.NET, open source and cross-platform

Ishan jain November 19, 2014 20:25

I remember when I was doing my bachelor thesis project on Mono, how uncertain the future of Mono was. While I was finalizing my report, I heard that Attachmate had acquired Novell, and was to close down the OpenSUSE and Mono divisions. At that point I was a bit scared if I will have to do the whole thesis again.

From the ashes rose the Phoenix, the old Mono team at Novell started Xamrarin, and Mono could still live on. Well I guess the strength behind Mono was the community.
For some reasons, I have never gone fully to Linux or Mono, I have been in a Limbo between the two worlds. I think it has to do with the I am LAZY person, for most parts I am used to with the Windows, and want parts of Linux to work like it.

On other hand I do prefer to have a Linux VM, always running, for my PHP and other Linux related development. Plus, I guess it was hard for me to ditch Visual Studio. Though, over the years I have tested my .NET application on Mono. And C# is a very handy language...

Well guess how surprised I was when I read in the newsletter from the Visual Studio Online team, that .NET was going cross platform, and Microsoft is supporting it, also that the parts of .NET is now available on GitHub as open source repositories.

If you have been around for a while, you would have noticed that Microsoft, has started to support more and more Open Source projects. Well, one guess is that they are trying to get away from the infamous quote from Steve Ballmer about Linux (don't think I really need to repeat it).
If my memory serves me right, some of the Windows builds for PHP on PHP.net was supplied by the Port25 project from Microsoft, but I could be wrong.

I guess it is only time that will tell the whole story, and we will just have to wait and see what the new efforts from Microsoft will bring. For now I am glad to know, that in near future, I might be able to use full .NET Framework on Linux, and don't have to limit my self to sometimes a bit ancients methods...

On the footnote, you can use full Visual Studio Professional for free, if you are working on a open source project. The newest edition is fittingly named Visual Studio Community.