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posted by n1 on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-desperate-moves dept.

Earlier this year, Microsoft open sourced a big chunk of .NET, publishing its new compiler, Roslyn, and many .NET libraries under the Apache license. Today, the company took that same open sourcing effort a great deal further. Microsoft announced that its full server .NET stack, including the just-in-time compiler and runtime and the core class libraries that all .NET software depends on, will all be open sourced.

The code will be hosted on GitHub and published under a permissive MIT-style license.

With this release, Microsoft wants to make sure that the .NET stack is fully functional and production quality on both Linux and OS X. The company is working with the Mono community to make sure that this platform is "enterprise-ready."

Not sure I'd want a port of .NET but perhaps we'll see some improvements to WINE with this available codebase.

Additionally, Microsoft announced a partnership with Xamarin for Visual Studio 2015 with support for iOS, Android and Windows, allowing to use one tool for all. This will impact Xamarin tools as well, making easier to install them from Visual Studio.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @03:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @03:57AM (#115403)

    They couldn't ditch Windows and move to BSD as fast as Apple did, but ma-a-ybe it's possible as a five year plan. BSD with MS proprietary modifications (same as Apple) and .NET with Winforms running on top.

    Then they can get rid of all the MS-DOS/16-bit Windows/COM/OLE/MFC/6000+ APIs (and that was 15 years ago)/IE built into the OS cruft, once and for all. All those ugly "Jeffrey Richter" APIs (Richter wrote several editions of the MS Press explaining them) could be deprecated during the course of a single press conference given by Satya Nadella.

    They would have to port MS Office, which I think still pretty much uses Windows GDI instead of Winforms, but with Moore's Law that can probably change.

    Heck, they can even have pathnames with forward slash delimiters instead of backslashes!

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:05PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:05PM (#115519)

    Actually, MS-DOS and Windows always supported forward-slash pathnames in API calls. The original COMMAND.COM shell used forward-slash for options as a backwards-compatibility hack for the older CP/M. So the MS-DOS file-system APIs accepted backslashes in order to let people type paths into the shell. An ugly hack that caused a lot of problems. Unfortunately, backslash is an escape character in C and derived languages, so people would program paths like "C:\new\folder" and get surprised. The funny thing is they didn't need to, because unless you're interacting with the COMMAND.COM shell, you can use forward slashes.

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:23PM (#115551)

      and of course, when AT&T released the getopt source code (on usenet in 83 or so?) a lot of people were mad they standardized on `-' for the flag character instead of `+' or something else. The original GNU getopt_long used `+' for long arguments (instead of `--' as is now standard).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @05:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @05:46PM (#115610)

      Indeed, there was even a time where you could tell DOS that you'd want "-" as command line switch. [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 14 2014, @02:37PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Friday November 14 2014, @02:37PM (#115911) Journal

    Seems like this isn't the first story I've seen recently about Microsoft embracing Linux a bit more. Could be the usual EEE, but I'm wondering if it might be a bit more than that. More and more apps moving to the web, more and more focus on mobile where MS is far behind, a few spectacular failures in Windows itself recently (ie, Vista and 8), the constant improvements to Linux, including Steambox and all of that...Microsoft might be worried about losing the OS market entirely. Or the desktop OS space becoming less and less relevant (and therefore less valuable -- we've already seen movement towards and rumors of cheap or even free Windows editions). So maybe they're trying to port their stuff while they still have a chance to use Windows' dominance to get customers. Perhaps they want to ensure there's still a market for .Net even if they lose Windows entirely.