Microsoft is doing a lot of great things this year as the company aims to change its fortunes by adopting modern business ideology. Recently, the giant from Redmond announced that it is planning to release .NET Framework on both Linux and Mac, along with open sourcing aspects of the software.
For the past 12-years, .Net has been the de facto programming model for Windows, and that's not going to change anytime soon. With Microsoft making moves to make the development software available on both Linux and Mac, the company is ensuring that the platform has a healthy future.
Microsoft at the moment has over six million developers using .Net as their tool of choice. Furthermore, the Framework has been installed over 1.8 billion times, a pretty massive size. What this means is that with the .NET finally coming to both Linux and Mac, we can expect the amount of developers using the software to increase by the end of 2015.
"It's been over 12 years since we launched .NET and it's been wildly successful," S. 'Soma' Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, told eWEEK. "We have over six million developers building .NET applications ranging from mission-critical workloads in an enterprise to anything and everything else. Just in the last year, we've seen 1.8 billion installs of .NET."
What's the next move?
Well, it is all about open sourcing the server side aspect of the Framework. The end game here is to open-source every aspect of the software, but this will likely take a long time to come to fruition.
This isn't the first time Microsoft talked about open-sourcing .NET; we first heard about it at BUILD/ 2014, but we were not quite sure if the company was actually serious about going down this route.
What about Mono?
As some might have known, Mono has ported .NET Framework to Linux for quite some time. The team works very hard on it, so it doesn't come as a surprise to find out that some Linux fans are a bit concerned. However, Soma Somasegar confirmed that Microsoft is working closely with the team to bring the software to Linux and the Mac.
As it stands, all is not lost, and the guys at Mono can finally bring .NET to Linux in ways they could not have in the past.
