It’s been a while since I last posted and it’s not because I abandoned the blog, it’s because I had other pressing matters to deal with. But now I have more free time at hand I will try to post regularly.
In all this time Microsoft has been busy and pivoted towards an open source world and as part of that, the .NET Foundation initiative became the main driver. Part of that is .NET core and includes Roslyn(the new C# compiler), the new JIT (RyuJIT), GC and a lot of .NET types became open source along with other cool stuff which you cancheck out on the .NET foundation page.
To give you a more broad idea let me explain this to you on the picture below.
Roslyn is the new open-source compiler for .NET, fully writen in C# as opposed to the previous compiler which was written in C++. I’m going to do a future post to demonstrate the power it now has.
.NET Framework has reached now version 4.6 and is still targeting Windows for the time being and on top of that lies WPF and Windows Forms used for UI applications as well as ASP.NET.
.NET core however is .NET Framework’s brother which was borned as open source and cross-platform. It is build as modular which means you can decide which components you can opt-in or out. However this is only a subset of the .NET Framework and for those of you that may be wondering, Microsoft has no plans on open-sourcing WPF. The current roadmap targets the .NET core to be ready for production as soon as Q1 2016 which is great.
Now, with all that open source around, Mono was also doing some open-sourcing of its own but the progress was also somewhat slow. But now, Mono has released two new versions to incorporate all these open-source stuff into their code and now Mono has support for C# 6.0, follows Roslyn compiler path, a lot of Mono previous implementation of collections, data types, LINQ, Threading have been entirely replaced with Microsoft’s code while things like WebRequests, Encodings and XML Serializer are in the process of being done and SqlClient is on the roadmap. So mono had a massive ram up in functionality , code quality, stability and targets by default .NET Framework 4.5 and I truly believe that mono can now serve as a serious platform for development. And it’s only going to get better and better because Xamarin’s team efforts are doubled by Microsoft’s effort to open source more and more of the .NET Framework.
I am very excited about this and I will keep you informed about what is going on and what’s the roadmap there.
