Microsoft Announced Full .NET Server Stack In Open Source

Microsoft declared that they are transitioning the server-side of their .Net platform to fully open source. On its official website, the company stated, “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 or Linux.”

The company also decided to make the framework cross-platform, so developers are now able to craft .Net applications, which runs easily on either Linux or the Mac operating system. Although, the company has open sourced tads and pieces of .Net over the years and developed the .Net Foundation in April.

The main aim of this foundation is to supervise open-source .Net plans. Moreover, recent news also highlights the understanding by Microsoft that the company should make a full-court press to tempt developers, who are working with different open-source technologies to develop cloud applications included multiple components.

In this modern age of software development, you can find a lot of difference compare to it used to be a decade ago. Before, coders had to use propriety tools in order to develop apps that do not required to work in different environments.

Microsoft’s corporate vice president of the Developer Divison at Microsoft Corporation ‘Soma Somasegar’, said “This is a huge change (for Microsoft) and a change that has been slowly and steadily building up for the last couple of years.”

The move to open source .NET comes from a fundamental realization of where the world is “and what application development now looks like, explained Somasegar. He added, “We have to meet developers where they are as opposed to saying ‘hey, you come to where we are.”

How Company Decided to Go Open Source?

However, it will not take only one day to completely open-sourced .Net, and Somasegar said he expects the project to take a “few months” before it completes. Microsoft is developing .NET repositories and forums on GitHub and will be encouraging .NET developers to start participating.

Microsoft is working with the Mono project and community in order to help things go easily. As Mono project is an open-source project that developed to make .NET cross-platform as company is feeling that its expertise will be priceless.

The close teamwork between Microsoft and the Mono project binds directly with a strategic partnership as Microsoft has with Xamarin, a professional software company, which oversees the Mono project. Before, there were a lot of rumors that the company was looking to purchase Xamarin to strengthen its cross-platform technology.

In its Visual Studio developer tool, Microsoft said that it plans to add more of Xamarin’s tech and will launch more joint Microsoft and Xamarin go-to-market products in the future. When it comes to Visual Studio, the company is also looking forward to rolling out a free version of the developer platform, which tailored for the open-source community. The software is allowing open-source coders, students and small development shops to create a lot of cross-platform apps for free.

In reference to the free version of Visual Studio Somasegar said, “Our core thesis is that in a world where developers are thinking about a mobile platform and a cloud platform, we want to be in the minds and hearts of developers no matter what they are building.” He also added, “Once you have developer mindshare, then a lot of other movement happens”.

An Open-source .Net’s Roots

In 2002, Microsoft first launched .Net as it was one such programming framework that especially designed to make it a lot easier for developers to develop apps tailored to run on Windows. Before, it was a Windows world back and open source was still considered a tad for heavy of the enterprise.

Andrew Brust, research director at Gigaom Research for big data and analytics, and a long-time Microsoft observer said, “In general, open source kind of had a different political significance then than it does now.”

Moreover, the company also experimented with cross-platform technologies like Silverlight framework, a completion of .NET which could possible to run on Mac, but the cross-platform naysayers won and support for Silverlight that was deemphasized.

“For years we’ve watched as first the .NET and then the Azure team struggled internally with the Windows team over whether Microsoft’s programming model should be cross platform or not,” wrote Forrester vice president and principal analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond in an email.

After that the world was adopting new things and suddenly developers had new options that were not previously obtainable, and Microsoft was not making the right moves to win their hearts.

“The Windows team’s answer was “HTML 5 everywhere,” coupled with it running better/faster on IE,” wrote Hammond “That’s great for the client side, but didn’t really help the cross platform story on the server side.”

By looking at the Microsoft’s efforts, we can say that the company realizes that it needs work with its competitors instead of burying them. However, this step of the company will be successful or not is still can’t be decided, but we can say that this new path is likely to be successful rather than holding on its old monopolistic ways. Let’s see what happens next.

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