Bowst Team
Yesterday was the first day of Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference and it was one heck of a way to start the event. Over the last couple of years Microsoft has really been shifting their focus back onto consumers and working to build great products again. It’s a Microsoft I’ve dearly missed. In any case, there were some really great announcements yesterday around Windows 10 and the Azure platform, but I want to talk about the .Net platform ones.
First, a quick recap
Last year’s Build conference unveiled a lot of new things in the Microsoft world, from an obvious favorite like Cortana, to DirectX 12 and TypeScript. On the .Net front, they announced the .Net native compiler, TypeScript, and the .Net foundation. But aside from some of these big ticket items, there was an underlying push from Microsoft to make more of their existing products open source. It’s still shocking, in a wonderful way, that they have a Github account with tons of repos (https://github.com/Microsoft). This year, they followed suit and added even more into the open source and cross-platform communities.
.Net core – for Windows, Mac, and Linux
Yup, that happened. Per this great yet lengthy blog from the .Net engineering team (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/12/04/introducing-net-core.aspx) .Net core “is a new .Net stack that is optimized for open source development and agile delivery on Nuget.”. It’s completely open source and easily found on Github (https://github.com/dotnet/corefx). In short, you’re now able to consume a modular .Net framework that supports multiple verticals on multiple platforms. Furthermore, the .Net core platform is going to be delivered as a set of NuGet packages rather than be a machine-wide framework. All of this combines to breathe more life into the expanding .Net platform.
What’s a framework without a solid IDE?
It’s possible that you’re now wondering about all the different scenarios of how to use the .Net core on your Ubuntu box. But how are you going to write all of that code? They have an answer for that too – Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/Download). While it’s still a technical preview, the idea and groundwork are there. In short, Visual Studio Code is a lightweight cross-platform IDE for developing .Net solutions. But really it’s more than that, out-of-the-box it also has solid support for HTML, CSS, LESS, SASS, and JSON, integrates directly with Git, contains a streamlined debugging experience with support for Node.js, and has IntelliSense. As if that wasn’t enough, it also acts as a glorified text-editor for a variety of other languages including C++, jade, PHP, Python, XML, Batch, F#, DockerFile, Coffee Script, Java, HandleBars, R, Objective-C, PowerShell, Luna, Visual Basic, and Markdown.
TL;DR
The first day of the Build conference showed us that Microsoft is looking to make it’s mark both in open-source and cross-platform products. By improving and expanding the .Net platform, Nuget, and Visual Studio they’re getting closer to creating a comprehensive cross-platform development suite that just keeps making life easier for developers.
