The New Zealand IT developer community has welcomed about the latest announcement from Microsoft that it is taking its .NET server stack open source and cross platform.
Last week, Redmond reinforced its commitment to cross-platform developer experiences by open-sourcing the full server-side .NET stack and expanding .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms.
“With billions of devices in the market today, developers need tools that target many different form factors and platforms,” said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president, Developer Division, Microsoft.
“Through Visual Studio and .NET we are committed to delivering a comprehensive end-to-end solution for developers to build and manage applications across multiple devices and platforms.”
Nigel Parker, Microsoft New Zealand’s Director for Developer Experience, says that the announcement was a further demonstration of Microsoft’s transformation to a mobile-first, cloud-first company.
“The streamlined suite of new products and services make cloud enabled mobile and cross platform development a pleasure using .NET, and it was great to see the community respond so well to the announcements, especially to open sourcing the full server-side .NET stack,” he says.
“Locally, our developer community is especially excited by the ability to build native open source Android and iOS apps for free by integrating Xamarin’s Starter edition cross-platform development tools with Visual Studio Community 2013.”
Jeremy Boyd, a Director of Microsoft software development company Mindscape, welcomed the announcement, saying being able to develop cross platform apps with a consistent development environment is a "huge productivity gain" for .NET developers, as it retains a familiar language, framework and set of tools while targeting multiple platforms.
“We deploy to multiple platforms for Raygun.io so for us being able to target a reliable high performance cross platform runtime is really exciting news," he says.
"Microsoft have always done a great job at supporting developers and this really affirms that commitment."
