We shall see. There is lots going on, both from Microsoft and from the rest of the OS community. It&#x27;s definitely going to be interesting.

It may be a bit premature to say that, though 2014 looks to be the year that I started liking Microsoft again.

I doubt. It should be a year of Linux desktop, haha. Wayland with drivers from Nvidia, KDE 5 and Mozilla Shumway are supposed to be coming. And also Daala video codec and Steam Machines &#x2F; SteamOS. Quite a number of breakthrough developments for 2015.

In a nutshell, that&#x27;s my problem. Once bitten twice shy. Even so I&#x27;m happy that they are moving in this direction, let&#x27;s hope they do it some more.

Absolutely. There is zero regard for open source from Microsoft here. At the very least they must be trying to return to the &quot;developers, developers, developers&quot; days. With Bill Gates punching the clock, it&#x27;s really anybody&#x27;s guess what the real motivation is here, but it sure as hell isn&#x27;t all the things we know and love about open source.

I&#x27;m not so sure, I kind of feel like this is them following Embrace Extend Extinguish, except they realized they moved to step 3 too soon so they&#x27;re going back to step 2 or 1. I do not have faith that they won&#x27;t try step 3 again later.

I would be in disbelief 5 years ago. Its a new microsoft

The culture changes because new people coming in have different ideas and upbringing.Market forces and realities impact Microsoft&#x27;s decisions far more than culture does. The reality of the Microsoft stack right now is that very few people are choosing it as a greenfield option, and those already invested in it are looking at alternatives.Just a few weeks ago I wrote about a new project I was initiating, choosing Java as the platform. Understand that I&#x27;ve been a Microsoft stack developer for many years, but a variety of inertia, platform support, ease of getting setup with the development tools, and trust in the platform reasons made Java the better choice.But this announcement changes the equation to some degree, as have Microsoft&#x27;s various other opening up directives. Microsoft no longer sets the technology agenda, so choices like this are simply a reaction to that new reality. That isn&#x27;t being cynical, and the changes are very welcome, but Microsoft didn&#x27;t just punt the old timers and now they see the light.

15 years is a long time. The culture changes because new people coming in have different ideas and upbringing. People that any company recruits have different ideas about OS than they did 20 years ago.For instance, one of the movers here is Scott Guthrie, who joined MS in 1997: 17 years ago.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Guthrie" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Scott_Guthrie</a>And let&#x27;s not forget thsi from Hanselman: &quot;I&#x27;ve been here pushing open source and the open web for over 5 years and things are VERY different.&quot; <a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx</a>

It was a totally different world for development 15 years ago though.Yeah, now Microsoft are dead.

It was a totally different world for development 15 years ago though. These days web applications are taking over what used to be in-house developed Windows apps. Those in-house apps represent a huge amount of software development. I think that market mostly dried up for Microsoft. Linux and open source software rule the web app space. On mobile it is Android and iOS.C# is a nice language, better than Java for sure. Microsoft has a long way to go yet to win back developers (lots of dirty tricks in the 1990s) but at least they are heading the right direction now.

&gt; Who would have thought they would have come this far?The sad thing is: these massive changes are only chipping away at the entrenched opinions.They&#x27;ve been doing this bit by bit over the past few years, yet I keep seeing this[1] kind of stuff at every turn (find my reply here[2] for a true tidbit of irony).We can be a very religious lot at times.[1]: <a href="http://compositecode.com/2014/04/09/ive-officially-sent-this-email-over-100-times-to-recruiters-looking-for-net-developers/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;compositecode.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;09&#x2F;ive-officially-sent-this...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526525" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7526525</a>

If you would have shown me this headline 15 years ago I would have thought it was an onion article. Who would have thought they would have come this far?

This is really a great move. C# is an awesome language and deserves to have a future on Mac &amp; Linux. Microsoft is changing for sure.

It does say that they are &quot;expanding .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms&quot;.

Only if it&#x27;s easy enough to port, and I doubt it would be. Although Mono will definitely gain from the original source code.

They say open source, but not which license they&#x27;re going to use. It may not be possible to integrate with anything in practice, or as free as developers would like it to be.

Nope but Microsoft is making it work on other platforms. From the opening line:&gt; and expanding .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms.<a href="http://news.microsoft.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-takes-net-open-source-and-cross-platform-adds-new-development-capabilities-with-visual-studio-2015-net-2015-and-visual-studio-online/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.microsoft.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;microsoft-takes-net-ope...</a>

Open-sourcing .NET doesn&#x27;t magically make it work on other platforms (a not-insignificant chunk is Win32-specific, for example). But it certainly makes the Mono team&#x27;s job easier.

No I think they are providing open source libraries of the server stack which is written in c#. Still needs mono to compile to linux&#x2F;mac but now mono won&#x27;t have to (re?)implement those, they can all share the same MS c# code

They&#x27;ve announced a .NET core CLR for windows, mac and linux - supported by Microsoft - so sounds like there&#x27;ll be options (either use Microsoft or use Mono)...(source: <a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETasOpenSourceNETonMacandLinuxandVisualStudioCommunity.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;AnnouncingNET2015NETasOpenSour...</a> )

In reading the article, it sounds like they&#x27;re going to work with the Mono team to bring it everywhere.

Yeah pretty much. Miguel is going to have te rewrite everything.

Would love to see that demonstration, do you have a link for that?

Mono (the code) and .NET Core will merge (per Scott Hanselmann)Microsoft will (in partnership with Mono the project) ensure that .NET core and server stacks run on Linux and OS X.They&#x27;ve just demonstrated deploying an ASP.NET MVC5 application on Linux, running inside a (Linux) Docker container and being remotely debugged from Visual Studio on Windows. Which seems to indicate that they are already pretty far down that road.

Does this mean that Mono will no longer be necessary for cross-platform C# use?

Miguel de Icaza&#x27;s post:<a href="http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tirania.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;Nov-12.html</a>

Wow - I have to say I&#x27;m impressed. I wonder how extensive the cross platform support is, and what sort of work has gone into targeting iOS? What does this mean for Xamarin and Mono?

Nope, now I don&#x27;t have an easy thing to complain about in Xamarin threads.Joking aside, there are a lot of surprises coming out of MS, this is all quite nice.

&quot;To further support cross-platform mobile development with .NET, as part of their strategic partnership, Microsoft and Xamarin announced a new streamlined experience for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio, as well as announced the addition of Visual Studio support to its free offering Xamarin Starter Edition — available later in the year.&quot;Well that should make a lot of people around here happy.

Here they mention MIT License. <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/11/12/opening-up-visual-studio-and-net-to-every-developer-any-application-net-server-core-open-source-and-cross-platform-visual-studio-community-2013-and-preview-of-visual-studio-2015-and-net-2015.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;somasegar&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;opening...</a>

Read this: <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/announcing-net-2015-preview-a-new-era-for-net.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;announcing...</a>

I can&#x27;t find anything but if I remember well almost all other open source project by microsoft are under apache2

I think that it is an MIT license, if I&#x27;ve found the correct project on <a href="http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/netcore5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dotnetfoundation.org&#x2F;netcore5</a>

.NET Framework 4.6 and its Reference Source source is being relicensed under the MIT license, so Mono (and you!) can use the source code to the .NET Framework.Link: <a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETasOpenSourceNETonMacandLinuxandVisualStudioCommunity.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;AnnouncingNET2015NETasOpenSour...</a>

MIT license according to: <a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/microsoft-open-sources-net-takes-it-to-linux-and-os-x/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;micros...</a>

You can verify yourself at the source :)<a href="https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/LICENSE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;corefx&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;LICENSE</a>

No mention of which license they are using?

Hardware requirements: 20 GB of available hard disk spaceSince we are here, could someone please explain me how is it that it takes so much space?

Try this: 
<a href="http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;products&#x2F;visual-studio-com...</a>

<a href="http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-2013-vs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;products&#x2F;visual-studio-com...</a> returns a 404.

<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/11/12/opening-up-visual-studio-and-net-to-every-developer-any-application-net-server-core-open-source-and-cross-platform-visual-studio-community-2013-and-preview-of-visual-studio-2015-and-net-2015.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;somasegar&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;opening...</a>True to form, the links to github are broken.

You mean they could release Rotor under crap licence? But could not make .NET multiplatform? Doubt it.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_Infrastructure" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shared_Source_Common_Language_I...</a>This was the CLI

They probably didn&#x27;t have the resources back then to make it multiplatform.  It would be a distraction from providing the core features of the platform.  Now that the platform is mature, it&#x27;s a good time to do it.

I welcome it. And still think it is 10 years too late. 2.0 was a blast and provided higher quality of life and speed of contemporary JAVA. If they had made it multiplatform back then the world would have been different.

This makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. It doesn&#x27;t in any way cheapen or lessen the .NET business at all, if anything more things will be built on .NET which will lead to higher sales of things like Azure, which for a lot of non .NET devs has almost 0 mindshare.I&#x27;ve never heard a Ruby or PHP developer list Azure as a potential deploy target. That is a real problem for Microsoft, even though Azure can do a lot of the same things AWS or Google&#x27;s cloud does.Smart move Microsoft.

Link is dead for me.Google Cache: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://news.microsoft.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-takes-net-open-source-and-cross-platform-adds-new-development-capabilities-with-visual-studio-2015-net-2015-and-visual-studio-online/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;...</a>

I don&#x27;t think it moves the needle off of &quot;irrelevant&quot;.

nothing? they are implementing windows, not c#

ReactOS seems mostly meant for supporting old Windows applications (a very noble effort). So... nothing?

Still great news, even without a port of VS to OSX or linux.
Personally I&#x27;m perfectly fine with using a windows PC as my development station, as long as I can create cross platform .NET code.Extensions enabled on the community edition is great news for people who can integrate awesome tools like resharper

There&#x27;s no indication from that that you&#x27;ll see a Linux or OS X port of Visual Studio. They might, but they haven&#x27;t said that.This Community Edition is extremely similar to the Express Edition, except with some limitations removed (e.g. extensions enabled) and some new limitations added (5x team members max, which the Express Edition doesn&#x27;t have: no limit).The Express Edition can be used to produce and publish commerical software. It says so right on their home page [0].[0] <a href="http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-express-vs.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;products&#x2F;visual-studio-exp...</a>

Together with the Visual Studio Community announcement <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595855" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8595855</a>, this is great news.I&#x27;ve always missed the power of visual studio when programming for open source platforms. This can change things a lot.

I think Xamarian made a very good move in getting into cross platform toolkits, rather than just relying on support contracts for Mono. At this point I think they&#x27;re in a position where Microsoft Open Sourcing the .Net runtime isn&#x27;t going to hurt them too badly.

What I&#x27;ve overheard on some podcast discussions is that they are taking the multiplatform Silverlight runtime, and have enhanced it to be a headless server-type runtime instead of browser-plugin-UI-focused. It doesn&#x27;t include all of the windows-only features of the CLR and BCL, but has all you need for ASP.NET vNEXT.

I would expect that Xamarin&#x27;s role with Mono is analogous to 37signals\Basecamp is to Ruby on Rails. Neither organization makes money developing Mono nor RoR. They make their money supporting and consulting organizations that chose to use the software that they are developing.

Is this Microsoft&#x27;s runtime or Miguel&#x27;s? I can&#x27;t work out whether:- he&#x27;s made it (if Mono is everywhere and now blessed by Microsoft)- he&#x27;s ruined (if Microsoft&#x27;s original Windows-only .net runtime is now everywhere, and there&#x27;s no need for Mono)EDIT: apparently it&#x27;s both - <a href="https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/532558786486370304" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;shanselman&#x2F;status&#x2F;532558786486370304</a>

Me too. I went from OSS stuff to .Net in 2009 and fell in love with C#, and eventually Visual Studio. It&#x27;s nice to see the two worlds merging and moving forward.

I know it&#x27;s silly but I&#x27;m tearing up. I grew up with .NET but neglected it for years because of moving to OS X, iOS and web dev. I played for some time with Xamarin and I&#x27;m so happy this is where MS is going. &lt;3 Scott &amp; Miguel, I&#x27;m sure they both had a lot to do with it.

Yep, and check out System.Console for some horrors in the mono runtime.

To be fair thats pretty much exactly what xamarin have done for ios, android and mac.

I&#x27;ve been playing around with kestrel&#x2F;asp.net vNext (Which I guess is now 5) on Mac, and while it&#x27;s still rough, it&#x27;s a good dev server.

From Hanselman&#x27;s post:&quot;ASP.NET 5 will include a web server for Mac and Linux called kestrel built on libuv.&quot;

Somehow reminds me of the Microsoft&#x2F;Novell agreement, will wait to see how it turns out...

After reading most comments here, the linked announcement, your blog post &amp; some other websites, I only have one question left. If Microsoft releases their code under the MIT license, will mono follow suit and stop using the GPL?

Microsoft&#x27;s focus on this release is the server.Mono plans on contributing to the effort our cross platform changes to Mono, to make .NET work great on Unix.Details here:
<a href="http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tirania.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;Nov-12.html</a>

&gt; I don&#x27;t think they are open sourcing the client libraries like WPF and Win Forms.I didn&#x27;t allude to that.

I don&#x27;t think they are open sourcing the client libraries like WPF and Win Forms. Like you are alluding to, what good would it do if they did since it is 99% Windows only functions in there.They are open-sourcing the server side code. I think this means your ASP.Net apps can run on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX all from the same open source code base. No worry about Mono incompatibilities and bugs.

Mono has been doing just fine. Yes, you can&#x27;t rely on WinForms, even though a port exists. You can&#x27;t do COM, that&#x27;s for sure. But that doesn&#x27;t mean that Mono is not valuable for what it is right now.Microsoft doesn&#x27;t need to provide compatibility for the Windows specific bits, as those bits are not part of the Core. And a platform like .NET has enough value in open-sourcing just the Core (i.e. whatever goes in the ECMA standard). For example it&#x27;s a perfectly acceptable strategy to use GTK# on Linux, WinForms on Windows, MonoMac on OS X and Xamarin.Whatever on iOS &#x2F; Android.On System.IO, indeed there are differences between Winsock and Linux&#x27;s epoll or BSD&#x27;s kqueue (i.e. notify on completion versus notify on ready). There are differences between the 2 models, but I don&#x27;t see that as a problem for System.IO and if you think it is a problem I&#x27;d like to read an explanation as to why.Personally I&#x27;m very excited about this announcement. I avoided .NET for years and preferred to settle for the JVM because I do not like building on top of proprietary things. If they are really open-sourcing the .NET runtime, whilst uniting their efforts with Xamarin, that&#x27;s really good news. Now hopefully the ecosystem around .NET will follow, as .NET needs an open-source oriented ecosystem and needs one badly.

&quot;What are they going to do, hack in System.IO&quot;System.IO works very well on Linux&#x2F;Mac right now. It was one of the first things implemented by the Mono team.Having ported numerous .NET applications, all of which do fair heavily file I&#x2F;O (the most common use case for System.IO), the main sticking point has been code that deals with filenames and paths. As in &quot;&#x2F;home&#x2F;billy&quot; vs &quot;c:\Users\Billy&quot;. A hour or so of cleaning up your code and making use of Path.DirectorySeparatorChar and IsRooted is all I&#x27;ve needed to do.&quot;As it stands the .Net framework&#x2F;libraries are very Windows locked&quot;This shows a lack of understanding of the .Net framework. Yes, if you used crazy Microsoft specific WCF libraries for networking protocols instead of industry standard stuff, or used WPF for graphics, that going to be a problem. But there are literally thousands of classes providing a fairly comprehensive set of data structures, network protocols, etc that are completely untied to Windows or Microsoft. If you are using something in System.whatever you are pretty OK.P.s., Sockets aren&#x27;t in System.IO, they are in System.Net

As far as I understood, they are really slimming down the core .NET CLR (runtime). Most of current BCL .NET libraries will be exposed as separate nuget packages, which makes it really convenient.

Ofcourse someone will have to write the linux&#x2F;osx implementations, but I don&#x27;t see much in System.IO that would be asking for trouble.The CreationTime on DirectoryInfo would have to be faked, and it&#x27;s not entierly clear if FileSecurity would map cleanly to posix acls, but nothing sticks out as being fundamentally incompatible with linux at least.

It will be interesting to see how this will work in practice.C# will port over just fine. But the .Net libraries? System.Windows has little to nothing in it, and right now using things like System.IO.* on Linux and Mac is just asking for trouble.What are they going to do, hack in System.IO.* Linux support after the fact? Or just add Linux.IO.* which is even more of a hack. In either case you&#x27;re going to get very messy very fast.The .Net libraries absolutely could have been designed with cross platform in mind, for example if they put the IO libraries in System.Windows.* and several of the other Windows-specific APIs.As it stands the .Net framework&#x2F;libraries are very Windows locked. So much so you&#x27;d almost have to scrap them and start over to make it more platform agnostic.

According to the announcement on visualstudio.com about the Community Edition, it isn&#x27;t just for students and open source developers. Basically, only enterprises or companies with more than five developers need to pay.

This is a huge amount of tech resource. Don&#x27;t know if it will actually bring to something working on the other platforms, but for sure it will help projects like Mono which deserved a little help.

I doubt the idea (at this point) is to &quot;RUN&quot; Visual Studio on iPad&#x2F;Android...My money is on the App Creation naively in VS 2015 - via Xamarin or similar plugins - instead of having to rely on tools like Eclipse or IdeaU.I think I&#x27;d lose my mind if I could develop apps in Visual Studio and C# instead of having to use Java and pay $1000&#x2F;year for Xamarin.

I think it&#x27;s just an oddly-worded sentence. They&#x27;re saying that you can use VS to target multiple platforms (including IOS). They&#x27;re absolutely not saying you&#x27;ll be able to run Visual Studio on an IPad.

The iOS and Android part don&#x27;t make sense to me. Surely you won&#x27;t be running VS on your iPad? So are they saying it has support for compiling to iOS and Android? Wouldn&#x27;t they need to mention Xamarin in that sentence for it to make sense?

Nice theory... but they went the opposite direction with Nokia.I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;d have any issue purchasing Xamarin and importing&#x2F;re-branding.

Not only that, but Xamarin&#x27;s independent existence is like free insurance for companies choosing .NET - even if Microsoft were to drop support (unlikely, but look at Silverlight), Xamarin would continue providing a viable way forward for the language and runtime. Now that MS&#x27;s .NET is open source, Xamarin&#x27;s .NET is like OpenJDK - Xamarin is a governing body and authority for the language&#x2F;API if Microsoft were to drop it. So it&#x27;s good for Microsoft to have Xamarin as an independent entity.

One theory I&#x27;ve read is Microsoft wants Xamarin to stay third-party so Microsoft&#x27;s competitors continue working with them.Xamarin is working with a great many companies who would think twice about working with Microsoft directly. This way Microsoft can shove money to Xamarin to forward the ecosystem without scaring anyone.

So the free Xamarin users will get Visual Studio support, but us with Xamarin Indie still have to use Xamarin Studio? I just want to use VS with Xamarin! But I guess that won&#x27;t happen, because that&#x27;s the only worthwhile reason to purchase their Business subscription (and the whole &gt;5 employees clause).

<a href="http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-partnership/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.xamarin.com&#x2F;microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-...</a>&quot;Today we’re excited to take the partnership to the next level, by announcing:1. Support for Visual Studio 2015 – Today, we released support for the Visual Studio 2015 Preview release, which includes Xamarin templates that make it easier to discover and download Xamarin from within the IDE.2. Free Xamarin Starter Edition for Visual Studio Users – Today, Microsoft announced a new, free edition to Visual Studio—Visual Studio Community. Visual Studio Community contains support for extensions, which means it will be Xamarin compatible with from day one. We want to help make Visual Studio Community a tool for anyone to create native apps for iOS and Android, so we are announcing our plans to enable our freely available Xamarin Starter Edition to work with Visual Studio Community. We are also doubling the size limit on apps that can be created with Xamarin Starter Edition, so that you can build even more capable apps for free. This will be available in the coming weeks.3. Special offers for MSDN Subscribers – We’ve worked with Microsoft to create a 20% discount for Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate MSDN subscribers to purchase Xamarin Business or Enterprise Editions, or world-class mobile development training with Xamarin University, available up to 60 days after the Visual Studio Purchase.&quot;

I believe they mean you write code in VS and target Android&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;etc for builds. It sounds like it&#x27;s moving more towards a regular IDE than very .NET specific.It does not sound like you can run VS on different devices.

The key points seem to be:&quot;Available Wednesday, Visual Studio Community 2013 is a free, fully featured edition of Visual Studio including full extensibility.&quot;So, it sounds like this will replace the Express edition and let you install extensions like you can in the Pro version.&quot;Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015: build for any device -
Built from the ground up with support for iOS, Android and Windows, Visual Studio 2015 Preview makes it easier for developers to build applications and services for any device, on any platform.&quot;It almost sounds like you&#x27;re going to be able to run VS2015 on different platforms, but I doubt it. Maybe you&#x27;ll run the web version of VS2015 to develop from Mac&#x2F;Linux?&quot;To further support cross-platform mobile development with .NET, as part of their strategic partnership, Microsoft and Xamarin announced a new streamlined experience for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio, as well as announced the addition of Visual Studio support to its free offering Xamarin Starter Edition — available later in the year. &quot;This is very interesting - .NET is going fully cross platform but they haven&#x27;t bought Xamarin...are they planning on competing while keeping their frenemies close or something else?

What do you use for GUI apps? GTK or native Core.Graphics libraries?

Wow, writing in C# for Mac, that&#x27;s almost like heaven.

Loving this. Recently started working on a project with my brother who loves MS .NET stack and I have no experience in it. I was really skeptic due to the reputation MS has of being closed source and license heavy. 
I could not have chosen a better time hopefully!!

Someone somewhere is spinning at mach 1 in his grave..

It will improve because of proper support for dot net in IOS and Android. They will evolve but I think they are well positioned.

Let&#x27;s hope that lowers the costs of Xamarin. It&#x27;s a great product, but even Microsoft realizes that, in order to achieve wider adoption, you need something close to the freemium model, like Visual Studio.

I like it how .NET Core has a more permissive license (MIT) than Mono (LGPL).

It improves it.We now get all these bug fixes for all of our products across Android, Mac, iOS, PlayStation, Xbox and every other embedded system we support.Some details:<a href="http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tirania.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;Nov-12.html</a>

What happens to Xamarin business model now?

Actually it goes back to 1999 and was a project that involved HP, Microsoft and Intel. The first release was in 2002 and it was public knowledge in 2000.

Oh aren&#x27;t you so smug.I was at the 2000 PDC when they announced C#. We are now just shy of 2015. My 15 is more accurate than your 12.

That might have been difficult, given that .NET is only 12 years old.

I just want to add my $.02.  It&#x27;s about fucking time.  They should have done this 15 years ago.

Any non-trivial GUI program will do, really.

Why would you only be convinced if the IDE runs on both platforms. You realize that the IDE and the CLR&#x2F;Runtime are two different things right?

&gt; the same executable, same as JavaI couldn&#x27;t care less about binary compatibility. As a developer, I&#x27;d rather have 100% (or 99.99%) source code compatibility. I don&#x27;t mind setting up different downloads or running different builds, as long as I can do it from a single codebase that doesn&#x27;t have thousands of #ifdef WINDOWS equivalents.

I don&#x27;t see anywhere in the announcement that Visual Studio will be cross platform. That would require porting WPF, which isn&#x27;t mentioned as being ported. It looks like they are concentrating on making web platforms multiplatform.

Microsoft doesn&#x27;t have a cross platform gui toolkit to open source. WPF (What Visual Studio is built on) is Windows only. If you want cross platform apps they would have to be built with bindings to GTK, Qt, or some other cross platform gui toolkit.

I will believe this when I see a distribution of Visual Studio running bothVS isn&#x27;t built (entirely) on .NET but uses lots of C&#x2F;C++ underneath. So it shouldn&#x27;t be confused with .NET itself running on these OS.

IntelliJ is written in Java, but has entirely separate distributions for each supported OS. As an user of the app, why would I care if it&#x27;s the same executable?Even as a developer, cross-platform binary compatibility doesn&#x27;t enter my top 10 list of important things for a programming language. Java is paying a pretty hefty price in language features (like type erasure) because things originally compiled for Java 1.2 still has to work on the Java 8 runtime. Is it really worth it?

I want to believe this, but I just don&#x27;t. .NET is so much more than just the core libraries. There will be a long time until it&#x27;s on the same level as Java. I hope Microsoft proves me wrong, of course (C# is an awesome language, F# is not bad either), but I will believe this when I see a distribution of Visual Studio running both on Mac&#x2F;Linux and on Windows (i.e. the same executable, same as Java).

But it&#x27;s Nadela who allowed that vision to move forward.

Not really if you understand how large corporations work. I think Nadella being a former dev and understanding the importance of it has a lot to do with it.

I&#x27;d pin more of this on Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman, really. They have been championing this kind of behavior for years within MS.

IronPython and IronRuby never really had corporate backing - and the few resources devoted to them had been moved away fairly quickly.Thus their fate today.The difference, this time, seems to be high-level policy and a complete change of direction of the entire developer division.

&gt;The new Microsoft under Satya Nadella has totally changed the direction of Microsoft in just a few months. They had one of the best and rock solid development platforms and research division, and loyal customers.While you might be right about having a new leader and creating change, but this is not something that happened in the last few months. This has been building up for years. I think it started with IronPython and IronRuby, then other things started popping up too.ASP.NET vnext has been on github for a while now.You&#x27;re right though about this all being really great news.

Could somebody please shed some light on this? I&#x27;m having a hard time digesting Thiel&#x27;s book, and I see this development as a perfect example of competition being positive.

&gt; Peter Thiel was right about creative Monopoly.This is coming after a decade of Microsoft losing ground on the server side to Linux and on the consumer side to Apple. If anything, it shows the positive effects of keeping a large firm out of a monopolistic position.

No one thinks that the development of this stuff happened entirely because Nadella is CEO. They think it was allowed to finally be released and promoted because Nadella is CEO.Huge corporations have a huge number of things brewing at any given time, most of which don&#x27;t make it to market. Executive decisions are a big reason why or why not. And Ballmer was repeatedly and emphatically on record that MS software should revolve around Windows.

Actually this doesn&#x27;t have to do with Satya. This has been brewing for years. It is at best naive to think this was done in a few months.

This is epic. Peter Thiel was right about creative Monopoly.The new Microsoft under Satya Nadella has totally changed the direction of Microsoft in just a few months. They had one of the best and rock solid development platforms and research division, and loyal customers. The new Azure cloud (Online + On Premise) along with the opening of .Net will change the playing field.I&#x27;m sure this is a great new for us developers. The change to work on one of the best runtimes, on a platform of our choice and on one of the best programming environments.Great job Microsoft!

Well, I was mentioning a revival of IronRuby because it was totally abandoned. I didn&#x27;t know the state of IronPython, but last I checked, it was still being developed.I want both to be available, though.

And IronPython! (yes, it works, quite well actually, but porting of numpy etc seems to have stalled years ago IIRC)

If only this included a revival of IronRuby.And, moonshot, but — giving IronRuby&#x2F;IronPython as much prominence as PowerShell.

<a href="http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jul-06.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tirania.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2009&#x2F;Jul-06.html</a>

The absurdity of betting your livelihood on a Microsoft &#x27;promise&#x27; aside, to me this reads as a green light to use, but not extend, the .NET runtime.MS still doesn&#x27;t get free software, and probably never will.Edit: My bad. &quot;As part of a .NET runtime&quot; means you can extend it. But I&#x27;d be no less nervous about using it because it is not a license, merely a &#x27;promise&#x27; with questionable legal weight.

<pre><code> Microsoft Corporation and its affiliates (“Microsoft”) promise not to assert any .NET Patents against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, or distributing Covered Code, as part of either a .NET Runtime or as part of any application designed to run on a .NET Runtime.

 If you file, maintain, or voluntarily participate in any claim in a lawsuit alleging direct or contributory patent infringement by any Covered Code, or inducement of patent infringement by any Covered Code, then your rights under this promise will automatically terminate.

 This promise is not an assurance that (i) any .NET Patents are valid or enforceable, or (ii) Covered Code does not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party. No rights except those expressly stated in this promise are granted, waived, or received by Microsoft, whether by implication, exhaustion, estoppel, or otherwise. This is a personal promise directly from Microsoft to you, and you agree as a condition of benefiting from it that no Microsoft rights are received from suppliers, distributors, or otherwise from any other person in connection with this promise.
</code></pre>
From <a href="https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;corefx&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;PATENTS.TXT</a>

Microsoft makes a patent promise:
<a href="https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;corefx&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;PATENTS.TXT</a>

Any guarantees about patents? Can using and extending .Net will cause in the future claims of software patents violations?

i think hes saying for less dependencies, and portability, and no required elevated users, and speed: its best to write it in straight win32. i agree and ill chime in down here in the downvotes. i think a lot of authors like the op and myself if we want a speedy app we have to go to win32 api only. c# is slow and even MS doesnt use it in windows desktop mgr or IE. ex: without hw accelleration the hearts game is unplayable on a 2ghz machine. with raw win32 api thats not a problem

Are you talking about the .NET misfeature that gave managed programs running from network shares less permissions than native programs running from the same network share?
Because that was removed a long time ago (.NET 3.5 SP1?).

<a href="https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Squirrel&#x2F;Squirrel.Windows</a>

I&#x27;ve reverted to WIN32 because users can run a single file, bare bones EXE without the Permission Police blocking you.Too often users aren&#x27;t allowed to install programs.
A simple program that can run on anything since XP is a good solution around Microsoft&#x27;s sandbox strategy and DLL hell and install programs are big problems.With wine you can even run your simple EXE on Linux and Mac.
Native x86 means you run faster than these virtual machine based solutions.

I&#x27;m not really hardcore anything but have been using Windows as main OS for years mainly because of the existence of VS. And boy it would be awesome if the stuff I write in C# now would just run on *nix :]

In Scala, there are just too many ways to do things. It&#x27;s  optimized for flexibility and easy writability. C# on the other hand may be a little more verbose, but at least everyone can read everyone elses code.

As someone who has written applications in C#, Java and Scala (amongst others). I&#x27;d be curious as what makes you think Scala is a winner relative to C#?

I don&#x27;t know why you are being down voted. Erik Meijer, a huge .NET contributor who worked at Microsoft (on C# among other things), and was behind the reactive .NET extensions (and also a big Haskell contributor) - he was saying exactly the same thing about Scala vs C# - <a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/covariance-contravariance-joy-of-coding-2014" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;covariance-contravariance...</a>I can also testify as someone who uses Scala on a day to day basis and used C# at work as well - I completely understand your statement, although it&#x27;s very subjective.

+1 as a Scala fanatic :) It&#x27;s all about what works for you though.

Yes, that&#x27;s why you would use F# in .NET if you want something like Scala. And then I heard many people say that .NET wins again.

Doesn&#x27;t Scala run on the JVM, and isn&#x27;t this announcement about porting the .Net runtime? And you&#x27;re really drawing this comparison?

I went from scala to C# 7 years ago, and after some feature withdrawal, I began to like C# for its simplicity. It was not very elegant, I often had to settle for ugly solutions, but this was actually a step up from scala where I would obsess to find the most elegant solution for my code. In C#, the best way is more obvious even if not that good, and you settle more quickly.As the language is considered holistically with tooling, the error messages are always good and they don&#x27;t make dubious decisions (getting rid of semi colons) that are theoretically sound but screw up tooling.

Why would you compare C# (although they keep adding functional programming concepts to it) to Scala, instead of comparing F# (which can commingle with C# wherever you need it) with Scala?I haven&#x27;t looked into F# or Scala too much, but I bet F# comes out looking far better, because it was so deeply inspired by Haskell (but made practical).

&gt; C# as a language is better than Java, but not as good as Scala.However Scala is not a first class citzen in the JVM, but C# is the systems language of the CLR, already a huge difference.

C# as a language is better than Java, but not as good as Scala.

Generics, Partial Classes, awesome Reflection API, Lambda syntax, LINQ, C&#x2F;C++ compatibility, async&#x2F;await, concurrency primitives, etc.I have worked with prettier languages, for instance I have picked up Haskell recently, I have also worked with faster languages, C was my forte for many years and I have worked with languages in the GSD category like Ruby and Python.C# is appealing not because of some feature that it has that other languages don&#x27;t. But rather the long list of things they didn&#x27;t fuck up. For instance by building concurrency and evented programming semantics into the core there isn&#x27;t multiple competing event loops for instance. (unlike say Python or Ruby which have about 5 each, Java has more than I can count).It&#x27;s not so much there is one single thing that makes C# really nice, it&#x27;s the whole package.

What languages have you got experience with that you feel C# is the best language you have worked with?And what makes it such a good language for you?

I&#x27;m not so sure I believe that they&#x27;re trying to do a &quot;nice thing&quot; out of the goodness of their hearts. They&#x27;ve held pretty tightly to .NET because in order to deploy anything developed in .NET you needed to buy Windows licenses. Recently that hasn&#x27;t played out so well. Software developers look to minimize costs and overhead that doesn&#x27;t contribute to their mission (e.g. licenses and license compliance). There&#x27;s just zero reason to pay for operating systems in 2014 when there are such capable free alternatives.So if people won&#x27;t pay for operating systems what will they pay for? Stuff that still costs them money, i.e. hardware infrastructure and attendant maintenance and administration. Hello cloud. Development shops are happily sending Amazon millions of dollars a month so they don&#x27;t have to buy servers, set up server rooms, hire system administrators, and worry about things like air conditioning, big UPS systems and emergency power generators, etc.Alongside Amazon, Microsoft is doing pretty well with Azure. And you can run free operating systems on Azure, and .NET is already well supported on Azure. So what will sell more Azure? Make .NET run on the free operating systems. Now all the developers who like the free OSs on their personal dev systems are suddenly able to develop stuff they can deploy on Azure. What about all the devs that like Macs? No problem, make .NET run on Mac OS X as well.I think this is all about making Azure services more compelling and more able to compete with Amazon than it is wanting to do &quot;nice things&quot; for the open source community.

While I do think this move is a valiant one, I don&#x27;t believe that it will, in and of itself, build better practices and help Microsoft build better software. Open source is very hard to do right, and if you&#x27;re a company that doesn&#x27;t have open source in their DNA it could pose a huge challenge to building positive relationships with your developer community. If you&#x27;re a big corporation like Microsoft, you have tons of people with their eyes on you at all times. Everyone can read and criticize your code.Also, being open source means being open and transparent about release cycles and roadmaps, which takes a lot of effort and initiative. I do think Microsoft can do that if they build a solid team of technical community evangelists, but otherwise, they will be swimming against the stream.

The power of OSS is often overstated when it comes to writing user friendly software and the sorry state of the *nix GUIs, where setting up a multi motor setup like you do in Windows 98 is still a few years away. The reality is that best practices often conflict with the need to ship resulting is wasted time refactoring, and redesigning.

Microsoft has been playing catch-up on developing that &quot;nice things&quot; like trying to build an open-source community. NuGet, open-sourcing the ASP.Net and EF stacks, etc. A long way to go, but they&#x27;ve recognized their big failing and are moving on it.MS makes some great technology and some terrible tech... but the problem is the terrible tech gets the same blessing as the great tech. An open-source community is the best way to develop best practices and properly replace their false-steps.

THIS +1.I feel that people need to feel and experience both side end-to-end deep in the bowel to be able to judge Java&#x2F;C# because it&#x27;s more than just the language; it&#x27;s everything! IDE, Tools, Libraries, Environments, etc.

Thank you for summing it all up, so well. C# has a language has so much stuff built into itself. When we work with java we have to take help from frameworks such as Spring etc .

Similar situation. I deal with Unix&#x2F;windows approximately 50&#x2F;50 from a devops perspective. My word I&#x27;ll also take anything Unix over windows at the moment regardless of the tech. To be fair in the short term, windows is maximally productive but if you hit an edge case or a rough spot you&#x27;re SOL, especially if it involves Microsoft support or scripting. Rough edges cost me a lot of money and willpower.An example: I opened a case when IE9 was in developer preview with partner support. When they rewrote the download manager in IE for this release they changed how download prompting worked and removed a setting from the UI (and left it in the registry). This broke ClickOnce launches entirely for over 2000 users for us. Fast forward nearly 5 years and it&#x27;s still broken, the case is still open and to get everything to work for the client we have to frig a registry setting on every workstation they roll out. That sucks for us and the client, badly.This is a typical story for us. When you deal with VSTO, MSI packaging, managing large clusters of windows server machines, random bugs that just blow up in your face suddenly after working for years, signing code, trying to get repeatable builds out of a CLR solution and automating all of these things, forget it. PowerShell gets you 80% of the way there but the last 20% is a tar pit of pain and impossibility.Now I&#x27;ve been in the Microsoft ecosystem for 20 years, certified and bought into it all. Perhaps I&#x27;m bitter and tired but I can&#x27;t see past all this experience and have mixed memories of c#. All I see is hung instances of visual studio and working out which project file is buggered and all this is destroying the best language I ever used. I don&#x27;t want to waste my life on giving them another chance.There is literally none of the above on Unix platforms from experience. I&#x27;ve only encountered one bug in the last 15 years due to a CIFS kernel bug and RH fixed it within two days. I haven&#x27;t had any automation friction at all.I&#x27;m worn out and confused to be honest when I read back this post.

I&#x27;ve been using c# since beta and I love it but agree that IIS is a cluster fuck, and working with msbuild is no picnic, and supporting windows services is macabre at best. 
There are efforts to ease the pain with projects such as a topshelf&#x2F;katana (owin) 
<a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn745865.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;dn745865.aspx</a>so MS is aware that this process should be more light weight for many situations, and appears to head in the direction of node.js type hosting for times when you don&#x27;t need all the IIS features.

I actually have this conversation frequently with my developers (most of them are .NET), so I&#x27;m really happy to hear someone else say this as well. I&#x27;ve done about a an even split in my career with C# and Java and feel as competent as the next guy bouncing between the two languages and delivering projects for clients, but I like writing C# the most, by far. The language is more modern, things like async&#x2F;await, Linq, and Entity Framework make developing Java web apps drudgery in comparison. Spring does a lot to help (Spring Boot is great), but there&#x27;s a lot of rolling your own and helping less senior developers figure out how to even START at Java WebApp project.But when it comes to automating my build process, doing continuous testing and deployment, setting up a environments in containers, or just where I&#x27;d rather spend most of my time operating- I&#x27;ll take *nix and Java all day over IIS&#x2F;Windows server. No thank you, the only Windows I have in my house is a VM for using Visual Studio and writing C# web apps on the occasion I need to for personal stuff.I will be truly happy when I can write C# code and deploy to something like Tomcat. I will never again go back to Java when that day comes.

I think you&#x27;re in a niche avoiding Microsoft technologies. It isn&#x27;t so much as Microsoft opening up to the world (which is true to some extent) as embracing the smaller market shares of Linux + Mac OS. Windows market share is colossal, and C# is a big thing in Windows land, even more important than C++.

&gt; Java should be more like GroovyIt has been since lambdas were introduced in Java 8. Groovy&#x27;s original design by its creator James Strachan was about adding closures to the dynamic typing that Beanshell had at the time. The stuff added to Groovy since then (e.g. the MOP for Grails, DSL syntax, static typing in 2.0) are things Java already does better or things (if you ask me) it shouldn&#x27;t do.

This is my impression too. I&#x27;m not terribly familiar with C#, and used to avoid anything from Microsoft like the plague, but a lot of stuff I hear about C# sounds like it&#x27;s a bit ahead of Java. (Really, Java should be more like Groovy, if you ask me.)But the JVM platform is great, and I&#x27;m just not going to get locked into a MS ecosystem. But if MS opens up to the rest of the world, well, that changes things considerably.

I&#x27;m so onboard with what you&#x27;re saying. I&#x27;ve been using mono for the last couple years, so much so that I call myself a &quot;mono developer&quot; and not a &quot;.NET developer&quot;.I worked at Microsoft for a couple years and I could already smell this brewing. The devs I respected the most were also the most unhappy with the platform tie-in. This is a desperately needed political shift for the organization, and I think it will actually boost morale as well.

I&#x27;m a hardcore *nix guy but boy do I love me some C#. Up until now it&#x27;s been the best language I have worked with but the worst platform due to it&#x27;s lack of &#x27;nice things&#x27; that we just expect from languages&#x2F;ecosystems these days.Where &#x27;nice things&#x27; is defined as being open-source, having open-source ecosystem of developer tools etc.This isn&#x27;t so much the beginning (as good stuff has been happening for a couple of years now) but it&#x27;s a huge step.Thankyou Microsoft.

reading that tweet brought back feeling of the whole Rails, Merb merge. Awesome to hear!

Apparently the .NET runtime and Mono will merge:<a href="https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/532558786486370304" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;shanselman&#x2F;status&#x2F;532558786486370304</a>

&quot;We are open sourcing the RiyuJit and the .NET GC and making them both cross-platform.&quot;That&#x27;s incredible!

This is massive.  I love the C# language, and hopefully this will lead to wider adoption, and usage on more architectures&#x2F;operating systems.

This is pretty cool. Java (the platform) is finally getting a much needed competitor and alternative. And a VM that was built from scratch to support multiple languages.The next decade will be interesting.

I&#x27;ve updated the link. Does it work better now?Btw, if you copy the original link into the Google search field, you get a search result with the page, and then you can just view the cached version by clicking on the small green arrow at the right side of the URL.

This cache link gives me a 404 :( and the actual link is not working as well.

Google cache link: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETasOpenSourceNETonMacandLinuxandVisualStudioCommunity.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;...</a>

Honest question from an outsider: it looks like Epic and Crytek have finally gotten around to moving in to the &quot;low-end&quot; of the game engine market. What&#x27;s still unique about unity?

I hope not, this way we will see a bit more of healthy competition in the indie game engine space. This is something Unity desperately needs.

I hope this positively affects projects using outdated versions of Mono, like Unity. I&#x27;d love to see them move to a more up-to-date version of .NET, and I wonder if this could enable them to do that.

It will be interesting to see how this works out, and how many resources are put behind it. If it does allow developers to choose to work on Linux&#x2F;Mac for .NET development, it will put a lot of pressure on Windows to create a great product.

Policy is made at the top. I can&#x27;t imagine this happening under Ballmer, though I agree with you that others (Miguel for one) have a lot to do with this.

Don&#x27;t forget Scott Hanselman... I don&#x27;t think this all would have been possible without any of these persons though. They all deserve some respects.. Even the ones who aren&#x27;t always visible or the ones who already left Microsoft ( Eg. Phil Haack has made the switch to Github probably because of his opensource work in Microsoft)They started opensource within Microsoft under Ballmer, so he deserves some respect to. But i&#x27;m sure Nadella is making more room for improvement and betting more &quot;all-in&quot;I just know some people at Microsoft use *nix tools all the time, Asp.Net MVC took over some awesome RoR features, they integrated NodeJS, LocalDB is the alternative for SQLLite and etc...Microsoft does everything it can to integrate good features and they won&#x27;t go away anytime soon. They also have the best compatibility in any programming language i know (with .Net) to be a safe bet for businesses...Hell, even VB6 still works (any Windows Server and a RDP connection) and that has been released in 1998 =&gt; 16 years ago!

I am sure Nadella deserves credit, but I think the real genius behind this is ScottGu. Whoever it is, its a welcome change.

- Stacker- Netscape- SCOAnd many others besides.Companies have reputations just like people do (that&#x27;s why we call them &#x27;incorporated&#x27;) and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation.This is not about Microsoft just doing &#x27;stupid stuff sometimes&#x27; it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in the world. Your silly linked blog post by a Microsoft employee tries to wipe all that under the carpet. For the record, I&#x27;m not exactly 25, used to be a MS developer and user and have decided that their ethics are not fit for my taste, feel free to disagree.

I like Hanselman&#x27;s blog a lot, but I found that post pretty disappointing. The reason there are a lot of people running around saying &quot;Microsoft killed my pappy!&quot; is because Microsoft actually did kill a lot of people&#x27;s pappies, back in the day.When someone comes into town and shoots your pappy, it&#x27;s not something you forget or forgive easily. The burden is on Microsoft to prove that they&#x27;re not the same company as they were back then, not on the people they wronged to get over it.

I&#x27;ve also been pretty unforgiving about things that Microsoft did in the past to crush competing web browsers, competing standards like OpenGL or ODF, Linux or open-source in general. And sorry, but I do not agree with that article by Hanselman.Thing is, I treat companies like I treat people. Legally speaking, isn&#x27;t that what they want, in the US anyway? So if you violate my trust, it&#x27;s goodbye until I see serious amends being made.However I must say that with this move I&#x27;m finally ready to forgive Microsoft. I&#x27;ve always seen .NET as a platform created for achieving lock-in with Windows, the ECMA standard (while better than Java&#x27;s JCP, which is a farce) I&#x27;ve seen as an attempt to paint a turd and Mono, while a wonderful effort, I&#x27;ve never seen as good enough. Open-sourcing .NET is a wonderful move, because now we&#x27;ve got a credible alternative to the JVM and this move couldn&#x27;t come with better timing, given the dickish moves by Sun&#x2F;Oracle against Apache Harmony and Android&#x27;s Dalvik &#x2F; ART.And don&#x27;t get me wrong, compared to other people I do not have double standards in this regard. I&#x27;ve been a Google fanboy for years, but my eyes are wide open now and I&#x27;m making moves to escape their lock-in ;-)

Sometimes is justified, never say never, but it will take short of a miracle for me to trust Internet Explorer in any way, shape or form after setting back the Open Web for years (I know that IE 11 is way better, but to little, to late)Now saying that, I think that an Open Source .NET stack is a wonderful thing! I like C# a lot.

No one else seems to be complaining about it, so it may just be me:Your link just drops me at the front page of his blog. Searching for it through Google leads to a result, but clicking on that link also takes me to the front page. Is there a mirror?

The post says Microsoft was convicted of anti-trust for &quot;for bundling a browser in the operating system that couldn&#x27;t be uninstalled or easily replaced.&quot;That is not true. Microsoft was convicted because they told 3rd party computer manufacturers that they could not purchase Windows if they intended to install any additional browsers. Not only is that illegal, but it demonstrably harmed innovation in web browsers for years.I don&#x27;t believe Microsoft killed my pappy, and I use MS software every single day. But I also don&#x27;t believe in minimizing or misrepresenting the facts of the past.

Hanselman is suggesting that we should just say Aww, shucks! and give Microsoft a big hug?He has so completely missed the deadly point that he&#x27;s accidentally echoed it in his own post: Tons of people feel that Microsoft killed their Pappy.Nadella&#x27;s actions tell me one thing: the free software movement has threatened their bottom line.This is not the time to back down, it&#x27;s not the time to forgive and forget.This is the time to review the Halloween Documents!

<a href="http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-senior-leaders/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.microsoft.com&#x2F;microsoft-senior-leaders&#x2F;</a>How many of the &quot;non-criminal new microsoft generation&quot; do you see there? My guesstimate: 33%

<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281319" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7281319</a>This is partly what inspired me to write a wishlist for Satya in the first place.

Many people who hate Microsoft do it as a pavlonian response to years upon years of fighting against crappy Microsoft products. People who&#x27;d like to spend 90% of their time creating instead spend 25% creating, 30% watering it down enough to be easily &quot;cross platform&quot;, and 45% of their time figuring out why-the-fuck-it-doesn&#x27;t-work-in-Internet-Explorer. This is the same browser where merely calling console.log threw an error until surprisingly recently.I met a bunch of the IE folks at CES 2012, and I honestly believe their trying to be better web citizens. They are still slower than I&#x27;d like, but IE isn&#x27;t quite terrible anymore. I have friends who work at various browser vendors, and I don&#x27;t sense any lingering ill-will towards IE.That said, I certainly understand why some people are slow to get excited about Microsoft. You don&#x27;t have to be middle-aged to have personally experienced the bad side of Microsoft.

From that post, interesting foreshadowing discussion on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181029" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7181029</a>

The modern pappies are Microsoft own technologies. You invest heavily in them, and then they are abandoned.I seem to remember they even tried to make obsolete the Win32 API. Their strongest asset.

Seeing comments like this “I&#x27;ll never switch back to MS for what they&#x27;ve done in the past” always reminds me of this post from Hanselman <a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx</a>

It&#x27;s hard to imagine something this big could have been planned and executed within 9 months. There&#x27;s no doubt that Nadella is moving things in the right direction, but some of these plans must have started taking shape before he took over.

&gt; I&#x27;m not sure what they&#x27;ve done to receive such hatred.Hatred?I simply decide not to buy into a certain company&#x27;s products and services because I recall some misdeeds from the past and that&#x27;s equal to hatred?As for what they have done, I thought Microsofts history was chronicled enough that it doesn&#x27;t need repetition, especially not on a website for &#x27;hackers&#x27;.But if you need pointers, you can go visit groklaw.net (if it is still up) to read about SCO and Linux, you can read up on the Stacker case and you can try to figure out why Microsoft ended up in court over IE and a long list of other not so nice things they did in the past.

&gt; They are just a technology company and are trying to sell the product.If you reword things enough, nothing makes sense. For example:&quot;I don&#x27;t see why Stalin receives such hatred. He was just a politician, and tried to stay in power so he could keep following his vision.&quot;

It is not hatred, decades more of experience. Throughout the 90&#x27;s and early 2000&#x27;s Microsoft abused their monopoly position to the detriment of many. Open source options were much more limited then than now. The only reason Microsoft is changing now is that they have no choice.

&gt;I&#x27;ll never switch back to MS for what they&#x27;ve done in the pastI&#x27;m not sure what they&#x27;ve done to receive such hatred. They are just a technology company and are trying to sell the product.

Yes, it makes perfect sense. Maybe not to you but it does to me. See, if in the future some other CEO sees an opportunity to screw over a competitor, to try to destroy a viable eco-system based on open source tech or to destroy a company just because they can they may remember the case of Microsoft, and maybe that will steer them in the right direction.I wish Microsoft the very best but I want no part of it and I&#x27;m totally free in making that decision based on their past behavior. Microsoft has had their chance with me, I probably developed as much or more code for the windows platform as I did for other platforms but right now I would consider myself pretty silly if I switched back to MS just because they may have changed their ways and deserve another chance. Those are not lightly made decisions, there is a huge amount of time and effort invested and I already switched once because of their behavior.That said there is enough going on in the present that makes me wonder just how much they have really changed, they&#x27;re still dragging their heels post judgement in several court cases where they have been ordered to start cooperating and have pulled a substantial number of annoying tricks in the recent past.Never mind the &#x27;microsoft tax&#x27; (which I paid on this machine even though it never ran MS software for even a single cycle) and so on. So yes, it makes perfect sense.

You can understand and even state that these changes are a consequence of a new CEO that has different ideas and behavior compared to previous CEOs. And you even &quot;blame&quot; by describing the previous CEO as a &quot;madman&quot; but still don&#x27;t want to give Microsoft a chance because at one point in time some previous higher-up made a decision with which you did not agree. Makes PERFECT SENSE!

There is a way. Their source may have been well organized and license problems known already.

That might not be true at all. Open sourcing something like .NET is not trivial but it certainly is not a 9 month job. It could well be started within Satya&#x27;s time.

Satya was holding the head of Cloud &amp; Enterprise division, which has .NET and Developer Division within. He may have been preparing&#x2F;planning for this long before he was appointed as well.

The process to open source .NET would have almost certainly started before Nadella became CEO.There&#x27;s no way they decided to release the source and have it ready within 9 months.

companies have to support people (customers, developers), not the other way around.

&gt;I&#x27;ll never switch back to MS for what they&#x27;ve done in the pastI wish more people were open to admit things like that. It would greatly reduce the time I&#x27;ve spent the last few months arguing over products and technologies with people who keep the fact that they don&#x27;t hate the product&#x27;s quality directly but indirectly, given that it was made by a company they don&#x27;t support anymore.

&gt; it is nice to see them try hard to become a nicer player in the software eco-systemThey&#x27;re just trying some desperate measures to stay relevant. You already know MS is institutionally evil.

Actually I though my initial comment was quite nice and reasonable. I&#x27;m genuinely happy that MS chose to opensource this code and I really hope that they will continue down this path. So no, I don&#x27;t dislike them that much (no more than Apple or Facebook), I just won&#x27;t use their products.

The wolf hasn&#x27;t even finished zipping up the crude sheepskin costume and folks are announcing their plans to go visit it.  It&#x27;s alarming! :&#x2F;

I&#x27;m not sure if there is any topic I am passionate enough about to post 22+ comments on a single HN news story about.You must really, really dislike Microsoft.

Do you honestly think this initiative began under Nadella? Open-sourcing any code at a behemoth the size of MS is a glacial process, and I can guarantee that so much code would not have been open-sourced from scratch in 9 months.&gt; I&#x27;ll never switch back to MS for what they&#x27;ve done in the past...I know people have their pet peeves, but IMO, opinions are better based on empiricism and data are than in infinitely repeated anecdotes:<a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498</a>(Spoiler: it follows Betteridge&#x27;s law. Disclaimer: it was published in 2001, so it does not account for any shenanigans post-2000.)

It&#x27;s funny how Nadella has moved the needle more for developers in 9 months than Ballmer did in the last decade or so, and all that without running around like a madman too. Pretty good. I&#x27;ll never switch back to MS for what they&#x27;ve done in the past but it is nice to see them try hard to become a nicer player in the software eco-system.Google and Apple need some other party to keep them sharp, it might as well be MS.

Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform