Like all those involved with the .NET ecosystem I’ve been slowly digesting the recent news on the whole thing going open source and cross platform. I’ve been jogging down a few notes in light of a future blog post, but then Jeremy Miller came out with his own Some Thoughts on the New .NET which is almost exactly the post I wanted to write. So when he writes:
I’ve started to associate .Net “classic” with seemingly constant aggravations like strong naming conflicts, csproj file merge hell, slow compilation, slow nuget restores, and how absurdly heavyweight and bloated that Visual Studio.Net has become over the years.
It is me. No it’s actually Jeremy but really it’s me. I also share his concerns on the future OSS .NET community him:
So much of .Net is open source now and they even take contributions. Awesome, great, but my very first reaction was that it doesn’t matter much because the .Net community as a whole isn’t as participatory as other communities and that would have to change before ASP.Net vNext being OSS matters. It’ll be interesting to me to see if that changes over time.
I’m very involved with the Python language and its community. I released open source projects for both platforms and frankly I’ve been shocked by the difference in culture between the two communities. I am really hoping that, in due time, .NET going open source will also cause its community to evolve as a whole.
And what about coding on a Mac (or Linux for the matter)? He goes on with:
After a couple years now of using a Mac, I’d really prefer to stay on that side of things and hopefully give my Windows VM much more time off. Mac OS being a first class citizen for the new .Net and the progress on the OmniSharp tools for Sublime or MacVim is going to make the new ASP.Net vNext runtime a much easier sell in my shop.
I’ve been working on a Mac for years, confining Windows on a VM, doing Python with Vim as much as possible. My God I love Vim. My Visual Studio runs VsVim (which is open source by the way). Even my Xamarin Studio on OSX runs in vi mode (which sucks unfortunately). I would never go back to a Windows machine but that does not mean that I don’ want to use C# or F#. Even these days most of my coding is C# in XS/OSX or Vim with OmniSharp, a project I’ve been experimenting with since when the plugin for Vim was released. So native .NET on OSX and Unix? Yes please.
I am in the process of writing a C# iOS application. The data layer is SQLite encapsulated in a Portable Class so we can use it on both Windows and iOS. The HTTP/REST client is also portable, open source and consumed on both platforms. And now even the mobile UI is C# and portable between Android, iOS and Windows Phone thanks to Xamarin.Forms. If you ask me, the future looks bright.
You should read Jeremy post on his site.
If you want to get in touch, I am @nicolaiarocci on Twitter.