> It means that MS is serious about their push into Mobile and Linux

Mobile OK but Linux? Currently on the HN frontpage theres an article about how Skype for Linux hasn't been updated for years and "is unable to join calls": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11165568

They want devs to write for Linux because they are a services company who make money from Azure VMs including those that run Linux.

They don't want end users to run Linux desktop.

So devtools/languages/cloud divisions inside Microsoft like Linux.

Those in ms who deal with end user applications (home users in this case, as ms push Lync to business) probably see little point in investing in development in Skype for Linux.

This. MS want .Net to run on all platforms. Give developers awesome tooling for free. Let them build. When they deploy, pay for Azure. It has an ongoing usage cost. Xamarin is just part of their tooling.

Skype on Windows Phone is horrible. Updates come to iOS and Android, and only then WP.

Microsoft is a very big company. Just because devtools division is doing one thing doesn't mean the Skype team has the same priorities. I wouldn't even assume that half the product teams in MS are using MS dev tools to build their product.

Exactly. It probably means that in 1-5 years, the C# experience on Linux is going to go way downhill. Extend embrace extinguish.

What are they going to extinguish, Linux? By letting people write C# code on Linux? Or are they going to extinguish Java? Or are you saying they'll extinguish Xamarin? If that's the case, that doesn't make since because Xamarin isn't a competitor.

Microsoft is so far from having the capability of doing any of those things. Any company that has a monopoly starts acting evil, but Microsoft is no longer close to having monopoly.

When the integration is done, we'll have Dotnet Core targeting Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS. There will be frameworks for serverside and clientside applications.

I think it can become the best alternative to the javascript world, which already can target all these, but needs all kinds of native support and is much less solid as a language.

If they could convince all browsers to host some version of the CLR so you could have IL and so (C#/VB.NET/F#) as a viable alternative to JavaScript then I would agree.

No need. The future is WebAssembly. We just need C#/F# compilers that generate this new IL.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/ilwasm - Of course WebAssembly being still in the design stage, this is probably not very usable.

nice!

Plan for - FSTWASM experimental/incubator project FSharp To WebAssembly

> I think it can become the best alternative to the javascript world

Ugh no. Professionally, I would have a lot to gain from that as a developer but in general that would be an awful turn of events. Long term it would be a net negative for the world and we all should know better by now.

would it hurt to qualify anything, or is this just your current emotional state?

MS already have one; Visual Studio Code. The crazy has been coming a while.

Visual Studio Code doesn't do an eighth of what VS 2015 does. VS 2015 on Linux with a full CLR would be huge. Think about the opportunities for existing enterprise programmers, alone.

It would be great to use Visual Studio on other platforms, but it's unlikely to happen any time soon (unless Microsoft have been working on it in secret). Visual Studio is a Win32 application, we haven't even seen a 64-bit version of it yet, I'd expect to see Visual Studio become a 64-bit WPF application before it becomes cross-platform.

Visual Studio already uses WPF where it matters (the actual editor is WPF, I think, among other things).

That said, the core and infrastructure and all the stuff that makes it run is still a radioactive COM wasteland, and from experience trying to write an extension once, you can tell..

It's been WPF since 2010.

It's a text editor though and doesn't focus on being a full featured IDE. I think a Cross Platform text editor is definitely a must have regardless though. I just wish it had debugging (or at least just execution) natively without me having to find a plugin, sort of how Geany runs / compiles anything I throw at it without much (if ever) effort.

It does have built-in debugging, although it might not support the targets you're working with. However, it is still less than a year old + only at version 0.10.x...

Eh Visual studio code is not an IDE. Last time I used it the C# support was pretty bad.

It's IDE-ish for some languages. I would call it a full-featured TypeScript IDE (with IntelliSense, syntax-checking, a decent debugger, etc) but not much else.

Yeah, it doesn't have debugging (of C# on Mac and Linux). I think the GP is referring to Xamarin Studio, which is an ok IDE, but pales in comparison to VS.

Visual Studio Code is very different from Visual Studio and was made exclusively to capture the unwashed masses of web developers that have been lead to believe by false prophets that they shall exclusively use 30 year old editors running in terminal emulators, themselves mimicking 40 year old interfaces, to accomplish their work.

(Some sarcasm intended)

The first web devs you're talking about are already using Atom and Sublime Text.

The other devs are still using a better terminal editor.

As a personal anecdote, I did give VSC a try when I had to write some TypeScript. Installed a couple of plugins for Neovim and I was both at home (which means, more productive) and still had the same functionality I used in VSC.

Most likely, they are going to kill whatever was left of it.