7 ms·

It's an interesting technical achievement and serious question without trolling - is there demand for running .NET apps on anything except Windows? If you're i

by hoodoof 12y ago

It's an interesting technical achievement and serious question without trolling - is there demand for running .NET apps on anything except Windows? If you're in the .NET world why would you want to do anything else?

voltagex_ 12y ago
Sure - Linux VMs can be cheaper.
- hoodoof 12y ago
  What's the upside for Microsoft in that?
  - nbevans 12y ago
    The bigger picture for MS now is building out Azure. They don't care what OS you are running on Azure as long as you aren't using AWS. You know Azure is forecast to exceed the revenues of Windows and Office by 2020, right?
  - hoodoof 12y ago
    To answer my own question, I guess it injects life into C# and perhaps enables them to sell more Visual Studio and maybe brings developers back into the Windows platform ecosystem. Even so, it does so at the cost of Windows server licences and potentially starts to erode the need to run Windows servers at all. Leads me to think back to when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and one of the first things he did was kill all the Apple-licensed Mac clones.
    - hobs 12y ago
      Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition is a 100% free 100% fully featured VS. They are definitely not trying to sell windows or vs licenses with these types of moves, give away the platform and good tools and they will make it popular and make you a lot of money in other ways.
      - petecox 12y ago
        Unless it works flawlessly under Wine, you still need to run it within a Windows desktop. A Windows 8.1 Pro OEM license costs around $150, which if you're building a FreeBSD desktop from scratch won't come included in the purchase price.
        hobs 12y ago
        Sure, and that is a fair point, I was just responding to the "sell more visual studio", but of course driving the windows ecosystem in some ways (online, os, whatever) is their stated goal.
    - noelherrick 12y ago
      My guess is that they want to sell two things: Azure and Windows Phone via Xamarin. Say open-sourcing .NET convinces a team or a startup to write their new app in C#. When it comes time to deploy to production, maybe they'll use Azure. VS has some Azure integrations to make it easy. Now the team needs to write a mobile app. They have the option of using C# with Xamarin. Conveniently, you write Windows Phone apps in C# too, so maybe the team decides to target all three platforms instead of just the major two since they can get so much code reuse. A phone platform is really about the amount and quality of applications. Sun was never able to monetize Java very well, but MS is in a little different circumstance since it has a cloud service and a mobile OS and hardware.
      - cmdkeen 12y ago
        This. It also applies to the enterprise, all those in house data centres that are ripe to be migrated over to Azure. Microsoft care an awful lot less that you migrated your Oracle server to Linux if you run that server on Azure...
        tracker1 12y ago
        That I my speculation as well.. when the company I work for migrated from rented hosting to cloud for easier growth, they went Azure because the existing software is all in .Net on windows... Even though new software is targetting Linux, we're staying on Azure mainly for entropy. It's a valid strategy for keeping their corporate customers.. they have that developer mindshare, and can reduce the systems employees (SysAdmins, DBAs, etc) to boot... Too many corporate environments have dev and admin groups that are combative to eachother... "The Cloud" offers advantages in many of those environments. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I can see the appeal on several levels. Though working with some of the azure tools via node, it's not as bright as MS makes it out to be.
  - tonyedgecombe 12y ago
    They are hoping to sell more Azure services on the back of all this.
  - xenadu02 12y ago
    There is no more growth (as in ever) in the desktop PC space. It's a mature market as far as the eye can see. Upgrade cycles continue to slow. Mobile and Cloud are where everything is happening. Amazon own(ed?) Cloud, Apple & Google own Mobile. Whole generations are growing up without using Microsoft tech even in developed countries. Which of the major tech companies to arise in the past 10 years use a Microsoft tech stack? (hint: none) Microsoft tried to take on mobile with Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 (Surface, Windows ARM, etc). They were all duds more or less and Microsoft was at risk of becoming completely irrelevant. I think Microsoft's leadership (including Bill & Balmer) took a long, hard look and realized that Mobile has already past the hockey stick growth phase. At that point only the one or two competitors seen as leaders survive; Apple and Google have already won. They were also at risk of Amazon and other hosting providers eating away at their server business by making it easier to deploy servers at the infrastructure level. Microsoft also critically lost developer mindshare; despite C# being a much better language than Java (and Oracle's mis-steps creating enormous opportunity) no one gave a shit. There's a thing that happens in large organizations where a leader can become boxed in and unable to change direction. Balmer was clearly in that position and as someone who deeply cared about Microsoft he stepped down and gave Nadela the reigns. You can also bet Bill is backing him or he'd never be able to get away with making such drastic changes. So what does Microsoft gain? Getting people to use their software. They'll never own the Mobile OS, so may as well accept it and move on. People don't want to run Windows Servers? fine, run Linux on Azure. They might as well take your money since they sure aren't going to get you to switch. Why did they push Mobile Services so heavily for iOS? Why do they have Android SDKs? Because if they can't own the Mobile OS, they can at least grab a piece by being a really easy to use back-end for the app ecosystems. And why open-source C# (Roslyn) and the CLR stack? Capitalize on Oracle's lawsuits over Java and Sun/Oracle's mismanagement of Java (and the years of stagnation Java suffered, though that has changed recently). They'd rather sell you developer tools, or make sure that cool new open-source projects start using C# so it makes it more natural to support Windows in addition to *nix/Mac. Now that it's all MIT licensed and contains full patent promises I consider Mono a completely legit fork. That means even if Microsoft dropped it all tomorrow, Mono could still continue unfazed.
    - berdario 12y ago
  - phaed 12y ago
    They are shifting away on their reliance of selling the OS to make their money. Putting "Windows" first was part of what was tearing Microsoft apart from the inside and was looking to leave it in the past. They no longer put that much weight on selling Windows licenses. I hear Windows 10 is even going to be a free upgrade, a la OSX. So what they gain from all of this is getting back into the ring. It also polarizes Windows to a desktop OS (where it belongs) vs Server OS.
  - felixg 12y ago
    Microsoft began to suffer when they forgot that they are a software company. They were believing that they are a Windows/Office company. Those cash cows were milked to death, additionally killing everything else along the way. At some point (way later than they should have) they understood what was happening and where it leads. The solution is going back to software (and its cloud form). Sell anything, target everything. Develop for widest possible audience, but also pursue niche markets. Like Microsoft did in the '80. Another point is developer attraction. They need "cool", and this kind of hardcore hacking is cool. The new Microsoft wants to sell any software/service, no matter the hardware nor the OS. To transform from the old Microsoft to the new version, they need cool software. And who can make this happen? Cool developers.
  - evilduck 12y ago
    I think MS is responding to an existential crisis. MS seemingly got blindsided by mobile. When it comes to a consumer who is personally engaging with a computing device nowadays and not just doing it for a job, a huge number of eyes are now glued to a device that doesn't use a Microsoft operating system, apps not written in a Microsoft language, utilizing backend services not running Microsoft servers. They own a good part of the boring corporate world people mostly dislike and a decent share of gaming, but consoles are fairly evenly split and their desktop gaming monopoly is only riding on a continually dwindling amount of momentum (a large chunk of games are multi-platform releases, desktop Windows and the Xbox are popular but not necessary for gaming to continue).
- jmspring 12y ago
  There is an interest, examine prior threads re: CLR and open source on HN. That said, as a FreeBSD fan (my own domain runs it, I've been running servers on FreeBSD for 14+ years), I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't know about this project -- work at MSFT in an evangelism role. Glad I learned something new to explore tonight.
  - josteink 12y ago
    This project was (very) briefly mentioned on HN one time earlier[1], but quickly disappeared from the front-page without too much constructive attention. In reddits /r/freebsd, there was a also some slight noise, which predated the HN-post.[2] Apart from that, I think it's just all been happening on Github. All in all, for the little attention it managed to attract, I think we've made some good progress so far. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031570 [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/2vikrs/freebsd_build_support_to_net_coreclr/ http://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/2vikrs/freebsd_buil...
BenTheElder 12y ago
Not in the .NET world but I found it to be rather pleasent to work with in the past and I certainly wouldn't mind another option on Unixes.
karmakaze 12y ago
Actually being multiplatform (not just variants of Windows) has real value. From my perspective, that means being able to use F# (a sort of OCaml.NET) anywhere. That, and true competition.
- hoodoof 12y ago
  Feels risky, like something Microsoft might pull the plug on. Like Internet Explorer for Mac. Microsoft has always been very stop/start about supporting other platforms - projects come and get cancelled and go.
  - phaed 12y ago
    Your feelings couldn't be more wrong on this. Making .NET cross-platform is one of their major initiatives towards creating a more open and future-proof Microsoft and part of the foundation for the next generation of their ecosystem. It's the very reason why Core was split off of .NET. They are betting the barn on this, its not some flimsy side project. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-source.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-i...
  - BenTheElder 12y ago
    Well coreclr at least has 778 forks on github currently, so it will be a bit harder to pull the plug on hopefully. It's also mit licensed and has a patent promise. IANAL but it looks pretty safe, especially with the mono project picking up the code and integrating it (in theory).
    - khellang 12y ago
      Not just in theory; http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/releases/4.0.0/ http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/releases/4.0.0/
    - ghuntley 12y ago
      It's actually happening - https://trello.com/b/vRPTMfdz/net-framework-integration-into-mono https://trello.com/b/vRPTMfdz/net-framework-integration-into...
Moto7451 12y ago
My current project at work is .Net based and I would love to have it run on *nix, as would the rest of the tech team. All of our infrastructure is based around Linux and I've had to spend quite a bit of time porting stuff over for use on Windows. The major holdup keeping us from using Mono or CoreCLR is that the tech we've licensed is .Net based but links against the Win32 API (for silly reasons like reading XML files to boot). Hopefully the vendor will move away from that in the future.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Wouldn't running .Net on Unix/Linux natively no longer be necessary with your .Net apps Dockerized?
  - ghuntley 12y ago
    Develop F# (or C#) with Visual Studio and deploy into Docker on CoreOS is the bright, bright future that is rapidly becoming a reality. See you later IIS, I've hated every moment dealing with you.
    - ed_blackburn 12y ago
      Absolutely. 100% looking forward to nginx CoreClr being trivial too. Would also be interested too tighter integration between node and CoreClr. So I can write node modules in C# / F# on deployed to posix or windows.
      - politician 12y ago
        I think we need a reddit for people interested in running the CoreCLR/CoreOS stack. And an acronym. CoreCore? 2Core? Core2Core? CLROS? Dual Core?
        ghuntley 12y ago
        Come up with something and I'll (and many others) will join. There's a pretty active community over at /r/fsharp already.
skrebbel 12y ago
To develop in a great language with great tools and deploy to a great OS.
curiousDog 12y ago
I think this is great because other apps like SQL Server, VS etc will now come onto the *nix stack. And there is a ton of demand for that. I for one love SQL Server.
- darklajid 12y ago
  I'm confused. How's SQL Server related to .Net? Put differently: What does the SQL Server gain by .Net being available for other platforms? Are there any announcements to port SQL Server?
  - politician 12y ago
    At the very least, CoreCLR could bring robust SQL Server client drivers to Linux/OSX.
  - curiousDog 12y ago
    SQL Server is actually a CLR host and this functionality is heavily used by existing apps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_CLR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_CLR). And no, I don't think an announcement has been made. However, this shows that it might be possible!
  - ximeng 12y ago
    I asked an MS dev evangelist about that and he said SQL Server was likely to be the slowest to move across and open up as it's practically its own operating system and the team are isolated and conservative.
- Alupis 12y ago
  > SQL Server, VS etc will now come onto the *nix stack. And there is a ton of demand for that Doubtful SQL Server on the 'nix stack has much demand nor will it gain traction. In all OS' not Windows... Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB dominate. Not because SQL Server isn't available, but because they are all very solid very good SQL servers.
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
ghuntley 12y ago
F# running on Unix :-)
hobarrera 12y ago
It seems pretty obvious that this makes porting existing windows applications to nix a lot easier. It also opens up the playing fields for .NET developers to now target nix as well (without learning a new language).
EnderMB 12y ago
I'm going to offer an anecdote that isn't technical. Like it or not, but there is a definite stigma associated towards working on Windows. Developers on HN are surprisingly open-minded towards developing on Windows, but in the real world you'll find a lot of developers that look down on those that choose Windows as their development platform. I've met a range of devs, from those working at startups, to people who work at Google, and many of them have been extremely dismissive of not just .NET, but those that work on Windows. I've worked at a startup using ASP.NET, but I reckon many C# devs would probably rate their chances of getting a job at a big tech company to be slim and none because they favour .NET. I spoke to some ex-Googlers a while back at an event, and I asked about the Google interview process. They asked me what language I coded in, and on hearing that my main language was C# they were less than favourable about my chances. It's a shame really, because I'd quite like to work somewhere like Google, but I wouldn't want to have to hide the fact that my strongest language by far is C#. In my mind, bringing .NET to Mac and Linux will do something that we rarely see in the development world. The Windows world will be bringing something valuable to the Linux world. The best part about this for me isn't being able to use .NET on an OS that I'd love to learn more about, but not having that niggling doubt in my head about my choice of language/framework, and I reckon a lot of .NET developers, especially younger ones will feel exactly the same.
- ghuntley 12y ago
  Exactly. I could not have said it better myself, matches my experiences as well.
- stuaxo 12y ago
  There are basic some things that make using open tools not work very well... the following 3 seem to bubble up and stop making lots of unix dev + python tools not work: No fork No ansi in terminal Seperate Select for files and Sockets on Windows.. Fix those and I bet loads of the open source tools would start working, making Windows much more attractive to X platform devs.
  - EnderMB 12y ago
    In my eyes the problem is no longer technical, but cultural. There are a million things Microsoft could do to please developers on other platforms, but I just think that there's no changing some peoples minds. When people think of .NET developers, they think of a middle-aged man that works for a big company writing corporate code, and this is not the kind of developer that start-ups or companies like Google want in their ranks. The moves that Microsoft are making will help validate those .NET developers that enjoy working on the framework AND want to feel like a part of the larger developer community. Technically, things will continue to improve under this direction, but what I really hope is that the per-conceived notions about .NET developers are laid to rest.
Gibbon1 12y ago
Oddly enough I'm looking at the source for a command line tool, written in C# that runs under windows, but I need it to run under linux.
WDCDev 12y ago
Speaking personally, yes I am very excited about .NET on *nix platforms. I am currently working on architecting a decent sized cloud application using .NET, Django and ElasticSearch. The entire platform will be built on Linux (CentOS or Ubuntu) to control costs. Why are we using .NET? My company's experience is primarily in .NET and we need to carefully manage discovery costs across all the platforms we are going to working on. I am going to blog about the experience when the project is set to get underway later this year, so stay tuned.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Deployment on Windows is a pain. The images are big, they have a lot of reboots (once a month usually). PowerShell is yet another thing to learn/deal with (despite being nice) but the simplicity of being able to SSH/SFTP doesn't seem to be totally there - scripting is still a second-class citizen. (Try setting up IIS as a reverse proxy with no GUI.) IIS is ... meh, a pain compared to nginx, and nginx is gimped on Windows. I'd prefer to have nginx FastCGI to an ASP.NET server than use IIS. Windows is fantastic if you've only got a handful of machines and buy into their other management systems that tie into AD. I'm guessing for companies running Exchange and so on, it makes a ton of sense. But deploying custom apps I've written in F# or C#, Windows only gets in the way. If the CLR ran fine on Linux, that'd remove the only real barrier (Mono's great, but it doesn't fully support ASP.NET, and has other weird edges (but I've used it in production at high volume for years.)) No doubt this was Microsoft's concern all along. But now with Azure, they figure they can make money on Linux. And at the prices they charge for VMs, they could resell Google Cloud and make a great profit. Azure's compute prices are double Google's.

by hoodoof 12y ago

voltagex_ 12y ago

Sure - Linux VMs can be cheaper.

hoodoof 12y ago
What's the upside for Microsoft in that?
- nbevans 12y ago
  The bigger picture for MS now is building out Azure. They don't care what OS you are running on Azure as long as you aren't using AWS. You know Azure is forecast to exceed the revenues of Windows and Office by 2020, right?
- hoodoof 12y ago
  To answer my own question, I guess it injects life into C# and perhaps enables them to sell more Visual Studio and maybe brings developers back into the Windows platform ecosystem. Even so, it does so at the cost of Windows server licences and potentially starts to erode the need to run Windows servers at all. Leads me to think back to when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and one of the first things he did was kill all the Apple-licensed Mac clones.
  - hobs 12y ago
    Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition is a 100% free 100% fully featured VS. They are definitely not trying to sell windows or vs licenses with these types of moves, give away the platform and good tools and they will make it popular and make you a lot of money in other ways.
    - petecox 12y ago
      Unless it works flawlessly under Wine, you still need to run it within a Windows desktop. A Windows 8.1 Pro OEM license costs around $150, which if you're building a FreeBSD desktop from scratch won't come included in the purchase price.
      - hobs 12y ago
        Sure, and that is a fair point, I was just responding to the "sell more visual studio", but of course driving the windows ecosystem in some ways (online, os, whatever) is their stated goal.
  - noelherrick 12y ago
    My guess is that they want to sell two things: Azure and Windows Phone via Xamarin. Say open-sourcing .NET convinces a team or a startup to write their new app in C#. When it comes time to deploy to production, maybe they'll use Azure. VS has some Azure integrations to make it easy. Now the team needs to write a mobile app. They have the option of using C# with Xamarin. Conveniently, you write Windows Phone apps in C# too, so maybe the team decides to target all three platforms instead of just the major two since they can get so much code reuse. A phone platform is really about the amount and quality of applications. Sun was never able to monetize Java very well, but MS is in a little different circumstance since it has a cloud service and a mobile OS and hardware.
    - cmdkeen 12y ago
      This. It also applies to the enterprise, all those in house data centres that are ripe to be migrated over to Azure. Microsoft care an awful lot less that you migrated your Oracle server to Linux if you run that server on Azure...
      - tracker1 12y ago
        That I my speculation as well.. when the company I work for migrated from rented hosting to cloud for easier growth, they went Azure because the existing software is all in .Net on windows... Even though new software is targetting Linux, we're staying on Azure mainly for entropy. It's a valid strategy for keeping their corporate customers.. they have that developer mindshare, and can reduce the systems employees (SysAdmins, DBAs, etc) to boot... Too many corporate environments have dev and admin groups that are combative to eachother... "The Cloud" offers advantages in many of those environments. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I can see the appeal on several levels. Though working with some of the azure tools via node, it's not as bright as MS makes it out to be.
- tonyedgecombe 12y ago
  They are hoping to sell more Azure services on the back of all this.
- xenadu02 12y ago
  There is no more growth (as in ever) in the desktop PC space. It's a mature market as far as the eye can see. Upgrade cycles continue to slow. Mobile and Cloud are where everything is happening. Amazon own(ed?) Cloud, Apple & Google own Mobile. Whole generations are growing up without using Microsoft tech even in developed countries. Which of the major tech companies to arise in the past 10 years use a Microsoft tech stack? (hint: none) Microsoft tried to take on mobile with Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 (Surface, Windows ARM, etc). They were all duds more or less and Microsoft was at risk of becoming completely irrelevant. I think Microsoft's leadership (including Bill & Balmer) took a long, hard look and realized that Mobile has already past the hockey stick growth phase. At that point only the one or two competitors seen as leaders survive; Apple and Google have already won. They were also at risk of Amazon and other hosting providers eating away at their server business by making it easier to deploy servers at the infrastructure level. Microsoft also critically lost developer mindshare; despite C# being a much better language than Java (and Oracle's mis-steps creating enormous opportunity) no one gave a shit. There's a thing that happens in large organizations where a leader can become boxed in and unable to change direction. Balmer was clearly in that position and as someone who deeply cared about Microsoft he stepped down and gave Nadela the reigns. You can also bet Bill is backing him or he'd never be able to get away with making such drastic changes. So what does Microsoft gain? Getting people to use their software. They'll never own the Mobile OS, so may as well accept it and move on. People don't want to run Windows Servers? fine, run Linux on Azure. They might as well take your money since they sure aren't going to get you to switch. Why did they push Mobile Services so heavily for iOS? Why do they have Android SDKs? Because if they can't own the Mobile OS, they can at least grab a piece by being a really easy to use back-end for the app ecosystems. And why open-source C# (Roslyn) and the CLR stack? Capitalize on Oracle's lawsuits over Java and Sun/Oracle's mismanagement of Java (and the years of stagnation Java suffered, though that has changed recently). They'd rather sell you developer tools, or make sure that cool new open-source projects start using C# so it makes it more natural to support Windows in addition to *nix/Mac. Now that it's all MIT licensed and contains full patent promises I consider Mono a completely legit fork. That means even if Microsoft dropped it all tomorrow, Mono could still continue unfazed.
  - berdario 12y ago
- phaed 12y ago
  They are shifting away on their reliance of selling the OS to make their money. Putting "Windows" first was part of what was tearing Microsoft apart from the inside and was looking to leave it in the past. They no longer put that much weight on selling Windows licenses. I hear Windows 10 is even going to be a free upgrade, a la OSX. So what they gain from all of this is getting back into the ring. It also polarizes Windows to a desktop OS (where it belongs) vs Server OS.
- felixg 12y ago
  Microsoft began to suffer when they forgot that they are a software company. They were believing that they are a Windows/Office company. Those cash cows were milked to death, additionally killing everything else along the way. At some point (way later than they should have) they understood what was happening and where it leads. The solution is going back to software (and its cloud form). Sell anything, target everything. Develop for widest possible audience, but also pursue niche markets. Like Microsoft did in the '80. Another point is developer attraction. They need "cool", and this kind of hardcore hacking is cool. The new Microsoft wants to sell any software/service, no matter the hardware nor the OS. To transform from the old Microsoft to the new version, they need cool software. And who can make this happen? Cool developers.
- evilduck 12y ago
  I think MS is responding to an existential crisis. MS seemingly got blindsided by mobile. When it comes to a consumer who is personally engaging with a computing device nowadays and not just doing it for a job, a huge number of eyes are now glued to a device that doesn't use a Microsoft operating system, apps not written in a Microsoft language, utilizing backend services not running Microsoft servers. They own a good part of the boring corporate world people mostly dislike and a decent share of gaming, but consoles are fairly evenly split and their desktop gaming monopoly is only riding on a continually dwindling amount of momentum (a large chunk of games are multi-platform releases, desktop Windows and the Xbox are popular but not necessary for gaming to continue).
jmspring 12y ago
There is an interest, examine prior threads re: CLR and open source on HN. That said, as a FreeBSD fan (my own domain runs it, I've been running servers on FreeBSD for 14+ years), I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't know about this project -- work at MSFT in an evangelism role. Glad I learned something new to explore tonight.
- josteink 12y ago
  This project was (very) briefly mentioned on HN one time earlier[1], but quickly disappeared from the front-page without too much constructive attention. In reddits /r/freebsd, there was a also some slight noise, which predated the HN-post.[2] Apart from that, I think it's just all been happening on Github. All in all, for the little attention it managed to attract, I think we've made some good progress so far. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031570 [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/2vikrs/freebsd_build_support_to_net_coreclr/ http://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/2vikrs/freebsd_buil...

BenTheElder 12y ago

Not in the .NET world but I found it to be rather pleasent to work with in the past and I certainly wouldn't mind another option on Unixes.

karmakaze 12y ago

Actually being multiplatform (not just variants of Windows) has real value. From my perspective, that means being able to use F# (a sort of OCaml.NET) anywhere. That, and true competition.

hoodoof 12y ago
Feels risky, like something Microsoft might pull the plug on. Like Internet Explorer for Mac. Microsoft has always been very stop/start about supporting other platforms - projects come and get cancelled and go.
- phaed 12y ago
  Your feelings couldn't be more wrong on this. Making .NET cross-platform is one of their major initiatives towards creating a more open and future-proof Microsoft and part of the foundation for the next generation of their ecosystem. It's the very reason why Core was split off of .NET. They are betting the barn on this, its not some flimsy side project. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-source.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-i...
- BenTheElder 12y ago
  Well coreclr at least has 778 forks on github currently, so it will be a bit harder to pull the plug on hopefully. It's also mit licensed and has a patent promise. IANAL but it looks pretty safe, especially with the mono project picking up the code and integrating it (in theory).
  - khellang 12y ago
    Not just in theory; http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/releases/4.0.0/ http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/releases/4.0.0/
  - ghuntley 12y ago
    It's actually happening - https://trello.com/b/vRPTMfdz/net-framework-integration-into-mono https://trello.com/b/vRPTMfdz/net-framework-integration-into...

Moto7451 12y ago

My current project at work is .Net based and I would love to have it run on *nix, as would the rest of the tech team. All of our infrastructure is based around Linux and I've had to spend quite a bit of time porting stuff over for use on Windows. The major holdup keeping us from using Mono or CoreCLR is that the tech we've licensed is .Net based but links against the Win32 API (for silly reasons like reading XML files to boot). Hopefully the vendor will move away from that in the future.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
Wouldn't running .Net on Unix/Linux natively no longer be necessary with your .Net apps Dockerized?
- ghuntley 12y ago
  Develop F# (or C#) with Visual Studio and deploy into Docker on CoreOS is the bright, bright future that is rapidly becoming a reality. See you later IIS, I've hated every moment dealing with you.
  - ed_blackburn 12y ago
    Absolutely. 100% looking forward to nginx CoreClr being trivial too. Would also be interested too tighter integration between node and CoreClr. So I can write node modules in C# / F# on deployed to posix or windows.
    - politician 12y ago
      I think we need a reddit for people interested in running the CoreCLR/CoreOS stack. And an acronym. CoreCore? 2Core? Core2Core? CLROS? Dual Core?
      - ghuntley 12y ago
        Come up with something and I'll (and many others) will join. There's a pretty active community over at /r/fsharp already.

skrebbel 12y ago

To develop in a great language with great tools and deploy to a great OS.

curiousDog 12y ago

I think this is great because other apps like SQL Server, VS etc will now come onto the *nix stack. And there is a ton of demand for that. I for one love SQL Server.

darklajid 12y ago
I'm confused. How's SQL Server related to .Net? Put differently: What does the SQL Server gain by .Net being available for other platforms? Are there any announcements to port SQL Server?
- politician 12y ago
  At the very least, CoreCLR could bring robust SQL Server client drivers to Linux/OSX.
- curiousDog 12y ago
  SQL Server is actually a CLR host and this functionality is heavily used by existing apps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_CLR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_CLR). And no, I don't think an announcement has been made. However, this shows that it might be possible!
- ximeng 12y ago
  I asked an MS dev evangelist about that and he said SQL Server was likely to be the slowest to move across and open up as it's practically its own operating system and the team are isolated and conservative.
Alupis 12y ago
> SQL Server, VS etc will now come onto the *nix stack. And there is a ton of demand for that Doubtful SQL Server on the 'nix stack has much demand nor will it gain traction. In all OS' not Windows... Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB dominate. Not because SQL Server isn't available, but because they are all very solid very good SQL servers.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago

ghuntley 12y ago

F# running on Unix :-)

hobarrera 12y ago

It seems pretty obvious that this makes porting existing windows applications to nix a lot easier. It also opens up the playing fields for .NET developers to now target nix as well (without learning a new language).

EnderMB 12y ago

I'm going to offer an anecdote that isn't technical. Like it or not, but there is a definite stigma associated towards working on Windows. Developers on HN are surprisingly open-minded towards developing on Windows, but in the real world you'll find a lot of developers that look down on those that choose Windows as their development platform. I've met a range of devs, from those working at startups, to people who work at Google, and many of them have been extremely dismissive of not just .NET, but those that work on Windows. I've worked at a startup using ASP.NET, but I reckon many C# devs would probably rate their chances of getting a job at a big tech company to be slim and none because they favour .NET. I spoke to some ex-Googlers a while back at an event, and I asked about the Google interview process. They asked me what language I coded in, and on hearing that my main language was C# they were less than favourable about my chances. It's a shame really, because I'd quite like to work somewhere like Google, but I wouldn't want to have to hide the fact that my strongest language by far is C#. In my mind, bringing .NET to Mac and Linux will do something that we rarely see in the development world. The Windows world will be bringing something valuable to the Linux world. The best part about this for me isn't being able to use .NET on an OS that I'd love to learn more about, but not having that niggling doubt in my head about my choice of language/framework, and I reckon a lot of .NET developers, especially younger ones will feel exactly the same.

ghuntley 12y ago
Exactly. I could not have said it better myself, matches my experiences as well.
stuaxo 12y ago
There are basic some things that make using open tools not work very well... the following 3 seem to bubble up and stop making lots of unix dev + python tools not work: No fork No ansi in terminal Seperate Select for files and Sockets on Windows.. Fix those and I bet loads of the open source tools would start working, making Windows much more attractive to X platform devs.
- EnderMB 12y ago
  In my eyes the problem is no longer technical, but cultural. There are a million things Microsoft could do to please developers on other platforms, but I just think that there's no changing some peoples minds. When people think of .NET developers, they think of a middle-aged man that works for a big company writing corporate code, and this is not the kind of developer that start-ups or companies like Google want in their ranks. The moves that Microsoft are making will help validate those .NET developers that enjoy working on the framework AND want to feel like a part of the larger developer community. Technically, things will continue to improve under this direction, but what I really hope is that the per-conceived notions about .NET developers are laid to rest.

Gibbon1 12y ago

Oddly enough I'm looking at the source for a command line tool, written in C# that runs under windows, but I need it to run under linux.

WDCDev 12y ago

Speaking personally, yes I am very excited about .NET on *nix platforms. I am currently working on architecting a decent sized cloud application using .NET, Django and ElasticSearch. The entire platform will be built on Linux (CentOS or Ubuntu) to control costs. Why are we using .NET? My company's experience is primarily in .NET and we need to carefully manage discovery costs across all the platforms we are going to working on. I am going to blog about the experience when the project is set to get underway later this year, so stay tuned.

MichaelGG 12y ago

Deployment on Windows is a pain. The images are big, they have a lot of reboots (once a month usually). PowerShell is yet another thing to learn/deal with (despite being nice) but the simplicity of being able to SSH/SFTP doesn't seem to be totally there - scripting is still a second-class citizen. (Try setting up IIS as a reverse proxy with no GUI.) IIS is ... meh, a pain compared to nginx, and nginx is gimped on Windows. I'd prefer to have nginx FastCGI to an ASP.NET server than use IIS. Windows is fantastic if you've only got a handful of machines and buy into their other management systems that tie into AD. I'm guessing for companies running Exchange and so on, it makes a ton of sense. But deploying custom apps I've written in F# or C#, Windows only gets in the way. If the CLR ran fine on Linux, that'd remove the only real barrier (Mono's great, but it doesn't fully support ASP.NET, and has other weird edges (but I've used it in production at high volume for years.)) No doubt this was Microsoft's concern all along. But now with Azure, they figure they can make money on Linux. And at the prices they charge for VMs, they could resell Google Cloud and make a great profit. Azure's compute prices are double Google's.