Microsoft was working extensively on its open source project: .NET Core and it was released officially recently. It is a trimmed variant of .NET Framework and can be used for creation of mobile, desktop and web applications. It can be used on Linux, OS X and Microsoft platforms, thereby making it easy for developers. With the new .NET Core 1.0, Microsoft has catapulted its position in the open source world.
.NET was made available on all operating systems two years back and Microsoft had created different versions of .NET so that people could adapt to it easily. With this move, Microsoft positioned itself as an open source company as well, which was definitely not the way Microsoft was perceived in the market previously. However, it was a smart move by Microsoft to stay agile and generate more leads for its cloud business. Due to this, Azure, the cloud services platform has flourished and open source technology has helped them increase their sales.
.Net Core and ASP .NET Core are derived from the server side of Microsoft technology and serves as an important product for Microsoft’s growth, as per Richard Lander, the Program Manager at Microsoft.
.NET is undergoing the largest transformation it has ever seen and the foundation has been changed based on the evolving market demands.
There were multiple functionalities that were not available in the .NET platforms previously, such as reading locally stored files. However, a great level of optimization has happened with ASP .NET, thereby making it easy for cloud or on-premise application development.
Scott Hanselman from Microsoft also spoke in detail regarding the change in Microsoft and how open source has evolved in Microsoft ever since he started working 15 years ago. After working immensely on the project, Microsoft was able to come up with .NET Core 1.0.
Over 18,000 .net developers and 1,300 companies collaborated on the .NET Core 1.0 project and the .NET Standard Library was also created so that apps running on servers could be repurposed for usage on any device. The complier languages, libraries etc. are all available in GitHub. RedHat is officially the first version of Linux to offer support for .NET Core 1.0.
With this, Microsoft wants to make its framework more accessible and make it popular among developers. This is easily achieved with their open source framework. However, with the new open source, you cannot totally stop using .NET and ASP.NET, as some of the functionalities might not be available in .NET Core.
Also, .NET core is operated by a steward group that is not dependant on Microsoft, named the .NET Foundation, which has collaborated with Samsung and Red Hat recently. If you are looking for a .NET Core software development kit, you can use it from the platform as mentioned. Also, extensions of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are available for .NET related work. Alternatively, you can download the latest update of Visual Studio to get started with .NET Core projects.
