Microsoft releases .NET Core preview for Mac and Linux

jeremy · 04-29-2015, 03:07 PM

Quote:

At its Build 2015 developer conference today, Microsoft took the first step toward a cross-platform version of .NET, the company’s software framework that primarily runs on Windows: The company has released a preview of the .NET Core runtime distribution for Mac and Linux.

Today’s preview is the first public version of “a solution that we think is going to be exciting to a broad set of developers,” S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft, told VentureBeat. “This is one of the most progressive things that we’ve done.”

At the time, Somasegar hinted that taking .NET cross-platform would help the company partner with additional platform and tools vendors across the industry and eventually grow the .NET ecosystem. And Microsoft has help: The open-source work is being done in close collaboration with the Mono project and community, which have long been working on making it possible to run Microsoft .NET applications cross-platform.

Somasegar told VentureBeat that over the past five months, the two groups have exchanged a “tremendous amount” of ideas and code. So we asked the obvious: Why bother developing two different implementations?

“If you talk to the key stewards of the Mono community, I think they would love for us to work together as opposed to work on two independent things,” Somasegar said. He added that Microsoft wants to see where it might be able to converge with Mono’s work, but in the meantime, Somasegar reiterated: “We are committed to .NET development in open source, and we are committed to taking .NET cross-platform.”

More at VentureBeat...

This is in addition to the news that Microsoft Visual Studio Code will now also run on Linux.

--jeremy