[martinald]

I agree.

The most exciting thing would be Mono becoming a first-class citizen for .NET.

I think this is likely for two reasons:

1) They may well acquire Xamarin, which would result in them 'owning' Mono.

2) The new CEO has been extremely forward thinking vs the rest of Microsoft on supporting open source software on Azure.

3) Increasing amounts of ASP.NET and other .NET technologies are open source now

I would love for them to do this. I think they'd also do very well out of it, as Azure is great platform.

[gum_ina_package]

This would be an incredibly interesting development. I personally love c# and would be thrilled if it became a mainstream language outside the enterprise software crowd.

[skrowl]

It's not so much that I love C# as I hate Objective C (iOS) and Java (Android)

[wtetzner]

To be fair, there are many language choices that compile to Java bytecode. They can be used for Android development.

[kyllo]

Yes, this would be amazing. C# and F# are great programming languages, and it would earn a lot of developer goodwill if Microsoft decided to officially support the effort to break these languages out of the Windows ghetto.

[Pxtl]

C# and F# are great languages, but there are a lot of utterly terrible things in the .NET framework that need to be maintained... I don't envy Miguel in supporting all Microsoft's various false-start libraries.

[kyllo]

I suppose a fringe benefit of open-sourcing .NET would be an eventual reduction in this phenomenon.

I mean, it doesn't really even make sense to have a closed-source application programming language in this day and age, where the community building and maintaining it is entirely employed by a single company. It just isn't efficient enough, the maintenance is intractable, and you end up with false starts because the whole thing is subject to the whims and shifting priorities of management.

Besides, Sun open-sourced Java back in 2006, already...

[jodrellblank]

I suppose a fringe benefit of open-sourcing .NET would be an eventual reduction in this phenomenon.

Why do you think that would be the case?

When I think "open-source" I think "fragmented, lots of utterly terrible things, lots of half-finished false-starts".

[kyllo]

Sure, but you can feel free to never use or support the false starts. In open source they are allowed to die. In a closed ecosystem they have a tendency to live on as deprecated zombies.

[nikanj]

Which is really good, because at Microsoft's size, there's often a non-trivial number of companies who drank the kool-aid and invest hundreds of man-years to building a system using those false starts.

[yulaow]

I was really happy seeing that azure sdks are released not only natively for windows but also for osx and linux.

Imho, their strategy for asp.net can be easily what you described here.

[pionar]

asp.net is open source, and it should run on any CLR.

[tkubacki]

I've got working asp.net ecommerce solutions, but for my last project went back to Java/Dropwizard/IntelliJ - it is just way better dev exp. + perf is much better on Linux. MS will be not interested in supporting competing (Windows Server/MS SQL vs Linux / PostgreSQL) server platform - it's sad but true.

[jasallen]

> "I've got working asp.net ecommerce solutions"

That sounds to me like a reference to some boxed product running ASP.NET. Possibly aspDotNetStorefront? If so, that competes with PHP platforms for being a mess of code and non-sense design decisions.

I can hear people talking about Scala, Ruby, Node and saying better performance + dev experience (whether I agree or not) -- but Java? Not flaming here, that just doesn't sound like a well informed statement.

[tkubacki]

meh sorry - I mean: working ASP.NET mono ecommerce (no, not aspDotNetStorefront - ASP.NET MVC app on green field). I started when Mono was in Novell's hands and hoped they will push harder for C#/Web/Linux but it didn't happen and now Xamarin is interested solely in mobile so it's even less reasonable to use Mono for web on Linux these days. Don't get me wrong I admire Mono guys but Monodevelop (even recent versions) is just not IntelliJ level IDE and Java with it is not so bad (especially Java8). Maybe I would go with ROR or Python but it's SPA (Dart on client side) so Java is just webservice (Dropwizard makes it frictionless)