to build apps for Windows. But in its efforts to take many of its developer tools cross-platform, Microsoft today announced that it plans to take .NET to both the Mac and Linux soon and that it is open-sourcing most of the full server-side .NET core stack (not client-side .NET), starting with the next version.
As Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me, about 6 million developers are now building applications on top of the framework. “We’ve been widely successful with that,” he said. But now the question is, how do you move .NET forward? Microsoft already open sourced the .NET compiler (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx)earlier this year, so it’s not new to this (even though many pundits may still take a double-take when they hear the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence).
Looking at Microsoft’s recent history, however, today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total shock. At its Build developer conference earlier this year, for example, Microsoft announced the .NET Foundation (http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/microsoft-launches-net-foundation-to-foster-the-net-open-source-ecosystem/) and it’s that organization that will also shepherd this project.
Unsurprisingly, the company plans to work with the Xamarin (http://xamarin.com)-sponsored Mono community (http://www.mono-project.com/), which already produces a cross-platform open source .NET framework based on C#. “We will announce this and then take the next few months working with the Mono community,” Somasegar told me. “We are working very closely with the Xamarin guys on this.”
[...]
Microsoft plans to set up a GitHub repository with the .NET code to get the conversation started. What exactly the final version will look like still remains to be seen, but Somasegar hopes that you will soon be able to run a .NET app in a Docker container in Linux on Microsoft Azure.
To protect developers, Microsoft also today announced a patent covenant that will cover the Mono project and everybody who implements it.
Whenever a company open sources a certain project, users often worry that this means the company is giving up on it. Both Somasegar and Guthrie stressed that this is not the case here at all.
Microsoft today launched (http://aka.ms/soma-connect) the Community 2013 edition of Visual Studio (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio), which essentially replaces the very limited Visual Studio Express version the company has been offering for a few years now.
There is a huge difference between Visual Studio Express and the aptly named Visual Studio 2013 Community edition, though: The new version is extensible, so get access to the over 5,100 extensions (https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/) now in the Visual Studio ecosystem. It’s basically a full version of Visual Studio with no restrictions, except that you can’t use it in an enterprise setting and for teams with more than five people (you can, however, use it for any other kind of commercial and non-commercial project).
“The simple way to think about this is that we are broadening up access to Visual Studio,” Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me in an interview late last month. Somasegar told me that the Community Edition will allow you to build any kind of application for the Web, mobile devices, desktop and the cloud. “It’s a full features version of Visual Studio,” he noted. “It includes the full richness of the Visual Studio extensions and ecosystem.”
This means you get access to all the usual Visual Studio tools like Peek, Code Analysis, Graphical Debugging and more.
[..]
You have no clue how much will I be able to fanboy now. :P
Sources: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-takes-net-open-source-and-cross-platform/ & http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-makes-visual-studio-free-for-small-teams/
For more than 12 years now, the .NET framework (http://www.microsoft.com/net) has been the programming model for developers who want to build apps for Windows. But in its efforts to take many of its developer tools cross-platform, Microsoft today announced that it plans to take .NET to both the Mac and Linux soon and that it is open-sourcing most of the full server-side .NET core stack (not client-side .NET), starting with the next version.
As Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me, about 6 million developers are now building applications on top of the framework. “We’ve been widely successful with that,” he said. But now the question is, how do you move .NET forward? Microsoft already open sourced the .NET compiler (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx)earlier this year, so it’s not new to this (even though many pundits may still take a double-take when they hear the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence).
Looking at Microsoft’s recent history, however, today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total shock. At its Build developer conference earlier this year, for example, Microsoft announced the .NET Foundation (http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/microsoft-launches-net-foundation-to-foster-the-net-open-source-ecosystem/) and it’s that organization that will also shepherd this project.
Unsurprisingly, the company plans to work with the Xamarin (http://xamarin.com)-sponsored Mono community (http://www.mono-project.com/), which already produces a cross-platform open source .NET framework based on C#. “We will announce this and then take the next few months working with the Mono community,” Somasegar told me. “We are working very closely with the Xamarin guys on this.”
[...]
Microsoft plans to set up a GitHub repository with the .NET code to get the conversation started. What exactly the final version will look like still remains to be seen, but Somasegar hopes that you will soon be able to run a .NET app in a Docker container in Linux on Microsoft Azure.
To protect developers, Microsoft also today announced a patent covenant that will cover the Mono project and everybody who implements it.
Whenever a company open sources a certain project, users often worry that this means the company is giving up on it. Both Somasegar and Guthrie stressed that this is not the case here at all.
Microsoft today launched (http://aka.ms/soma-connect) the Community 2013 edition of Visual Studio (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio), which essentially replaces the very limited Visual Studio Express version the company has been offering for a few years now.
There is a huge difference between Visual Studio Express and the aptly named Visual Studio 2013 Community edition, though: The new version is extensible, so get access to the over 5,100 extensions (https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/) now in the Visual Studio ecosystem. It’s basically a full version of Visual Studio with no restrictions, except that you can’t use it in an enterprise setting and for teams with more than five people (you can, however, use it for any other kind of commercial and non-commercial project).
“The simple way to think about this is that we are broadening up access to Visual Studio,” Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me in an interview late last month. Somasegar told me that the Community Edition will allow you to build any kind of application for the Web, mobile devices, desktop and the cloud. “It’s a full features version of Visual Studio,” he noted. “It includes the full richness of the Visual Studio extensions and ecosystem.”
This means you get access to all the usual Visual Studio tools like Peek, Code Analysis, Graphical Debugging and more.
[..]