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Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

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Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#121

Post by jacquesm »

click170 wrote: post #75
eyeareque wrote: post #5

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?

I'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're going back to step 2 or 1. I do not have faith that they won't try step 3 again later.

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

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#122

Post by untog »

This is amazing. But I really, really wish Microsoft would buy Xamarin. I know it sounds counter-productive - they're doing great work on their own - but the subscription costs associated with Xamarin hold it back. MS would have every motivation to release it for free to try to corner the app development market.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#123

Post by weavie »

wernercd wrote: post #79
weavie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iOS and Android part don't make sense to me. Surely you won't be running VS on your iPad? So are they saying it has support for compiling to iOS and Android? Wouldn't they need to mention Xamarin in that sentence for it to make sense?

I doubt the idea (at this point) is to "RUN" Visual Studio on iPad/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'd lose my mind if I could develop apps in Visual Studio and C# instead of having to use Java and pay $1000/year for Xamarin.

It would destroy Xamarin if they made it free to develop C# for iOS/Android.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#124

Post by Someone1234 »

megaman821 wrote: post #105
Someone1234 wrote: post #32

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're going to get very me…

I don'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.

> I don't think they are open sourcing the client libraries like WPF and Win Forms.

I didn't allude to that.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#125

Post by OWaz »

jacquesm wrote: post #77

It'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'll never switch back to MS for what they'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…

Seeing comments like this “I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past” always reminds me of this post from Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#126

Post by rikkus »

bigdubs wrote: post #93
shadowmint wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

System.Console isn't something that most apps rely on. It's handy for printing something out in a tiny one-file test app, but generally not relied upon for bigger apps.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#127

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

eyeareque wrote: post #5

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?

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Guthrie

And let's not forget thsi from Hanselman: "I've been here pushing open source and the open web for over 5 years and things are VERY different." http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#128

Post by stinos »

Slackwise wrote: post #53

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

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

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#129

Post by nas »

eyeareque wrote: post #5

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?

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.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#130

Post by megaman821 »

tomp wrote: post #49

I want to believe this, but I just don't. .NET is so much more than just the core libraries. There will be a long time until it'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/Linux and on Windows (i.e. the same executable, same as Java).

Microsoft doesn'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.
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