Released under the Apache 2 license.

http://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#License.txt

Which is really good. It put a final say in the question about patents.

What does this mean for the Mono project? http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

This is still Windows only. If anything Mono now has more resources to pull from to improve their project.

It's a compiler. It takes input and produces output. There shouldn't be much in there that has any platform dependency.

For any compiler, platform-dependence of the compiler itself is strictly tied to platform-dependence of outputs.

Edit: I confused roslyn with the recently announced AOT compiler.

Miguel showed personally on stage they integrated it in mono (in a version that, obviously, at the moment is not out there)

Yep, he's compiled on stage an IOS app with a version of Mono that had Roslyn integration.

I'm not sure who this new company is going by the name of Microsoft, but I'm glad they seem to be running things now.

Wow, this is impressive. Does this mean the .Net framework is next?

They've released it under "MICROSOFT REFERENCE SOURCE LICENSE (MS-RSL)" some time ago, but I'm not sure what the future plan is.

You can view and download the whole .NET source here: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/

That is awesome. What about the CLR VM?

They also announced as part of this that they are putting a large swatch of their .NET Source code under Apache 2 and accepting pull requests.

Folks, this is a very big deal for Microsoft. Who would have imagined this 10 years ago?

Here is an image that shows what they are putting into the community https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkT9oBcCQAAHIAV.jpg:large

Who would have imagined it 5 years ago?

Who would have imagined it five months ago?

They open-sourced a lot of things related to .NET in the recent years. That Roslyn was to join those things doesn't exactly come as a surprise. It's still welcome, though.

At that moment they already released part of .NET, asp.net and azure.

I think you wanted to say that the "change" was made only thanks to the exit of Ballmer, but I think that's an exaggeration.

Quite a lot of people actually. These moves have been on the cards for years. Just waiting now for the next big move in the coming months of when they acquire Xamarin.

I was hoping there would be an announcement at Build that they had acquired Xamarin, but that didn't happen. All that was mentioned was that they were a partner that they were working with. Still a possibility in the future though.

The open sourcing of Roslyn can only mean good things for Xamarin.

Microsoft clearly is involving Xamarin in this announcement -- parts of Xamarin are going into the same dot net Foundation that's in charge of this, and de Icaza was on stage for part of this. It may be best for Microsoft at this point if they support and involve Xamarin without buying it outright, people who want to use Xamarin with MS tooling can take advantage of Visual Studio integration, people who are wary of Microsoft can use Xamarin Studio and Mono and never officially touch Microsoft's stack while still becoming part of their ecosystem.

yulaow, clearly the lead-time on a lot of this stuff is longer than Ballmer's been gone, so yeah, not fair to put all this on his departure. "Five months" was a pithy play off "five years," nothing more or less than that.

Does it really take that long to make a decision to open source something? Perhaps for a large company it does, I dunno. The projects themselves may have been in development for a long time (this is definitely true of Roslyn), but that doesn't mean they were always going to be open sourced.

They announced a Foundation with members outside of Microsoft, in charge of a mix of their code and code from Xamarin. So you need to coordinate all of that. You also probably need to have lawyers review all the code and make sure that MS has the rights to everything included so they can do this, someone to scrub all the comments to make sure developers didn't throw in something embarrassing or worse, you need to set up workflows for reviewing community bug reports and patches... this isn't something you can do in an afternoon.

... as awesome as this is, I'm gonna be That Guy:

No WPF?

WPF is more or less owned by the Windows team. This is all stuff under Scott Guthrie's control

WPF just got some love a few minutes ago - they've got plans for a new release of it by the sound of things.

I have a few WPF 4 bugs that were marked "fix in next version" 3-4 years ago, and then it was announced that there is no next version - i'm in the process of moving off WPF and this newfound love is not going to change anything.

Similar problem with IE for me. I raised a case with gold partner support when IE9 came out as it broke ClickOnce download prompting. Been bouncing back and forth between framework and IE teams ever since.

Result: we now have to ship a .reg file to our clients before we can launch our shit via ClickOnce. That's only 2000 people we now have to hand hold through this.....

Yeah, ClickOnce should go down as one of the bigger dead-end embarrassments, since they torpedo'd installer projects in VS2012.

Why did they get rid of Installer Projects? We are still on VS2010 and although it isn't a massive issue to use a different installer system, it seems a very odd decision. I mean, you are writing apps for their OS using their tools. Why wouldn't you want to create an installer? Daft!

It's because the installer packages stink. WiX is a far better platform.

I thought WPF was killed during the whole mess of killing Silverlight, etc. a few years back?

No WPF is still there. XAML is still the basis for windows store apps, and windows phone apps.

XAML != WPF. XAML is a language for object instantiation, thats it. Similar to XIBs in the Apple world.

There are no less than 3 similar but different and incompatible UI libraries that can be instantiated by XAML: WPF, Silverlight (WPF/e), and Windows store/phone (WinRT). WPF is dead like WinForms but the only solution for normal windows apps unless somethings changed with WinRT to make non full screen apps with.

If you have ever tried to develop across more than one of these with a shared code base you will know how frustratingly similar yet how incompatible and different they are. They are not supersets or subsets they are forks.

Windows 8.1.1 allows non-fullscreen WinRT apps.

So yeah, when I said WPF, I meant XAML/WinRT. My main desktop use is supporting WinForms legacy apps so I don't keep up with the new GUI frameworks.

Once again the whole KILL MONO FUD was the actions of the Open Source Community in the last 5 years. I never understood how in the world they got this is a trap from everything that was happening.

I don't agree with RMS many times but in this one way he was 100% wrong when he targeted mono.

You honestly don't get it?

I really like microsoft products and I use them every day, however the business model is too lock people in to their ecosystem so that you have to purchase licenses for their products.

Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free platform.

Unless I'm somehow completely misunderstanding their business model - killing Mono just makes business sense.

I think you misunderstood the parent. They are talking about the open source community and RMS, not Microsoft trying to kill Mono.

Red Hat, for instance, makes a ton of money off the reverse model, where they let CentOS give away their core offering for free (heck, they're even paying people to work on CentOS now), and they make their money off clients who have money and are willing to exchange it for support and such for otherwise free offerings. There's really no reason Microsoft can't do something similar here (and they seem to be trending in that direction, although not quite to the extent Red Hat has) -- a mix of free-as-in-beer and open source tools for a "core" offering, so people can get into the Microsoft developer ecosystem, and a variety of paid offerings on top of that as their needs grow. And the extent of Microsoft's partnership with Xamarin shows just how much Microsoft is depending on Mono for their strategy, it'd be senseless at best to kill it.

You honestly think Microsoft it trying to shift to a RedHat-like business plan? That they'll switch to becoming a support provider?

I think what RedHat is doing is nice, but it's really not on the same scale to what Microsoft does; not to mention that they essentially have no monopoly/lockin - b/c anyone can start doing what they do (ie. start providing support for CentOS).

The synergy of microsoft services is closely tied to their ability to lock in developers and customers. Devs like C#, they write code to run on windows, windows gets more OS-exclusive software, more people buy Windows and Office, etc. etc.

Mono means people can run their C# work on free software, which mean they stop looking any better more appealing than the competition

Put together with this "Parsing Microsoft’s Decision to Cut Windows Fees"[1] It may well be that MS is feeling enough pressure from Android and to a lesser extent linux to give it a go.

1. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/parsing-microsofts-...

No, not really. It's clear to me we are moving to a devices and services model. More people writing C# means a broad reach on everything from netduinos to iphones to desktops to the cloud.

* I work for MSFT, on the Cloud.

Any way we can get some clear story on Mono or where the direction is going? Maybe this has already happened as part of this Build event.

I work at Microsoft, in Azure.

What I hear privately from the people I meet who work on the .Net and Visual Studio side of things is consistent with what the company is now saying publicly.

Basically: "We luvvv Mono" :-)

Are you referring to this? It doesn't sound like he was trying to kill Mono, he just didn't want to depend on it because of the patent issue.

https://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono

So, five years later Microsoft makes another step in the right direction, and you think he's wrong because he didn't want to risk building the open source environment around something that could go away with a simple threat.

Btw, doesn't Microsoft make more money from Android patents than Microsoft phones? Microsoft does exercise their patents.

Speaking of which, have the patent concerns about ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms gone away yet?

signs of the new Satya Nadella era?

All this started long ago. Roslyn has been in development for a few years and that was still under Ballmer's leadership. Also many of the other things they're unveiling and open-sourcing now started way before Nadella took over as CEO.

But my guess would be that Ballmer stepping down was sort of symbolic in this regard. With a new CEO it looks more like a "new Microsoft" doing all these things.

Just because they were working on it before doesn't mean that the plan at the time was to open-source those things...

Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).

I don't think it's particularly fair to lump Apple with the rest since 14 years later [1] the core OS is still open source [2], and they're actively working on several high profile open source projects (e.g. Webkit, CUPS, and clang). They're not exactly irrelevant either.

[1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Dar... [2] http://opensource.apple.com/

Given that all of those are already open sourced, do you know how bad it would look to close source them now? Especially Webkit/KHTML - that would be a PR disaster. I don't keep track of what Apple does - have they open sourced anything within the last few years? If not, I think they fit right in with the other companies.

Grand Central Dispatch[0] is the latest (2009) I can think of...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch

None of them should be lumped together. There's no evidence that open-sourcing is a "standard play" demonstrative of anything as specific as what leoc claimed or with predictive power. That list of companies seems to demonstrate the opposite, in fact.

Hate to burst your bubble, but the only thing apple has going for them is the iPhone, which is arguably a fad. The reason Rolex never goes out of style is because they never change their style, and apple is no Rolex like a lot of people seem to think. People easily forget about all the hype around the iMac g3. Sure, it changed the company, but they still have yet to over take windows. Now Android is out selling the iPhone because of the business model. No large companies would ever replace current desktops with iMacs except in specialized "labs" where they're needed (mostly for designers). Apple isn't dominating any market. They're not on servers, they're not embedded, they're not on super computers, they're not on mainframes. They're no where, but if you spend your whole life surrounded by graphic designers and programmers and hacker news, they're going to appear to be everywhere.

Only thing Apple has going for them is the iPhone.

And the iPad, which is kicking the hell out of Android tablets (to my consternation, because I'm primarily an Android user and their tablets are terrible).

And the Macbook Pro, which is making pretty major inroads at leading-edge companies. A buddy of mine is working on *nix software at IBM and they asked if he wanted a Thinkpad or an MBP; that blew my mind.

They don't do big iron, but they move a lot of product and very little of it is faddish. They Get It, or have Gotten It historically, and a lot of people respond well to that. They might at some point no longer Get It, but until then, saying that they only have the iPhone going for them is wishcasting.

You're right, how could I forget the iPad, the thing is the business model they have for all of their products is unsustainable. The iPad is doing well now, just as the iPhone did initially, but less and less people are buying the iPhone because the Android environment has had time to develop. Even chromebooks out sold mac books [1] in 2013. A lot of companies allow developers to use Linux too. The fact that people working for large tech companies are allowed to develop for *nix on a macbook is kind of irrelevant. The circle jerk on HN around apple is deplorable, but lets let the down votes commence.

[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/googles-chromebook-outsells-apples-ma...

Are less and less people buying iPhones, or more and more people buying phones? (Not a rhetorical question, I don't know whose numbers to trust for mobile stuff.)

Apple's business is not one that has to own a market to make gobsmacking amounts of money. As such I doubt they see being outsold by Chromebooks as being a serious problem; they've been being outsold in the laptop market forever and are still making yachtloads of cash.

I know Chromebooks outsold MacBooks but I don't think you can compare them. Chromebooks are like disposable cameras. If they are referring to the cheapy plastic things, I wonder if people are buying them as devices to use whilst on the toilet or in areas where mugging is a risk?

Most Chromebooks are glorified phone hardware. Even the one with the whizzbang screen has lousy soldered-on local storage, so it fails as a microcomputer. It essentially is a terminal with a fantastic screen. I certainly wouldn't attempt to use one to develop on (and I mean develop on, not RDP/VNC/SSH to a box elsewhere). Could I write C++ on it for multiple OSes thanks to virtualization on a Chromebook? I know my needs are niche but I don't think Chromebooks compete with MacBooks, even if they look similar-ish and one has outsold the other. Out of interest, have Kindles outsold MacBooks? Would that be the death-knell for MacBooks? Really is comparing Apples and Oranges I think.

My acer c720p has a haswell processor, 4 GB ram and I'm working from ssd right now. You can dual boot into Linux and develop in rails, vim, x-windows is 3d accelerated. Virtualbox, vmware, libreoffice, postgresql, nginx - everything works. Linux is not as shiny as OSX, but it gets the job done.

A buddy of mine is working on *nix software at IBM and they asked if he wanted a Thinkpad or an MBP; that blew my mind.

Except, you know, IBM doesn't have anything to do with Thinkpad anymore, and hasn't for years.

"Except, you know," that it's a highly conservative company and offering a line developer a Mac is, in my experience, kind of weird.

  Apple isn't dominating any market.

You're obviously going by the number of units sold, not the profit share. And you're not technically wrong. But isn't that a little bit like measuring the number of swings a baseball player takes instead of the number of times he gets a hit?

In the PC market Apple is absolutely destroying all comers: 45% of the profit share in 2012. HP, Lenovo, Dell, Acer and Asus combine for the remaining 55%. (I couldn't find numbers for 2013) http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/04/18/apples-ma...

They're dominating similarly in the mobile market. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-smartphone-profit-share...

I mean, if you want to say their products are crap - that's subjective and we can't argue that.

But if you don't think they're doing incredibly well in their key markets, that's diametrically opposed to the truth.

Lambo is dominating the car market by your logic [1]

[1] http://www.lambocars.com/lambonews/lamborghini_among_most_pr...

I'll get downvoted for this one but they have a similar characteristic as well:

they both catch fire!

I had a 2010 MBP go up in flames and an immediate colleague's one screen went phut and melted. Lambos do this too (google images)

What was the 2010 MBP made from? Do the unibody ones fare better than the plastic models? Were you typing so fast that the keyboard caught fire? Are you Superman?

Answers in order please.

Market share matters.

Apple were doing well by profit share in the PC market in the early 1990s when they were as now a bigger company than MS. But because there were so many more PCs out there software developers and hardware manufacturers targeted MS not Apple and then when Apple machines were poor in the mid to late 1990s Apple almost disappeared.

If Android is, say, 80%+ of the market at some point and it's no longer worth making things for iOS Apple and Apple have a generation or two of stuff that isn't that good Apple could be in the same position as they were in the late 1990s and it's unlikely Jobs will be back again to save them.

Judging the success of Apple by its profit share is like judging a baseball player by his salary. I get that if you personally identify with the baseball player and want to see him have a nice life, but I think the most important metric for a baseball fan is the extent to which he helps his team beat the other teams. The only thing Apple wins is the mindshare of relatively wealthy (American) people and an enormous amount of hedge and institutional fund investment. It's an easy buy in an extremely precarious, but bullish, frothy economy and if it tanks it'll 1) start slowly, and 2) you won't get fired, because everybody's doing it.

Yes, although I could pick nits about the significance of each of these (Webkit being open source is somewhat less significant that it appears since web browsers nowadays are de facto somewhat unforkable; the open-sourcing of clang was partly or mainly an attack on the GPL). But while Apple's continued doing many of those things (and done some similar things like GCD), they've also started doing other things they weren't doing back in 1999 or 2003, like breaking new ground in walled-garden application platforms and aggressive use of patents. The iPhone has never been as open to non-native apps as desktop OS X, while even desktop OS X's support for them is declining. (That's especially significant if you take the post-PC-era viewpoint and see phone/tablet devices as displacing or succeeding the PC rather than just supplementing them.) So overall Apple fits the mould pretty well.

Not to mention the fact that webkit itself is a fork of khtml - so while apple's contributions are clearly valuable, it's quite a different story. If apple had not open sourced webkit, given its origins, that would have been resoundingly bad PR at the time.

Apple built on oss foundations, and most of what they've open sourced is simply a result of them not closing forks of once open projects, which is very valuable, but nevertheless less impressive that releasing important bits of their own making.

Darwin was based on NeXT, which as far as I can recall, wasn't open source before Apple opened it. While a number of the userland tools were (and are) open source, I don't recall the kernel being open.

There's also things like the streaming server which as far as I can tell was strictly an Apple project. I think libdispatch was also strictly an Apple project.

I mean it's based on Mach and FreeBSD both of which are open source.

Apple took advantage of things that were already open source. How many innovative, profitable programs has it developed itself and then made open source?

The fact that the core OS is still open source doesn't actually mean much when there's a huge layer of proprietary code on top, does it?

The Darwin Streaming Server for one. There's also the Apple Lossless Codec. Plus, they're heavily involved in work on LLVM and have been for quite some time. Lastly, There's Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch). Plus, WebKit is quite far from it's KHTML roots.

Having followed a fair number of MS bloggers/podcasts currently in and around their web tools (ASP.NET, MVC, etc) teams... I honestly believe they understand the value of open source.

Visual Studio and their MVC framework continue to impress me (I mostly work in Ruby today, but have to maintain some .NET stuff) and MS takes inspiration from successful open-source tools and frameworks where needed. Many of their recent advancements over the last 3-4 years have clearly been the work of engineers who enjoy and value the best of the open source world.

I'm not trying to tell you that Microsoft is suddenly our warm, fuzzy friend. As even Scott Hanselman would gladly admit, they're ultimately trying to sell you software licenses or Azure services.

But it seems to me that they're using open source the right way in order to achieve that goal, as opposed to the bad old "embrace and extend / embrace and extinguish" days at Microsoft.

Whether or not Microsoft has earned another shot with us or not is definitely up for debate, and with all the cool shit happening in the open source world it's probably even a moot point to an extent.

But they're definitely doing more than cargo-culting in Redmond these days.

I don't know, I see this as a good sign but for me it's still "too little too late". At least release it under a copyleft license, make it usable with previous versions of Visual Studio (it only works with 2013) and I'll feel more confident that you aren't setting a trap.

Non-copyleft licenses can easily align with the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. The value of .NET for most developers is closely associated with Visual Studio. They can make the next version closed source and have Visual Studio only accept that one and we are back to the same old Microsoft. Sure, you'd still have the previous open source version, but who cares when most people will probably just move on to the next.

Non-copyleft licenses can easily align with the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy.

What? I would think if anything giving everyone else a crippled license while retaining copyright etc yourself that would be an even bigger setup for a EEE.

Remember, MS can do w h a t e v e r they want with that code anyway it is not lke they'd be bound by a copyleft on their own code.

(Unless they also started accepting patches without copyright assignment I guess.)

Exactly. There's a reason why more restrictive licenses are more conducive to dual licensing models than less restrictive ones.

A non-copyleft license effectively means that Microsoft, should they try EEE, has to compete not only with free as in beer and free as in freedom, they also have to compete with all the closed source competition they are subsidizing in this effort.

If you believe that more competition is good, the less restrictions on the code from a big vendor, the better.

Copyleft licenses are more conductive to dual licensing because they give you no other choice if you want to sell a closed source premium version. That's the only reason. And for that to work you have to get copyright assignment.

I think your view is pretty naive. They develop the platform and own the IDE that's synonymous with it. They can keep any other compiler off the IDE if they want that, you would be competing with them at their house, which is doomed to fail.

With copyleft without assignment at least any later version would effectively remain free for all, whether Microsoft wants it or not. You don't have to believe and hope, it's just the way it is.

Well, I was surely thinking about the option without copyright assignment. Everybody giving assignment to Microsoft? Yeah, that's a bigger and much more obvious trap.

I don't understand what was so upsetting about my previous comment thatgot so many downvotes. Microsoft has a history of being hostile to FOSS. I will agree that they have changed their attitude when they make a serious effort to assure us that there aren't potential traps in this move. Otherwise I'll say thanks but no thanks.

I don't understand what was so upsetting about my previous comment thatgot so many downvotes.

Didn't downvote but I think the ones who did did so because they found your comment misleading. I happen to agree with them but chose to explain the reasoning behind it instead of downvoting.

Read einhverfr's comment again, espescially the "the less restrictions on the code f r o m a big vendor, the better.".

See, some of us has had to work within and around various funny and not-so-funny licenses for years. Both commercial but open source as well..

I think one would be exceedingly foolish not to exercise the very greatest of caution. This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery.

But I do indeed think this is better than not having happened.

Yeah, I think that's totally fair to say.

I wouldn't place bets on any strategy that relied on Microsoft not closing the doors again at some point in the future, on future versions of their development stack.

Like you said, though, this is better than not having happened.

I don't see why they would. This has been an obvious move for a long time, keeping it closed never really made any sense to me. They gained nothing from .Net being closed except hate and utter avoidance from people like me (vocal early adopters.)

MS doesn't really make money off C# or .Net directly, they make money off the windows licenses you need to run the resulting code.

Open C#/.Net = stronger, longer lasting community / free improvements = more users = more licenses.

It also has other side effects like fostering [more] open source frameworks/plugins for their platform, which again, strengthens their position.

MS doesn't really make money off C# or .Net directly, they make money off the windows licenses you need to run the resulting code.

On this page: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/microsoft-updates-visual-st...

There is this quote:

Microsoft also today announced that Visual Studio 2013 has sold over 3.7 million copies since its release less than five months ago. That makes it the fastest-selling release of Visual Studio to date.

Based on those numbers and the fact that Visual Studio prices range from about $1,000.00 for VS Professional up to $13,000.00 for VS Ultimate, I'd say they make quite a bit of money of C#, .Net (and of course C++ as well).

I payed $99 for VS2013 Professional, as did many others. Which is probably a key factor in why it is the fastest selling release.

Impressive numbers.

VS2012 was shockingly bad. VS2010 users who dodged it were now 2 releases behind.

Releasing .NET sources could help Mono development and ultimately lead to .NET world not being locked to Windows (at least on servers, you'd still want Windows for Visual Studio when doing development)

A Mono developer should avoid looking at the .NET code at all costs. That would only set them up for patent law suits.

This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery.

Any examples? Besides "bundling IE with the OS and pressuring some OEM vendors back in the nineties"?

I would also add that Google, Apple, Facebook and others are hardly without their track records of "profound fuckery"... and yet it's only Microsoft for which the knee-jerk reaction to any bit of news seems to be "it sucks."

Oh come on, did you miss the huge backlash when fb took over occulus rift? And Google get a lot of shit for closing much used and loved services.

But Microsoft wanted to remove the open web, in favour of all their proprietary services, such as Active-X. Places like South Korea foolishly followed the MS paradigm, and they are suffering for it now. Microsoft wanted to control everything, and kill Linux and over open source projects by spreading FUD.

So not dissimilar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client ?

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents

Continue here if you feel extraordinarily ambitious: http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720... (Comes vs. Microsoft)

Damn, give it a break those Halloween Documents were over 10 years ago. The pricing thing is one bit, Microsoft hasn't really been too shy about that, but neither has Intel. The whole bundling of IE - how else did you expect someone to browse the web? I don't get it. People don't want IE in Windows yet can never give an answer of how people will get anything else. Then Microsoft has to give people choice. Such a vocal minority.

Yeah. I get so mad when the default Ubuntu install gives me Firefox. Sure I can always just immediately use FF to download another browser, but it is so anti-competitive! Such monopoly!

Seriously though, you have to have an initial browser to be able to get the browser you want. Of course a company will make that initial browser the one they make themselves. I've never understood the outrage over this.

10 years ago Microsoft was unlike any other big company because of their stronghold on personal computing - being able to use their monopoly on one market to crush their competition in other markets and they did so repeatedly. Startup founders for example always had to take into account the "Microsoft problem".

I don't blame them for bundling IE in Windows, not bundling a browser would be foolish and you can say that Microsoft bundling IExplorer in Windows is what made the web so ubiquitous - I blame them for (1) not making IE cross-platform, which meant that alternatives like, Mac OS, Linux, OS/2 suffered for years because the web was optimized for IE - actually IExplorer was released for Mac OS but it wasn't the same, which made the problem worse as it stopped alternatives for awhile, (2) promoting Windows-only technologies like ActiveX, still in use by many online government services in many countries and (3) after they crushed Netscape with IExplorer 5, which was really good technically speaking, they completely halted the development of IExplorer and of the web in general. IExplorer 6 was a cosmetic release, after which the team was dissolved, many of the members ending up working on Silverlight and other such bullshit. Not mentioning web standards here because the web standards were whatever IExplorer was doing, 10 years ago.

In so far as forgiveness for mistakes that happened 10 years ago - dude, many of us don't have a short memory and many of us don't forgive so easily, not when we aren't seeing signs that a company changed. I'm happy for these recent announcements - it seems that there is interest amongst the upper management to change things, now that Ballmer is gone. And Roslyn (with F# before it) - are the first projects of any significance that they are open-sourcing and F# is finally accepting contributions from third-parties.

But lo and behold - Microsoft is choking Android with patents infringement threats, because obviously, when you can't innovate, you can always litigate, especially when you have a war chest that was built starting in the early eighties. I don't hate patent trolls as much as I hate big companies that are becoming obsolete and with stuffed legal departments that sit on their asses all day thinking of how to "monetize" their bullshit IP, that was built on top of prior art in a time when software patents weren't the norm mind you.

So I'll forgive Microsoft the day they stop threatening and litigating and strong-arm their way into new markets. And don't think that I'm not seeing what Google and Apple are doing. Neither of them resemble the companies I fell in love with years ago. And they should pay attention to Microsoft, as public trust once lost is very hard to regain.

1. Internet Explorer standard compliance : Internet Explorer has introduced an array of proprietary extensions to many of the standards, including HTML, CSS, and the DOM. This has resulted in a number of web pages that appear broken in standards-compliant web browsers and has introduced the need for a "quirks mode" to allow for rendering improper elements meant for Internet Explorer in these other browsers. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer]

2. SCO versus Novell : On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means.[60] Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real.[61] BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft, but that no money for it came directly from them.[62] In addition to the Baystar involvement, Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to "Unix and Unix-related patents", despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO.[63] This deal was widely seen in the press as a boost to SCO's finances which would help SCO with its lawsuit against IBM.[64][65] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies]

3. Patent troll : [http://gigaom.com/2014/01/21/cable-industry-sues-apple-backe...]

Well, I'd like to see Visual Studio for Linux with support for Java, Scala, Clojure, Haskell and other non-Microsoft technologies. That's my wishlist in this bright new era of Microsoft openness.

I don't like Microsoft but Visual Studio is the only IDE I've ever tried that is substantially better than gedit/jedit. The auto-completion (intellisense) is just delightful to use.

Is Visual Studio auto-complete significantly different from IntelliJ or Eclipse? There are many great editors an the continium between gedit and Visual Studio, such as Sublime, hell even vim and emacs have autocomplete plugins.

C# support in IntelliJ would be a dream come true!

(yes, I know about ReSharper - but that's just lipstick on a pig)

Pig? VS is considered one of the best IDEs out there. On par, if not better than IntelliJ.

If it was better, it would not need ReSharper.

Microsoft does great work in researching static code analysis, I only remember their auto-complete ten years ago for C++ code and it was miles ahead of anything else. It pops up in just the right moment and it just feels like a genuine "code assistant" instead of just an auto-complete. Unfortunately I don't really trust MS with developing great OSX software (see MS Office for Mac) so I'm not sure I'd want Visual Studio. But if they could pull of a proper port, it would be awesome.

MS Office for Mac is pretty well done IMHO

While I really like using MS Office 2013, I just can't use MS Office for Mac. It doesn't seem to integrate with the OS very well. I hope that the next version is better - hopefully retina screen support

The auto-complete is truly wonderful. XCode's isn't too bad (but does anyone know how to get it to pop up the parameters in a function, same as VS Ctrl-Shift-Space????) but the real stinker I had to use was Borlands Codegear 2007. That whole think was rubbish and engaged in colossal disk-churning for auto-complete. The linker crashed and the IDE was buggy as anything. A shame.

But VS auto-complete was a breath of fresh air afterwards.

If you haven't already - try AppCode out, it's superior to XCode in so many ways, and the functionality you've asked for is there (Ctrl+Shift+P).

I can't speak for IntelliJ (can never get the damn thing configured correctly), but Eclipse's autocomplete leaves a lot to be desired. This may be configurable, but my experience has been that it's finicky about when it will trigger.

I appreciate Eclipse's openness (and I tend to work with open source languages), but I must admit that purely examining the quality of the tool, Visual Studio is leagues ahead.

And Erich Gamma moved to MS three years ago...

I'd rather see C# across the board and write once run anywhere (eg release a linux distro with .net support built in).

I'm fairly sure Mono is installed by default on Ubuntu. I'm not sure what happens to Windows Forms or WPF code in that case though.

I think you have to define "they" here when you say "they understand the value of open source."

There are a lot of people at Microsoft who really do understand the value of open source. When I worked there ten years ago, there were plenty who did. When I wrote interop papers as an outside consultant in 2007, I worked with a unit that did.

But Microsoft also has a bunch of real problems that make it hard for them to realize this value, and so their options in going into it are somewhat limited. They can't pivot and become a services company because their whole Microsoft Partner network would be turned upside down. So they enter services in some key areas where their partners can't. It's a very delicate process, and it means for many on the administration side, the value of open source software for Microsoft is not as high as it would be for some other firms.

Nonetheless this is huge. Open sourcing the VB.net/C# compiler effectively means the possibility of an Linux port, which means that .net has the possibility to become write once, run anywhere even if the whole class libraries are not open sourced yet. This is a gamble for Microsoft because it reduces the barriers to moving from Windows to other platforms (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc).

Outside of my 9-5 work, I've probably deployed nearly as much C# code (via Mono) under Linux as I have under Windows. In a few ways it's been very nice, in others a bit frustrating. I think that if MS Dev-Div buys out Xamarin, we'll see where things are really headed here. It will either be a new era of OSS tools from MS, or back to the old "kill it for cross platform in v.Next" ...

I'm hoping that the tooling and integration gets a lot better in *nix, but nod sure how the Mono license (MIT iirc) and this new C# license (Apache) will jive together.

Personally, most of my new dev for the past couple years has been in node.js (which has its' own niceties and quirks).

Subtle difference: Apple and IBM have made use of free software such as FreeBSD, CUPS, Webkit, etc. Microsoft here is taking core technology and releasing it as free.

Important. Also, Oracle has bought/absorbed free software and slowly suffocated it (lookin at you, MySQL).

Apple has made Darwin open source. That, WebKit, and LLVM are pretty core technologies. A good portion of their technology is open. So, it's not just using free software and not giving back.

Isn't WebKit a fork of GPLv2 code?

Darwin is open source but is there anyone here who has actually used it or got a bootable usable machine from it? I mean, can you even run X on it successfully? I never could (didn't try very hard mind you).

The release of Darwin isn't a massive thing I don't think.

There have been several independent distributions of Darwin. The current one is Pure Darwin. http://www.puredarwin.org

There have been several independent ones because they all fail. I don't fully understand the dynamics here, but the inability of the community to create a usefully working OS out of all that open code for over a decade speaks volumes.

I wonder if it is because it never gained enough intertia when Macs are good enough with the Mach kernel etc.? I wonder why the varieties of Darwin didn't catch on?

Correction: Webkit wasn't some software Apple made use of. Apple created Webkit as we know it. What they DID use was KHTML, a far more barebones web rendering engine used in KDE, that Apple adopted, and turned into Webkit. Webkit as Apple had it (before Google stepped in) was an order of magnitude more evolved than KHTML.

KHTML was licensed under LGPL. Releasing the code was not a choice, but an obligation.

How about LLVM?

The raison d'etre for Apple's LLVM-based compiler was avoiding GPL3 restrictions of having to publish source code, it seems. They are frequently laggards in publishing parts of LLVM they care about and think of as competitive advantage (e.g. ARM64[1]), and they seem to not contribute much to parts of LLVM that they don't use themselves[2] (not that I find anything wrong with it, but portraying them as innate altruists is just not gonna fly.)

I would not be surprised if they get worse and worse over time in giving back to LLVM.

In short, Apple publishes free software, generally because they either (1) have to, due to GPL, or (2) feel the gain from the project is bigger than the cost of having to maintain a separate branch, so it makes perfect business sense.

(I am not criticizing that Apple has published free software and that is a good thing in general, regardless of the intent, but to say that they don't have their business interests in mind at all times and they fundamentally care about free software more than Microsoft is simply not true.)

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[1]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY0NzE

[2]: In our own experience developing techniques to uncover more than a hundred bugs in production GCC and LLVM (http://mehrdadafshari.com/emi/paper.pdf), we found GCC folks much more responsive to bug reports than Clang/LLVM folks, of which I draw the conclusion that the project is relatively under-resourced, at least in parts that are less relevant to Apple Darwin x86/64/arm backend.

Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!)

Remember that time (well within the iOS era) that Apple claimed that FaceTime would be an open standard for interoperability?

It's my understanding that the original plan for how FaceTime worked was derailed thanks to Apple losing a patent lawsuit.

Which lawsuit was that? I would be interested in knowing which patent they violated, and who the patent belonged to.

I'm sure I'm guilty of some logical fallacy or another here, but isn't responding to customer demand one of the core things espoused by the startup community? A big company does exactly what we're all saying is good for companies to do and everyone is up in arms with "TOO LATE M$" and the like (apologies for paraphrasing, and this is directed at several comments, not just this one). This is the kind of thing we WANT to see from big players, and while it's easy to say "close but nope", they do offer it up as "this is the direction we're going", and not "fine, this will have to do to shut you people up." Top MS dev team members have long been about open sourcing things, and I for one think it's awesome to see the company as a whole listening to it's best people, and the community that enables it.

Well, I certainly can't speak for the startup community, as I'm more strongly affiliated with the screwup community myself. ;) But no, I'm certainly not dismissing MS's new direction: it seems to be fairly genuine, and (some lingering patent/EEE concerns aside) good news, just as IBM's support (in various ways) for Linux or Sun's eventual open-sourcing of Java were good news. I'm all in favour of a kinder and gentler MS (as far as it goes and as long as it lasts). And I'm certainly not singling them out either, as the list of comparisons shows.

Microsoft, you're seducing me again. I cheated on you with Ruby and Rails development a couple of years ago, but you're making me consider coming back in full swing.

Competition is great for everybody and Microsoft is making all the right moves!

If you like Sinatra then check out Nancy.

For a compiled platform, nancy seems pretty slow http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

But not much behind ASP.net.

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

And quite a bit ahead of Sinatra

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

Then again, so's Perl. The joys of implementation differences.

I find Nancy a lot easier to develop with than ASP.net. You do pay for the expressiveness however.

At work I'm deploying a Nancy based project to parse/process documents into structured data using a 3rd party vendor's SOAP service. There were some unpleasant compatibility issues with the SOAP service and our Perl server's SOAP client and zero logging so I took the service's source code (so glad the Vendor provided it) and replaced the WebService portion of it with a thin Nancy controller to route the calls and return JSON. Since most of the processing time is spent chewing on the files Nancy's overhead isn't an issue and Nancy made it dead simple to code.

It's a great time to be a Microsoft dev. They stopped pretending that Windows will win back the lost ground overnight.

Everyone on Roslyn is really excited about this and we hope that it serves as a signal that big things are happening in .NET to make the entire platform more open and agile!

P.S. We're the Visual Basic compiler too :)

as someone who doesn't know a whole lot about the .net ecosystem - does this open the possibility for writing server side c#.net web applications that run on linux, with full parity with the windows environment? with or without mono?

The C# compiler is written in C#, so you can use it anywhere with a .NET runtime. Microsoft doesn't ship a .NET runtime for Linux, so you'll have to use Mono, but if your app is compatible with Mono, you're good to go!

Is Mono able to compile Roslyn?

I assume you mean the Mono C# compiler (the one that the Mono team develops).

Interestingly, no -- but neither can the native C# compiler (that's what we call the old C# compiler that everyone's using in VS right now)!

Why? The C# compiler is bootstrapped, so we actually compile the compiler with the compiler. It just so happens that a while ago we felt we needed a feature so badly for the C# compiler that we introduced it into the C# language (exception filters) and started using it in the compiler immediately. So in order to compile the compiler, you need a C# compiler that supports exception filters, which right now is just the Roslyn C# compiler. Honestly, the feature (and some other small changes we've made) aren't that complicated, so they could be backported to other compilers, but I don't know why you would want to do that.

Heh.

A few years ago I was on a small team working on a .NET compiler and runtime -- it compiled MSIL into native code targeting x86 and PowerPC. I remember when working on the part of the compiler that built the exception handling routines running into exception filters and wondering what they were for. We were largely targeting C# as a development environment at the time but ended up implementing them in case anyone wanted to use VB.NET. Funny to see that they're now making their way back into C#, even if it's just in the compiler :)

How does something like this happen? How can you write a compiler in the language that it is supposed to be compiling?

They wrote the original C# compiler in a different language (probably C++) first.

Then they wrote the second C# compiler in C#, and used the first compiler to compile the second compiler. Voila!

We regularly dogfood, so we're on like N iterations of your structure, but that's the idea!

Could you ask around the office and find out some of the details about the C# bootstrap process? I would be fascinated to know what language the non-C# compiler was written in and also how long they used/improved the non-C# compiler until they switched to the C# compiler.

This source release is so cool!

Oh, the old compiler is just the currently shipping compiler (i.e., the one in a clean install of VS 2013). We've been using and maintaining it since the beginning. It's written in C++, so we refer to it as the "native compiler."

We only stopped bootstrapping using the native compiler about, oh, 6 months ago, since that was when we decided to take a dependency on new language features. The next VS will be the first VS where Roslyn is the default C# compiler.

From an open source neckbeard to a MS employee, thanks!!!

Man, this is a crazy world. Cats and dogs living together. Open source MS projects. The falcon cannot hear the falconer

So does that mean one can reasonably expect to use official F# implementation(compiler, vm, libraries) in Linux within the coming months/years?

F# is already distributed with Mono as it is open source

Lots of people use it

I'm not sure any of this would have happened without Miguel. Mono really gave .NET a second life when MS dropped the ball.

It's also somehow satisfying to witness Xamarin's success and further opening of .NET after all the bashing and hating Mono received from the free software community.

What's the likelihood the .NET VM is open sourced as well? I use Mono right now to run my apps on Linux but it would be great to use the official implementation since Mono has subtle differences.

That's the main thing I would be interested in also, but I'm thinking that's one thing that we WILL NOT see. That could seriously undercut the need to buy Windows servers.

The .NET VM would be pretty much useless on other platforms. It is tied to Windows and it would be pretty hard to rewrite. But standard libraries would be different story.

As a C# developer who genuinely likes the C# language (although I loathe vast swaths of the .NET framework libs) I'm actually super-excited about this.

C# is a great language, and I hope to see it flourish outside of the MS walled garden. Miguel de Icaza does what he can with Mono, but it can be so much more.

I've started to get experience with javascript, and Java, and Scala the past year or so as my resume is very heavily weighted with C#. I'm glad to see there may be life outside Microsoft.

But I still hope Microsoft does well, because frankly I like .NET

Agreed.

I really like C#. But it's currently pretty close to useless anywhere other than Windows - Mono doesn't even come close.

Hopefully this will close the gap.

Anyone else getting deja vu?

Makes me think of Sun open sourcing Java.

Sun retained restrictions on mobile Java though and it wasn't opened royalty free. That's the whole story with Oracle attacking Google later (on patent basis). And don't forget, MS sided with Oracle there, claiming that APIs should be copyrightable.

So while this development is positive, one should take it with a grain of salt. MS still can't be just trusted blindly.

The releases are under Apache License 2, which has both a patent grant and a patent retaliation clause.

That's good. But that's just the compiler. What about APIs (i.e. .NET)? I don't think Oracle claimed ownership over Java compilers in the example above. It was primarily about Java APIs.

The precedent has already been set that API's aren't patentable... So I think we're good.

Wow these contributions are a huge deal for Mono. I've spent the last few months making sure C# code works well in Mono and there are a lot of things that are missing or buggy. WebClient for example on Mono is missing DNS refresh timeout which means your app will never update a dns cache entry. If the ip of a server changes, you're pretty much screwed in Mono.

This doesn't solve your issue with WebClient. This is only a compiler and not runtime.

If Microsoft starts working on its own Unity-clone, with a functional language, advanced concurrency features, and good incremental GC, they could be sure to capture a big chunk of the mindshare of game developers. This could then be parlayed into mindshare of soft-realtime development, which will become ever more important.