Microsoft .NET is Open for Every Developer

Microsoft delivered on their commitment to supporting cross-platform developer experiences and have begun open sourcing the full server-side .NET core stack. The multi-billion dollar company is hardly known for open sourcing any of their products, so the news may be a shock to some. However, ASP.NET and the C# compiler have already been open sourced so the announcement isn’t all that surprising. This release is mostly about open sourcing the remaining Core .NET framework. During the next few months, the open source .NET will be expanding in order to support cross-platform integration with Linux and Mac OS X in addition to Windows.

Developers generally seemed to appreciate what .NET offers but some may have shied away from the fact it was closed-source and only supported on Windows. Now that Microsoft is addressing these concerns, they believe developers won’t have any reasons not to use their .NET framework. This should be true since people enjoy being able to work freely and without any restrictions. Removing these limitations seems to be a good decision by Microsoft since it will open up possibilities that weren’t always available before.

Visual Studio Community 2013, also released along with the announcement, which is a new free edition of Visual Studio which will include access to the Visual Studio core toolset and supports full Visual Studio extensibility. This edition of Visual Studio will let developers target any platform from desktop and mobile to web and cloud. The support for Visual Studio extensibility also offers access to an ecosystem of over 5000 extensions. Along with access to Visual Studio extensibility, extension authors will have some more opportunities to create new tools and experiences on top of the Visual Studio platform.

Open sourcing a project often carries the perception of a company giving up and throwing it away. On the contrary, Microsoft believes that this will be the path toward giving .NET a broader platform to work with. For more information about this announcement and a Q&A by Somasegar, check it out here. 

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