I must admit that I'm a little surprised at the number of people who have been so keen to heap praise on Microsoft recently. I'm very glad that they are making

I must admit that I'm a little surprised at the number of people who have been so keen to heap praise on Microsoft recently. I'm very glad that they are making moves towards increasing openness and collaborating more with other ecosystems. From my perspective, software development has always felt like it was split into two camps: the "open source" platform, and the "Microsoft" one, with developers working across both being pretty rare in my experience. Being able to break down those barriers and maybe starting to see genuine cross-platform Microsoft technologies is really, really exciting. However, I'm convinced it's prudent to remain cautious. Microsoft have a long and colourful history of doing real damage to open standards, free software, and their own business partners. Even their development community has been harmed by repeated changes of direction in their development efforts – damage which is made worse by that fact that the ecosystem is traditionally so closed. Maybe we are seeing a core of developers who are actually too young to have experienced this firsthand, or at least with limited experience of other platforms, who are a little less skeptical. Anyway, Microsoft's recent bout of openness is nothing but a good thing. It'll be a while before I'm comfortable deploying a cross-platform app on .NET, but baby steps…