Understanding the future of the .NET framework

Question

I currently use Qt for my desktop app (simple apps) development. The one thing I don’t like about Qt is the fact that I have a feeling that the free license will eventually disappear and I would rather move to a different framework. On the other side I have been hearing about .NET going open source and cross platform.

Can someone clarify what exactly does this means because I have read that only the server side will be open sourced and cross platform but I’m not sure if this will only affect Linux servers.

1. Does this mean that we will be able to create cross platform application in Visual Studio?

2. Does this means that Visual Studio will run on Linux and Mac?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

In December I got an email from BizSpark about this very same announcement.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/announcing-open-source-of-net-core-framework-net-core-distribution-for-linux-osx-and-free-visual-studio-community-edition

Basically, the idea is to open-source the ASP.NET runtimes to allow developers to build ASP.NET websites for all platforms.

That said, there's no telling where Microsoft will take it. My personal opinion is that they will use this opportunity to port the ENTIRE .NET framework to Linux/OS X, but this is complete conjecture.

Today I’m excited to announce that we are going even further, and will be open sourcing the .NET Core Runtime. This will include everything needed to execute .NET code – including the CLR, Just-In-Time Compiler (JIT), Garbage Collector (GC), and core .NET base class libraries.

And more importantly:

Today’s open source announcement means that developers will have a fully supported, fully open source, fully cross platform .NET stack for creating server and cloud applications – including everything from the C#/VB compilers, to the CLR runtime, to the core .NET base class libraries, to the higher-level .NET Web, Data and API frameworks.

You should visit the GitHub page for .NET and see what it has to offer, as this will likely be the first part of .NET to be cross-platformed: https://github.com/dotnet/

So, to answer your questions:

1. To an extent. The entire .NET framework is NOT expected to be ported (largely System.Windows, and the other GUI libraries). You will likely NOT be able to develop WPF or Windows Forms apps for Linux/OS X, but WILL be able to develop ASP.NET WebForms and MVC products for them.

2. Not likely. Visual Studio is expected to remain a Windows-only application.

Edit: Yes, you could continue to use MONO or WINE for GUI based applications, and yes, large parts of the MONO and WINE implementations could be based around the new open-sourcing of the .NET framework, but if you are expecting Visual Studio to allow you to compile Linux/Unix/OS X native applications, you will likely not find that in the new announcements.