Microsoft To Open-Source .NET, Bring It Officially To Linux

While Mono has been around as an open-source, unofficial .NET implementation for years on Linux, OS X, iOS, etc, Microsoft announced today they are officially open-sourcing their .NET implementation and making it cross-platform -- Microsoft explicitly mentions Linux support.

Microsoft announced today, "On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. 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. Microsoft also released Visual Studio Community 2013, a new free edition of Visual Studio that provides easy access to the Visual Studio core toolset. The announcements kicked off Microsoft’s Connect (); event, where the company released Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview."

The .NET code is going out on GitHub.

This announcement further ties a strategic partnership with Miguel de Icaza's Xamarin company that's been the steward of Mono. "Microsoft and Xamarin announced a new streamlined experience for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio, as well as announced the addition of Visual Studio support to its free offering Xamarin Starter Edition — available later in the year."