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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.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:17PM
I've been pondering this development since the news broke, and I honestly don't know what to think.
- MS is giving us a drive train without the chassis, tires, or engine. The whole MS stack is optimized for SQL Server, and I haven't used .NET enough to know if it works with any other database. Also, I don't know if they're open-sourcing their whole ASP.NET stuff. Without the engine (SQL Server) and the chassis (the presentation-level stuff), .NET is a systems programming environment and Linux has enough of those already. You're also not getting Win32/Win64, just the runtime virtual machine, so I don't know how much of code is actually going to be portable. (With database code, you can plug in your own drivers for LINQ, but how many Linux databases would have that kind of thing available? I don't know, because it never occurred to me to look. I know IBM ported or reimplemented ODBC on Linux.)
- ASP.NET is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. I read about it once, saw "run at server", and went back to J2EE. They have a parallel universe of their own MVC and ORM (the Entity Framework) which seems to appeal to people who want their IDE to think for them. If ASP.NET was available for Linux, well, anyone who wanted to use ASP.NET would want to use Windows. That kind of developer would not want to be near Linux. I don't see body shops grinding out code wanting to suddenly switch to Linux. I don't see Linux people wanting to learn ASP.NET. The inefficient design of ASP.NET ought to bother anyone who is comfortable with Linux.
- I've always admired Anders Heidelberg (how do you spell his last name again?) who has a way of developing elegant languages like Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and C#. Java is just one hack after another piled on top until it's about to collapse under its own weight. C#, by comparison, seems elegant and well designed.
Is this a win or a loss? I have no idea.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nicdoye on Friday November 14 2014, @12:55PM
C# is a better version of Java. Sun should have added many of C#'s features ages ago.
LINQ, Functional programming (had it for ages - better than Java 8's verbose awfulness) http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/375166/Functional-programming-in-Csharp [codeproject.com], Properties, etc., etc. are all awesome.
I've used C# to talk to Greenplum/PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle (and obvs. SQL Server). I've never used the IDE to do schema design.
Hibernate fans (shudder ;-) ) can use NHibernate, there's Log4Net and NLog to replace Log4J, the list goes on.
ASP.NET MVC is almost as good as Spring MVC. If you like modern lean stacks like Ruby's Sinatra or Node's Express, there's NancyFX.
Package management using NuGet is pretty awesome. I don't know if it works completely as well as say Maven, but Maven in itself is kind of nasty.
Dependency Injection via the long established Castle container http://www.castleproject.org/ [castleproject.org], Microsoft Unity http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647202 [microsoft.com], and others is just as good as in the various Java implementations. (A Spring expert may jump in here and point out that Spring's ecosystem is massive compared with the C# versions - I've never had the need to use all of Spring, and the sheer size of the number of methods actually puts me off).
VisualStudio is a seriously good IDE, and I'm glad there's a Community edition, now (I've been forced to use Express editions most of the time).
At this point, I'll say that Groovy (and JRuby) for the JVM are awesome, too, but open sourcing and cross-platforming C#/.NET is probably one of the most significant IT events of the last 20 years. (Unless no one ends up using it).
I'm a UNIX person through and through, but I have to use .NET for one application and I've come to love it.
I code because I can