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Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

news.microsoft.com

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

#32

Post by Someone1234 »

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 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/libraries are very Windows locked. So much so you'd almost have to scrap them and start over to make it more platform agnostic.

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

#34

Post by jobu »

simonmales wrote: post #10

No mention of which license they are using?

.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: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETasOpenSour...

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

#35

Post by mindstab »

archagon wrote: post #18
methyl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

"To further support cross-platform mobile development with .NET, as part of their strategic partnership, Microsoft and Xamarin..."

I would be pretty shocked if MS just suddenly dropped their won linux/mac implementation. Xamarin and the mono team have been working on this for a very long time. MS is just bringing them further into the "legit" fold

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

#36

Post by atwebb »

cwyers wrote: post #9

"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." Well that should make a lot of people around here happy.

Nope, now I don'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.

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

#37

Post by viraptor »

jxf wrote: post #20
archagon wrote: post #7

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

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

They say open source, but not which license they'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.
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