If you have been following the Dot Net world lately then you will know how Open Source is impacting the development of the framework. I watched a presentation by Jeffrey Fritz, who is a senior program manager with the Microsoft Developer Outreach Group, regarding the impact of open source contributions to the Dot Net framework, and its specific impact on ASP.Net. One of the neatest parts of the presentation was seeing him do the presentation completely using OS10 on a Mac, using native code tools along with Dot Net Core.
The Dot Net Core framework consists of a minimalist set of tools necessary to build an application. Because it is a small footprint, it is able to be used in any platform where Dot Net Core may be hosted. That includes Windows applications for server and client computers, Macintosh, Linux, and even Android and IPhone utilizing Xamarin. That’s not really news to most people. But it was really cool to see it working in real world applications.
I will say that most of the tools for writing code do not have the fancy GUI application we have come to utilize in Visual Studio on Windows. Instead, they have written extensions for many different common editors such as VI, EMacs, etc., enabling intelisense based on the Dot Net framework. There was a lot of command console work that was quick and easy once you know the commands. It reminded me of a lot of the kinds of things we do in a PowerShell console in Visual Studio for things such as Entity Framework.
One of the most interesting things from the presentation was then next goal for the open systems Dot Net Framework. Dot Net Core was designed to be minimalistic. It maintains and implements the bare bones features needed for most applications. Now, the next idea is called Dot Net Standard. Dot Net Standard will not be minimalistic. Instead it will be a full feature with standardized interfaces for an entire framework. Because the actual implementations may be quite different on the various supported platforms, Dot Net Standard will be all inclusive on interfaces alone. Then building applications you include the implementations written against the Dot Net Standard interfaces for the target host environment.
It’s great to see the progress being made in Dot Net, specifically in the open source network. I’m curious if anyone can share an experience writing in Dot Net for something other than a Windows Platform? Especially if you have done it recently since Dot Net Core has been available? Just leave a comment with your thoughts or experience.
Cheers,
Ben