Running ASP.NET vNext on OS X and Linux (opens in new tab)

"My new LAMP stack: Linux, ASP.NET, Mono, PostgreSQL."

Good one :)

do you have zsh installed ? when i'm trying to install kvm i got error:

   .../.kre/kvm/kvm.sh:145: parse error near `]]'

Cross-compatibility makes a lot of sense of they perceive a lot of future risk to their value proposition that one technology or product will sell another one. If they don't believe Windows Server will be a compelling enough technology to push adoption of .NET, then why risk the decade of development on it by tying it around the neck of IIS? I see it as an admission that the various product offerings need to float on their own merits, not just because 'its the option that runs on Windows'. There's enough alternatives now to make that kind of assumption a relic of the '90s and 00's.

* sell more visual studio

* sell more sql server

* reach developers who wouldn't consider ms technology at all

* accelerate the nuget "marketplace" of open source 3rd psrty libraries, which could benefit other platforms almost for free (winphone, xbox, winrt, win8)

* finally, there's a good chance a lot of the stuff will "just work(tm)" well enough only on windows. Suddenly your planned linux deployment is thrown out and replaced with windows to make those small annoyances just go away

* Developers developers developers

Foot-in-the-door? Having Linux as a deploy target allows a MS-heavy group to keep using their tools. The strategy of pretending nothing else exists won't work, so working well together must be done.

It seems that Linux vs Windows is often a fundamental question, so Microsoft is going to rule out all of their products if they can't say yes. Mono is plausible; I've been using it in production for years and processed billions of transactions with it. Microsoft adding more official help reassures the people that might otherwise dismiss Mono.

Microsoft still has some good product value. SQL Server is pretty fantastic as far as capabilities and getting them to work goes. Unfortunately their decision to go all Oracle on their licensing means a lot of people are going to be looking elsewhere. (Not adding "basic" things like JSON operators is also a bit embarrassing.) Office and Visual Studio are unrivaled.

Bad for them? How so.

Windows can sell itself on its own merits, and has been for ages. Meanwhile, dev tools is a billion dollar a year revenue division, and yet it could be even bigger. C# is one of the best languages around at present, but a lot of the "cool kids" don't use it because it's too tied to the Microsoft stack.

I typed a bunch of stuff here already but I just deleted it, instead I'm going to go with an analogy.

If devs are cats then doing things like porting the .net toolchain to linux/osx is like leaving cat food outside. And that's precisely how you turn feral cats into house cats. Cats will go where the food is. And they'll keep coming back to it night after night.

If you treat devs right, and give them the tools they want on the platforms they want they will become encouraged to turn to you for support. They will buy your IDE and other dev tools. They may even buy your OS and database tools. Additionally, by increasing the adoption rate of the .net toolchain it makes it that much easier for devs to write for winphone, windows, xbox one, etc. If you encourage devs to use C# for android/iOS development then the cost/benefit prospect for shipping a winphone version of an app changes dramatically vs. using raw java/obj-C.

It's win/win for devs and for MS.

Azure. That's where they intend to make money.

They always made the specs of .Net open, which means anyone can implement it.

With the rise of other tools, they have a foot in the Linux/MAC development, where else, they wouldn't have anything outside of Windows. Their coöperation with Mono is great, helping a partner further while letting the .Net thrive :)

BTW. Their strong argument is Visual Studio, which is still (personal opinion), 100% better then any other tool i ever tried - although i must admit, Sublime Text feels great, but it isn't integrated like Visual Studio

Because they are making a lot of money of Windows Azure. And they plan to make even more.

Make it work cross-platform, but offer better support (and more importantly support contracts) on Windows. This positions Microsoft as a credible player in the modern software world, but still positions Windows as the premiere environment for running Microsoft-stack applications.

The answer? Azure. It runs linux.

Tools. Azure. Relevancy.

Microsoft missed the whole generation of programmers when the focus shifted from the desktop to the web. Without programmers MS is dead in the water. This is their play to stay relevant.

>Can anyone imagine a compelling business case for this?

Sure - make Windows the premiere platform for (ASP.)NET, which is rather a given (even if not intentionally, which it most certainly would be, unintentionally the practical implementation details mean that things will just naturally work better with Windows). Get teams that would have adopted alternatives to adopt .NET under the premise that it is cross-platform and goodness now. Make a really good case for them to switch to Windows down the line.

That isn't a new tactic, and is done across all industries by many businesses.

Despite the apparent influx of Microosft-platform devs on HN lately, this is not going to gain traction -- it is, in essence, a gimmick, and simply provides a talking point to avoid changing platforms.

I find a lot of these Wordpress blogs around lately, all with the same theme and, even more curious, all with a lot of comments though they rarely have more than a few articles.

It makes me suspicious of the source and purpose of them.

Maybe they realized that Windows is sinking[1] and if they don't untangle the company from it, the entire Microsoft will sink with it.

[1] Slowly, but inexorably. Anyway, this is server side. The only similar act on the client side I can rmember is making Office run on Android.

It's a correct observation. Why switch from an extensible mark-up format to a non-extensible data format?

Maybe it is possible to put comments in .csproj files, but that isn't exactly a common use case.

I really don't understand why this is being downvoted into oblivion. It's a valid question.

One answer is simply that C# is an awesome language. It is roughly as expressive as Ruby and Python, yet it is usually faster and it has much more powerful tooling (MonoDevelop, Visual Studio), partly enabled by its static typing (which is mostly up to taste, I suspect).

Also, .NET is very batteries-included and the open source ecosystem is decent (decent, not good).

As an example, I currently run a team that develops a C# backend. We dev on Macs, Linuxes and Windowses, we deploy to Docker containers on Linux hosts, we use Postgres for data and the open source ServiceStack for API bindings. When e.g. one of our Mac devs does a deploy, not a single byte of Microsoft code is touched.

I'm not saying you should do this too. But it's a valid option, and you can perfectly well do C# without depending on Microsoft tooling or paying them anything. Of course the future is still very much determined by MS, so we're betting that MS doesn't kill Mono-for-Linux once they buy Xamarin. But that's not very different from Oracle and Java, really. MS made stronger and fairer community promises, if that's something.

It's too bad you were downvoted, this is a good question.

First, I'd question why you'd still think of it as a proprietary ecosystem. It's an open source (Apache 2), cross platform framework. It's not even directly released by Microsoft, it's released under MS Open Tech, which is a foundation just focused on open source development. And it's not just "throw it over the wall open source", it's an open source project that's set up for and encouraging contributions.

Even the compiler it runs on is open source, also under Apache 2 (http://roslyn.codeplex.com/license).

As for the "why" bit, here are some reasons:

- If you're developing on Windows, Visual Studio is a pretty good web editor. That includes Visual Express for Web (free) with the Web Essentials extension (also free, works on Express). You can develop on Windows (inc. a VM) and deploy anywhere.

- C# really is a pretty nice language. It's static and compiled, but has support for some dynamic features. Linq is really useful. Generics work well. The language spec is under an open standard. Everyone has their own preferences on languages, but it's pretty nice.

- As a web framework running compiled assemblies, it can run pretty fast.

- If you're interoperating with .NET and/or Mono, of course this is pretty useful.

- C# and .NET are actually really good for cross-platform development (e.g. Xamarin hits ios, android, wp, maybe even tizen soon). For example, C# runs better on my Mac than Ruby does on my Windows machines.

- If you find that ASP.NET MVC 6 (the version vNext will run, including MVC / Web API / SignalR) works for you but you don't like Windows, you could dev on Mac / *nix and publish to Azure / Mono / whatever.

Languages, libraries, performance, ...

So, the question is unanswered but someone took the time to express their displeasure that it was asked...

Very telling. And I think I now have my answer.

Here's a web application https://github.com/davidfowl/HelloWorldVNext

Good thing it says ASP.NET vNext then.