Microsoft Releases .NET Core Preview For Linux & OS X

When I wrote about the release of Microsoft’s free and open-source text editor, Visual Studio Code, yesterday, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen next. We’re talking about Microsoft, of all companies, becoming more integrated into alternative operating systems. The company had a big presence at LinuxFest Northwest, which just happened over the weekend, and then it released a cross-platform editor mere days later. It even had the CEO of Docker, a company that’s built on open-source software, to speak at the conference!

The thought that wouldn’t leave me was, “What’s next? .NET?”

Little did I realize, that’s another component to this big puzzle announced yesterday. Alongside the release of VS Code, VS Studio 2015 RC, and Application Insights, comes the first preview release of .NET Core and ASP .NET 5 for OS X and Linux – a FreeBSD version is en route.

.NET Core was actually announced last fall, and it was no secret that Microsoft would be cross-platform (again, another fact that flew right on over my head). It’s effectively an open-source version of .NET, but it won’t have feature parity to the Windows-exclusive .NET Framework. However, that likely won’t matter (except for backwards-compatibility), as Microsoft seems to be banking on developers giving .NET Core a try for their Web and cloud-based applications.

If you’re a developer who’d like to get started with .NET Core, on any OS, you should start here. If you’d like to explore all of the projects related to .NET Core, including CoreCRL and CoreFX, head here.

What’s next? Microsoft porting the desktop version of Office on over to these alternative OSes? Now that’s a tall order.