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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

#371

Post by bad_user »

pjc50 wrote: post #138

The politics of this are interesting, and IMO related to the decline of the PC as a platform. Suddenly Microsoft is the outsider crying for "openness" and "freedom" while hammering on the gates of the Google/Apple ecosystem. For Microsoft, it's less bad if everyone switches to an uncontrolled platform than if they switch to a platform locked in by a competitor. The embrace/extend/extinguish logic works the other way…

The decline of the PC as a platform are greatly exaggerated. The only thing that happens is that upgrade cycles have gotten longer because PCs in use are good enough, the operating systems are good enough as well, so people don't feel the need to buy new ones every one or two years. I've got a 4-year old laptop. I only had to replace its battery, still works fine. Meanwhile I've got an iPad and an Android tablet (received as a gift) and both are gathering dust. What do you know, tablets are declining - too big to fit in your pocket, too small to do anything productive.

If anything, Microsoft was hurt to get on this bandwagon in the first place. I guess they had to, too bad that they followed the Windows/iOS model, instead of following the Android one. If they would have released Windows Phone as an open-source platform, maybe they would've had a chance.

But I digress - there's a lot of opportunity to improve desktop operating systems. Too bad that Microsoft decided to release a desktop / tablet hybrid. What a dumb idea that was.

> For Microsoft, it's less bad if everyone switches to an uncontrolled platform than if they switch to a platform locked in by a competitor.

Exactly, these companies want openness only as long as they are the underdogs. Check out what happens with Google - broken IMAP in Gmail, broken CalDav in Calendar, dropped Exchange support, dropped XMMP support in Hangouts, PNaCL as their own version of ActiveX, Drive still does not have a Linux client, etc...

> [Apple has] done fairly well at killing off Flash, and Silverlight never stood a chance in this environment

Well, I'm actually glad that they did that, because it encouraged open standards to emerge. It would have never happened if Flash survived the mobile world. No, my pet peeve with Apple is that their App Store policy prevents Firefox from happening on iOS. And that's not what I consider a platform I can build on or an operating system I can use.

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

#372

Post by [deleted] »

colbyh wrote: post #295

Microsoft people correct me if I'm wrong - but this feels like a decision Ballmer never would have let pass? This feels huge to me as someone that has always been on *nix variants but that has been told the .Net environment is amazing as long as you're willing to pay/work on Windows. I still probably won't switch over to C# or F# any time soon but it's good to know I could actually work on a WinMo app if needed.

[deleted]

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

#373

Post by Scuds »

virmundi wrote: post #349
JeremyMorgan wrote: post #224

I feel like the last couple years I've been cheerleading for MS and telling people how much they've changed, how open things are becoming, and how awesome the development experience is. It's fallen on deaf ears or met with resistance, but today's announcements are really gonna drive the point home. Developers need to start looking more seriously at C#/.Net. The Scotts (Hanselman/Guthrie), Miguel De Icaza and so many…

Until MS makes VS 20XX Professional cross-platform and free, I don't think they'll get much traction. I gave the a shot when I still used Windows via the Express editions. The fact that I had to jump between 3 editors to do anything and still didn't get NUnit integration is ridiculous. Many languages can use the Eclipse, IntelliJ or Netbeans platform. The JVM provides a true multi-platform target as a first class ide…

From: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETAsOpenSour...

"There is a new FREE SKU for Visual Studio for open source developers and students called Visual Studio Community. It supports extensions and lots more all in one download. This is not Express. This is basically Pro."

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

#374

Post by shmerl »

aerique wrote: post #311
JeremyMorgan wrote: post #224

I feel like the last couple years I've been cheerleading for MS and telling people how much they've changed, how open things are becoming, and how awesome the development experience is. It's fallen on deaf ears or met with resistance, but today's announcements are really gonna drive the point home. Developers need to start looking more seriously at C#/.Net. The Scotts (Hanselman/Guthrie), Miguel De Icaza and so many…

Too little, too late IMHO. Also MS has always come across as very opportunistic, giving the impression they will drop support for this if it serves them better.

That's my feeling as well. No amount of opening stuff can fix their reputation at this stage. Unless they'll completely drop all their crooked practices, which is not likely.

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

#375

Post by tree_of_item »

jbooth wrote: post #342
psibi wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> majority of features in scala and Haskell for that matter are fundamentally misguided I'm interested in the Haskell part. What features do you think are fundamentally misguided ?

I'm much less experienced with Haskell than with Scala, so I might be unfairly painting it with the same brush here. But, for example, https://www.haskell.org/tutorial/io.html . At the end of the day, this is a huge inner-framework anti-pattern over the same procedural syscalls that every other language handles procedurally. I shouldn't have to care what a monad is, and side effects? The whole point of I/O is side ef…

I don't think they are acknowledging any impedance mismatch there. The point of that paragraph is to emphasize that Haskell retains the usual feel of imperative programming, with the important difference that the imperative bits of your code are cleanly separated from the pure bits due to the IO type.

There's no theoretical stuff here, it's just making sure that the caller knows about callees having side effects.

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

#376

Post by felixrieseberg »

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?

Microsoft person here, all these things you're seeing today have been coming for a while - they always 'felt' right, but with an org of our size and history, you always have to consider every possible scenario. I'm super excited that people here are bold enough to increase speed here. We're all pretty excited :)

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

#377

Post by squeaky-clean »

wanda wrote: post #190
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #42

The key points seem to be: "Available Wednesday, Visual Studio Community 2013 is a free, fully featured edition of Visual Studio including full extensibility." So, it sounds like this will replace the Express edition and let you install extensions like you can in the Pro version. "Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015: build for any device - Built from the ground up with support for iOS, Android and Windows, Visual Studio…

http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-... "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…

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't happen, because that's the only worthwhile reason to purchase their Business subscription (and the whole >5 employees clause).

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

#378

Post by pjmlp »

Touche wrote: post #369
pjmlp wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suddenly Microsoft is the outsider crying for "openness" and "freedom" while hammering on the gates of the Google/Apple ecosystem. Just like Apple. Apple only became open source friend after being acquired by NeXT (this is actually what happened inside). The old Apple from the Mac OS 1 - 9 days was anything but open.

I'm skeptical that Apple is currently very open source friendly. I'd like to see some statistics of what % of their software products are open source (including libraries and tooling of course) compared to other companies. I'd like to see what % of their open source products were built from scratch by Apple (not through acquisitions/hiring like with LLVM).

I agree with you.

Some people just label it as open source due to LLVM, Webkit and everything else posted at https://opensource.apple.com/

While forgetting that is a tiny part of the whole eco-system.

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

#379

Post by aggronn »

codeshaman wrote: post #230
potatolicious wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem like a mobile play at all, honestly. They're opening the core, and large portions of the web server stack. This points to it being a play for web development, not native mobile. There are some additional integrations with Xamarin - but Xamarin isn't owned by MS nor is it the key highlight of today's announcements.

I should have read TFA before commenting :) But that is even more puzzling. The backend space is so crowded with native, scripting and exotic languages, that I really don't see how they can attract hardcore c/c++/go/node.js/python/ruby/perl/php/erlang/haskell/lisp or Java crowds to .NET. Maybe it's exciting for existing .net developers to be able to deploy their backend apps on linux servers.

You could have said the same thing about several of the languages you listed, even within the last 5 years. The difference here is that C# already has a massive userbase.

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

#380

Post by bigdubs »

rikkus wrote: post #126
bigdubs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are servers / daemons not a common usecase? Most, if not all, of the apps I write on a daily basis do not have GUI.
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