This is probably old news to many of you. But I am optimistic about the Microsoft approach to make Dot Net software available to be hosted outside the Microsoft set of operating systems. They are starting with Dot Net Core, a set of libraries of shared capabilities found in all implementations of Dot Net.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-source.aspx
There are a couple of compelling reasons for Microsoft to make this transition to a shared core library and to open systems development.
- Creating a common core library reduces internal develop costs for internal Dot Net distributions already in the MS environments. Each different Dot Net library inside Microsoft has independent development and code base, sharing only a common contract that all distributions must fulfill.
- Opening up the development to the open systems community has the potential to attract open developer contributions, or at least acceptance. The mono team is one of the open projects highly sought after.
- When Dot Net Core reaches maturation it has the potential to provide an option to building software outside of the Microsoft OS Targets.
The benefits to developers are large as well. Since the code base is hosted in Git Hub you can download and see all of the source for the core library functions. This can be a good learning tool to be able to see how the libraries are put together.
This is going to be an interesting project to watch in this coming year of 2015. According to the MS publicity, it is intended that Dot Net Core will be used by all of the internal projects, and it appears it may be a contributor to Mono as well.
Is it possible Dot Net will catch up with Java in the “Run Anywhere” dream? We know that no product does a perfect job with “Run Anywhere”. But Dot Net isn’t even in the running today. Will it be in the running next year? What do you think? Leave a comment or drop an Email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben