Microsoft open-sources .NET framework and offers Visual Studio Community 2013 for free

Thank you Satya Nadella. XD

Microsoft has been swiftly moving towards being a more open company. For example, when CEO Satya Nadella told the audience at the Windows 10 preview event that Microsoft loves Linux, it wasn’t a surprise, but rather a bold statement for a company that at one point saw Linux as a threat to its business.

Now the company has announced that it will be open-sourcing its full server-side .NET stack and making it available for use on Linux and OS X systems, in addition to Windows. Now developers can use the .NET framework on three of the largest operating systems on the planet. Plus, Visual Studio Community 2013 is now available for free.

To achieve this, the company has been working closely with the Mono community. The community has been working to port the .NET framework to an open standard and now it has the backing of the creator of .NET.

Microsoft launched .NET 12 years ago and six million developers currently use the framework. Today’s news expands the reach of that framework by allowing developers to build their apps across the three largest operating systems on the planet, with a common code base.

Visual Studio Community 2013 is being offered for free with the full extensibility. That includes the over 5,000 extensions available for Visual Studio.

Finally, like the Windows 10 preview, Microsoft is offering a Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview for download here.

Source: Microsoft Open-Sources .NET framework

Reference: Opening up Visual Studio and .NET to Every Developer, Any Application: .NET Server Core open source and cross platform, Visual Studio Community 2013 and preview of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 - Somasegar's blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

That's a cool and good thing.
Microsoft have earned tons of respects with this decision.

I guess this is a noob question, but help me out there.
What is .Net a language or IDE?
And what is use

.net is a framework you use to develop apps. Visual Studio is the IDE.

B

If only Nadella had been the CEO 10 years ago instead of that clown Ballmer, Java would have been wiped off the face of the earth by now!
Anyway, great to see the aggressive approaches being taken by Nadella and Pichai. Interesting times ahead!

Yeah heard this on Friday. Read about it on a blog.

It's one of the happiest moment for me. Because I love Open Source and always have a urge to do something on Linux. But because of .NET and VS I never liked any other language (like PHP, C etc.) except Python.

And developing on open source means mainly C / PHP / Python / Perl / Ruby. Now I hope I can work in Linux, I can develop apps for Android in .NET etc. etc.

krishnandu.sarkar said:
Yeah heard this on Friday. Read about it on a blog.

It's one of the happiest moment for me. Because I love Open Source and always have a urge to do something on Linux. But because of .NET and VS I never liked any other language (like PHP, C etc.) except Python.

And developing on open source means mainly C / PHP / Python / Perl / Ruby. Now I hope I can work in Linux, I can develop apps for Android in .NET etc. etc.

There already was a open source implementation of .net's CLR as Mono. Microsoft collaborated with the Mono team to make this possible.

This could be a true competition to Java.

- - - Updated - - -

Android apps in .net is not really possible unless Google makes some adds support for it. However, if you can make a .net based VM in Android's native SDK, you can then develop .net apps for it.

There is another view from here:

Summary: .NET is not “Open Source”, it cannot be forked (there remains patent threat), Visual Studio is still completely proprietary and it is expected to come to other platforms only because Windows has lost its dominance and Microsoft wants to perpetually control APIs (with software patents) and hence reign over developers
more ...

Debunking Several Days of Never-Ending Lies About Microsoft and .NET | Techrights

Why can't it be forked? It should be forkable if it's open source.

DeSmOnD dAvId said:
There already was a open source implementation of .net's CLR as Mono. Microsoft collaborated with the Mono team to make this possible.

Yeah I know Mono was already there for a long time. But it can't be considered for main stream production. For RnD it's fine, but for production it'd fail. So now Microsoft is collaborating with them, we can now expect something at production level.

This could be a true competition to Java.

Yeah specially due to VS. There's no IDE even close to VS. I know many Java fanboys says about Eclipse, Netbeans etc. But I have tried them, and I know it's nowhere close to VS.

Android apps in .net is not really possible unless Google makes some adds support for it. However, if you can make a .net based VM in Android's native SDK, you can then develop .net apps for it.

Possible. There is already Xamarin Studio out there. You can use C# to develop Android and iOS apps. But let's see what Microsoft does on that front.

But yeah I get your point, that it can't be on .NET. But it can be developed using C# atleast.

There's always Phonegap.

Also Eclipse is a pretty clunky IDE. There is always a chance that it will fail for any reason. But it is pretty modular.

DeSmOnD dAvId said:
There's always Phonegap.

Also Eclipse is a pretty clunky IDE. There is always a chance that it will fail for any reason. But it is pretty modular.

Phonegap is not at all recommended for heavy apps. For basic web based apps it's fine. But for CPU intensive tasks it's not at all recommended.

I have used Phonegap it lags like hell.

krishnandu.sarkar said:
Phonegap is not at all recommended for heavy apps. For basic web based apps it's fine. But for CPU intensive tasks it's not at all recommended.

I have used Phonegap it lags like hell.

It's slow but not that slow. In my project, we work on enterprise grade banking apps created with Phonegap.

Yeah heard that IBM use Phonegap with Sencha to create enterprise grade apps.