Microsoft Is Making Xamarin Free, Will Open-Source Its SDK

[Luke_Wolf]

I really wish Microsoft would port Visual Studio to Linux. It is an amazing IDE. No not VS Code, the real VS.

The real thing holding them back is they'd need to open up and port WPF, which may happen eventually but unless there's an announcement at BUILD... not now.

[lunarcloud]

This is great news, now unity3d will support a newer version of mono.

Yes, a newer version of monodevelop would be nice. They are moving most of their platforms to their IL2CPP AOT stuff anyway, so they were going to be able to support newer versions of the runtime either way.

[uid313]

The real thing holding them back is they'd need to open up and port WPF, which may happen eventually but unless there's an announcement at BUILD... not now.

Well, they wouldn't even really need to open it maybe. Just port it.
But I think WPF depends on the Win32 API or something, so its not easy to port. But I don't really know much about WPF.

[Rubble Monkey]

Not what's going to happen, the MS runtime will be replacing Mono entirely on all platforms because that's kinda the whole point of .NET Core https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet . As to Qt bindings, watch this https://github.com/ddobrev/QtSharp it's not ready just yet but it's getting quite close. The important point of all of this is that the Xamarin Mac, Android, and iOS bindings are going to be released under MIT which means that Linux developers will finally have access to those bindings.

I swear I heard somewhere that mono was going to go in a different direction after .NET was open sourced. Does that mean that mono will just be the name for cross platform .NET, or will .NET completely replace mono? I mean, it would be kinda weird since .NET itself is open source if you called it something different.