Last update March 26, 2018 at 08:06 am
It's a big day for Microsoft and its developers: Microsoft has rolled out the core elements of its open-source, cross-platform .Net framework to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Microsoft is also adding android and iOS support in the upcoming visual studio 2015.
In fact, there is already an Android emulator in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, and iOS support will be added soon. Additionally, Microsoft is releasing a new version of Visual Studio - “Community 2013” - which is free and comprehensive. This is a bold move that will attempt to cement .Net, C #, and Visual Studio as the dominant development platform (perhaps) on Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and Mac. Open source didn't really make sense when Windows was the only OS that mattered, but today the rapid growth of Linux as a server platform, Android and iOS in the consumer space, has forced the application developers to take a stand… and Microsoft eventually followed suit. It's a lot of fun and even heartwarming to see that Microsoft who hated Linux and all that goes with it, positively embrace the penguin.
Anyway, today Microsoft is putting the .Net framework. You can download it (along with other open-source Microsoft goodies) at Github. Basically, before this event, you could only run .Net applications on Windows desktops and servers - you had to use a third-party runtime called Mono, if you wanted to run .NET on Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, or any other lesser-known operating systems. Mono makes a valiant effort, but we must admit the original .Net framework is far superior to Mono. Now, with .Net being open-source, these other platforms should all (soon) be able to run .Net applications perfectly. We can even say that soon .Net will be as useful as Oracle / Java from Sun Virtual Machine ...
Additionally, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2015 will be “built from the ground up with support for iOS, Android, and Windows” - rather than just Windows. Visual Studio 2015 pre-release already has a full Android emulator. I'm not sure what's in store for iOS, but probably Microsoft wants to offer an alternative route to Xcode and Objective-C / Swift with Visual Studio and. net / C #. Additionally, if you are a student or an open-source developer, Microsoft has also released a free and complete edition of Visual Studio, It's your turn.
With these releases, Microsoft is also making .Net development free - it's one thing to just dump tons of .Net code on Github and release it to the public, and another to listen to the community. and add new updates on a regular basis.
All in all, this is a great Microsoft event - but also a necessary strategy, if Microsoft is to remain in a world where the Windows fan club is no longer important than it once did. C #, .Net, and a myriad of other Microsoft developer tools are top notch. There will be a lot of excitement among iOS, OS X, Android and Linux developers today.
Source: http://www.extremetech.com
