Microsoft opens .NET source code and makes it cross-platform

For more than 12 years, the .NET framework has been the main programming model for developers who want to build Windows applications. But in an attempt to make many of their development tools cross-platform, today Microsoft announced plans to migrate .NET to Mac and Linux and open most of the .NET server core (not the client part), starting with the next version.



S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of development, points out about 6 million developers who are building .NET applications today. “We were successful with this, but now the question is: how to develop .NET further? Microsoft has already opened the source code of the .NET compiler (Roslyn) earlier this year, so we are not new to this (even with many pundits who react and make their assessment when they hear the words "Microsoft" and "open source software" in one sentence. "



If you look at the recent history of Microsoft, today's announcement will not be a shock. At the Build conference, earlier this year, for example, Microsoft announced the creation of a “.NET Foundation” and that this organization will accompany this project.

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Not surprisingly, the company plans to work with the Xamarin sponsored community Mono, which is already creating a cross-platform .NET based on C #. “We announce this and then we take several months of working with the Mono community. We work closely with the guys from Xamarin. ”Somasegar told me.



The efforts to make .NET cross-platform go hand in hand with this announcement, argues Somasegar. “I think of this as the next big step for .NET,” he told me. Microsoft wants to provide .NET more support for different platforms and what will be better than bringing it to new platforms?



Microsoft's executive vice president of cloud platforms, Scott Guthrie, echoed that opinion when I spoke with him about this a few days ago. He noted that developers often tell Microsoft why they like .NET, but many do not use it because its source code is closed and it only supports Windows. “After Wednesday, all the reasons not to use it will disappear,” he told me.



Somasegar believes that this will open up many opportunities for Microsoft partners. In today's statement, for example, the head of Docker’s business development, Nick Stinemates, notes: “Central to an open Docker platform is the ability to port a program to any infrastructure using Docker containers. Delivering the open .NET engine to all major operating systems means that Microsoft is expanding the concept of portability to the software platform itself. "



Microsoft plans to create GitHub repositories with .NET code to start discussions. We will see how the final version will look exactly in the future, but Somasegar hopes that you will soon be able to run the .NET application in Docker containers on Linux in Microsoft Azure.



To protect developers, Microsoft today announced a patent agreement that will insure the Mono project and all those who use it.



Whenever a company opens the source code of a certain project, users often worry - does this mean that the company abandons this project? Somasegar and Guthrie emphasize that this is not the case at all.



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