Microsoft plans to open source .NET

Nov. 17, 2014 - PRLog -- Delivering on its promise to support cross-platform development, Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac and Linux. Through this implementation, Microsoft will work closely with the open source community, taking contributions for future improvements to .NET and will work through the .NET Foundation.

Microsoft will port the core server-side .NET runtime so that it runs across Windows, Linux and the Mac. This will allow developers to build ASP.NET 5.0 applications that can be deployed and run on all before mentioned environments.

Microsoft plans to use GitHub for hosting the core framework porting and open-sourcing work. What exactly the final version will look like still remains an issue, but Somasegar hopes that it will be able to get run a .NET app in a Docker container in Linux on Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft's next-generation server-side Web-development framework, ASP.NET 5.0, already has been shown running on Linux and OS X.

The company plans to work with the Xamarin-sponsored Mono community, which already produces a cross-platform open source .NET framework based on C#. Microsoft and Xamarin are announcing a new "streamlined experience" for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio, as well as the addition of Visual Studio support to Xamarin's free Xamarin Starter Edition product.

However, Microsoft is not planning to open source the client side .NET stack, which means certain libraries like the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Forms will remain proprietary.

- See more interesting news at: http://itechcraft.com/blog