Azure & Office 365

Posts Tagged ‘OSS’

Satya Nadella is seriously changing the company.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that tech companies need to stop forcing their will manifested in managerial meetings down the customers throats and change it to be the other way around. Collaboration is now the new key success.

Microsoft not only did .NET get open sourced, they accepted the FIRST COMMUNITY PR TOO. This is an epic day. To get more details of this .NET (OSS) Open Sourced Software
https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/pull/31

MS committed a long time ago not to bring patent suits over the .NET specifications (the ECMA CIL specifications). This means anyone can freely implement the .NET specifications (which define the languages, platform, etc., but not all of the APIs for things like WinForms, ASP .Net, etc.), this is why Monopoly exists. They committed to this something like 10 years ago, and they have never violated that promise.

What happened today, is that they’ve opened the implementation, not just the specification. Which is awesome-sauce. But I just want to emphasize that parts of the platform (the specs) have been open for a long time.

As per my opinion Microsoft’s .NET is a very mature, very complete programming world.

• Great IDE
• Great language (C#, VB.NET I guess too)
• Can create extremely robust windows applications
• Can create great web applications (using asp.net webforms if you’re old school and ASP.NET MVC if you’re in the new stuff)
• Azure support “baked in” which greatly simplifies going to the cloud
• Free version of SQL Server that is extremely powerful (SQL Server Express, includes reporting services and full text indexing) and has, again, arguably the best tooling support of any RDBMS

Historically this has all been limited to the Windows stack (has to run on a windows server and developed on a windows computer, with expensive licenses). This move (and the previous moves leading up to this, and the vNext stuff coming) is beginning to tear down this restriction.