Wait, what? Microsoft makes .NET open source. Includes Android, iOS, and others

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It’s a big day for Microsoft and its (soon to be even larger) cadre of dedicated developers: Starting today, Microsoft is making the core parts of its .Net framework open-source, and cross-platform on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Microsoft is also committing to adding Android and iOS support in the upcoming Visual Studio 2015 — in fact, there’s already an Android emulator in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, and iOS support will be added soon. Furthermore, Microsoft is releasing a new version of Visual Studio — “Community 2013″ — that is free and full-featured. This is a bold move that will attempt to cement .Net, C#, and Visual Studio as the dominant development platform across Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and Mac — and, well, it might just work.

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Over the last few years, Microsoft has been slowly open-sourcing various parts of its developer tools, mostly in response to the fact that developers expect a lot more transparency than they used to. It didn’t make much sense to open-source stuff when Windows was the only OS that mattered, but the rapid growth of Linux as a server platform, and Android and iOS in the consumer space, have forced software developers to take a much broader, platform-agnostic stance — and Microsoft has followed suit. It’s actually been quite amusing and heartwarming, watching Microsoft go from hating everything about Linux and what it stands for, through to positively embracing the penguin.

To read the rest of the ExtremeTech.com article, click here.