By: Tuan Duong Manh, Mitrais Programmer

In the middle of last year, Microsoft woke up the Open Source community with the release of .NET Core 1.0 and ASP.NET Core 1.0.

Now .NET is not just running on Windows, it’s running on Linux and MacOS as well.

This is a big change in direction from Microsoft that has been happening since Satya Nadella takes control of the company. Let’s see how the developer community can benefit from this change.

.NET Framework yesterday

Once upon a time, when it came to C#, people thought of Microsoft’s .NET Framework that only works on Windows.

In addition, to write C# applications, programmers also had to work with Visual Studio and Microsoft SQL Server which both are heavyweight, expensive and, once again, only work on Windows.

Previously, to run C# on other operating systems, we could have used Mono. However, this is not an official Microsoft project. Developers still do not have a good C# IDE, nor is there any SQL Server included. Using C# means having to use the whole ecosystem (cost) of Microsoft. As a result of this, the Open Source Community did not like Microsoft Technology.

.NET Framework today

Then Microsoft started to open gradually. Instead of shutting things down they started to let it go!

Microsoft initially attracted open source developers with .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core.

.NET Core 1.0 was officially launched in the middle of 2016. At last C # programming has become lightweight. We only need to install .NET Core (lightweight), Visual Studio Code (also lightweight), and all is free. Moreover, Microsoft has put SQL Server 2016 on Linux which is really good news for those who are familiar with this RDBMS.

The reason Microsoft brought .NET to Linux

The main reason is the expansion of the Azure Cloud Platform which competes directly with Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform enables the creation of Red Hat Linux virtual machines. Running Red Hat Linux with .NET built-in will help Microsoft increase Azure Cloud’s sales.

Besides that, now the money barrier has disappeared, Microsoft is attracting quite a lot of ex-open source programmers, who have started using their technology.

What does .NET Core come with?

• The .NET Runtime installer: allows you to write code, build and run .NET applications on Windows, Linux, Mac
• .NET Cli: Instead of using Visual Studio to open the project, build and press run, now you can use the command line and type dotnet build, dotnet run. Just cool and fast. Build and run with the command line also makes it easier to integrate CI and deploy the project.
• IDE: Visual Studio has a lot of features but it runs slow and it takes a lot of RAM. We now have Visual Studio Code: fast, lightweight, git-compatible and runs on all operating systems.
• Database: Nowadays, .NET is used with Microsoft SQL Server. When do you go to Linux? Do not worry, Microsoft have already put their SQL Server 2016 on Red Hat Linux.

The New .NET Ecosystem. (Source)

Conclusion

This change by Microsoft is welcomed by the developer community. The developer community now have more choices of technology to use. Microsoft is attracting a bunch of new developers using their software.

C # itself is already a pretty powerful language. With the advent of .NET Core, C # is able to run on all operating systems. Now you can use C # to write web pages, write mobile applications (with Xamarin), and to run on many different platforms.

What are you waiting for? Get on Microsoft’s official page to download .NET Core 1.0 on your machine and try it. This version is lightweight, not as heavy as the .NET Framework.