If you told me, even one year ago, that Microsoft would begin open sourcing as much technology as they do right now, I would have flat out said “No”.Today at Connect() developer event, Microsoft announced that we’d open source the .NET core. Scott Hanselman explains it best on his blog.
Scott Guthrie has more info on his blog about open sourcing the .NET core:
Earlier this year, at the Build 2014 conference, I announced the creation of the .NET Foundation – which is an independent organization designed to foster the development and collaboration of open source technologies for .NET. We have now open sourced ASP.NET, EF, Web API, NuGet and the “Roslyn” C# and VB compilers under it.
…Will be open sourcing the .NET Core Runtime. This will include everything needed to execute .NET code – including the CLR, Just-In-Time Compiler (JIT), Garbage Collector (GC), and core .NET base class libraries.
We are releasing the source under the MIT open source license and are also issuing an explicit patent promise to clarify users patent rights to .NET.
So what does it mean as a dev?
Today’s open source announcement means that developers will have a fully supported, fully open source, fully cross platform .NET stack for creating server and cloud applications.
And for gaming?
While this is largely for the server side community at the moment, it’s comforting to know that there is potential for this to head to the gaming side of things, and the possibility of having a cross platform C# gaming framework (MonoGame). I don’t have any sort of information on this now, but I’d love to see it happen!
They are also working with the Mono community to bring all of this to Linux as well, so that you can run .NET server and cloud apps there, as well as OSX.
Resources
- You can find the .NET GitHub page here.
- Microsoft also has a GitHub page
- For all of the open source projects that we’er working on. You can find things like TypeScript (statically typed JavaScript), WinJS (HTML5 framework for Windows, Win Phone, and Xbox One), or SignalR (Real-time web functionality for web apps, including server-side push).
@DaveVoyles
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