Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Supports Targeting Linux

Microsoft announced their Visual Studio 2015 line-up this week, but why is it important for Linux users/developers?

With the new Visual Studio 2015 product line-up, Microsoft hasn't brought their Visual Studio development environment over to Linux, but it seems that it now supports targeting Linux!

The Visual Studio 2015 product page mentions, "Build for iOS, Android, Windows devices, Windows Server or Linux." Yes, Linux output from VS!

I don't recall this ability for former versions of Visual Studio (aside from Android targeting) though haven't ran Visual Studio in a number of years myself. From the Visual Studio 2013 page, only web, Android, iOS, and Windows are mentioned as part of "cross-platform development" with no mention of Linux on the current stable version of Microsoft's popular IDE.

It's nice to see the apparent ability of Visual Studio 2015 to now generate Linux binaries, albeit it's likely laced with .NET and part of that push. For the past year Microsoft has been pushing .NET Linux support, has open-sourced various .NET components, and made other Linux/OSS progress.

It will be interesting if one day Microsoft were to bring Visual Studio itself to Linux... While many Phoronix readers likely want nothing to do with closed-source Microsoft software, there's many Windows game developers and others out there who prefer the Visual Studio environment to most anything Linux has to offer in terms of a complete integrated development environment. Having VS on Linux would further lower the barrier for developers to port their software/games to Linux.