Gone are the days when MS compared open source software as a cancer. If you are wondering what I meant by that statement then here’s a brief history lesson: Back in 2001 Steve Ballmer, then CEO of MS said that “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. He made other similar statements and accusations over the years during his time at the head of MS. Now that he is finally out of the picture MS has suddenly gotten a lot more friendly to the Open Source movement and over the past few months has made major announcements to woo developers back to the Windows eco system.
Today MS made two major announcements at it’s Build Developer Conference that mark another step in the right direction for the company. The first was the Launch of Visual Studio Code, A Free Cross-Platform Code Editor For OS X, Linux And Windows.
This is the first release of a cross-platform code editor from Microsoft as till now all of their offerings required you to be running Windows. Which immediately prevented all developers running Linux or Mac OS from using their software. This is no longer the case, however it still remains to be seen how many folks switch to this new editor from their existing favorites. As you know that arguments/discussions on which editor is the best for development is akin to a religious war for developers. So not sure how many will switch to the new IDE.
Please note that this is a Preview release so is not ready for prime time yet and that also means that the software sends data back to MS. From the download site: “When this tool crashes, we automatically collect crash dumps so we can figure out what went wrong. If you don’t want to send your crash dumps to Microsoft, don’t install this tool. “. Don’t think they can be clearer than that about what they are up to.
Visual Studio Code offers developers built-in support for multiple languages and as Microsoft noted in today’s Build keynote, the editor will feature rich code assistance and navigation for all of these languages. JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js and ASP.NET 5 developers will also get a set of additional tools.
The editor features all of the standard tools you would expect from a modern code editor, including syntax highlighting, customizable keyboard bindings, bracket matching and snippets. It also works with Git out of the box
The IDE is available for download at this site.
The second announcement was the release of their .NET Distribution For Linux And Mac. This is a follow up to their promise back in Nov 2014 to release the core features of their .NET platform for Linux and Mac.
Microsoft says it is taking .NET cross-platform in order to build and leverage a bigger ecosystem for it. As the company also noted shortly after the original announcement, it decided that, to take .NET cross-platform, it had to do so as an open source project. To shepherd it going forward, Microsoft also launched the .NET Foundation last year.
You can download the Preview builds for the .NET core from their site.
Additional details on their announcement and other things in the pipeline are available on their blog: .NET Announcements at Build 2015.
Well this is all for now. I just finished downloading their new IDE so I am going to go try installing it and see how it looks/works. Who knows I might actually like it. 🙂
– Suramya