The future of .NET is on both Windows and Linux. Millions of existing .NET developers are happy to continue making .NET code for billions of Windows devices. On PaaS, it still makes a lot of sense to use Windows as the underlying OS. And, yes, the proportion of Linux vs. Windows underneath will go up, because that's the only direction available.

>On PaaS, it still makes a lot of sense to use Windows as the underlying OS

Why is this the case? I would have thought PaaS of all things would be OS agnostic as the end user doesn't really care about the OS or how things are being done in the background as long as it's simple to deploy/configure etc.

For example if Azure Websites suddenly made this big shift to Linux for some reason, it wouldn't affect anyone actually using the service.

Maybe they meant the future of .NET server side. I could see that in the future with the last holdouts being big corporate server environments already heavily invested in Windows (particularly internal apps).

The majority of desktop applications that we create, and we do create quite a few of them, are mostly WPF, with some new ones now being prototyped in UWP.

So no, .NET on GNU/Linux won't make those customers magically migrate to it, specially since GUI tooling isn't part of .NET Standard.

Even if WPF, UWP and Blend get ported, I don't see those customers changing their IT infrastructure for desktop, device readers and robot controllers OSes.

What kind of WPF applications are you writing?

I'm just curious because I always liked WPF but I don't hear about too many people developing for it these days.

Data manipulation applications for life sciences data analysis, front ends to industrial robot automation systems, control software for medical devices, scheduling systems, ...

Sometimes there is still an inhouse C++ layer for driving the hardware when talking to older devices, but newer ones are covered by standard Windows APIs or OEM provided libraries, so we can write everything in .NET.

If you search for WPF jobs in Europe you will find many people do use it, even for greenfield projects.

How does Microsoft make money on this? Sun spent all this money supporting java, but they ultimately couldn't survive.

I think that if Microsoft makes .NET attractive to a large number of developers regardless of their preferred OS they have a headstart and constant edge on the competition in terms of services that mesh well with .NET. This increases the appeal of Azure and its services. It might be a good shortcut since they're competing with established players who have the early edge. Stealing away a lot of customers from the competition in the cloud space is going to take more than competitive pricing since you're fighting familiarity/experience, first-to-market advantages and a lack of 1:1 features on some services.

The more people they bring I to the .net community the more opportunities they have to sell tons of azure services. Doesn't hurt them to be more open because existing .net shops are still going to pay for msdn, etc.

The same way Office on Mac OS/iOS brings MS Money... services. Office365, Azure, etc.

They use .NET and build their tools and services using it. .NET gets better so does their associated services built using it.

there is not much windows only, check github status of dotnet/cli (the sdk), https://github.com/dotnet/cli#build-status, lots of os supported, just clone + build

As a linux user, I tried:

1) Visual studio only works on windows 2) It runs on mono 3) I don't like .exe and .dll stuff

Jetbrains Rider is coming soon. It's pretty great!

JetBrains Rider Public EAP is out. I've been using the private EAP on Linux for 6 months and it just keeps getting better.

I contribute to a couple open source .NET projects working with developers that use Visual Studio on Windows and don't run into many cross platform issues. I commonly see open source .NET Core projects run Windows CI with Appveyor and Linux CI with Travis so catching cross platform build issues is not hard.

Jetbrains' stuff only works properly on Oracle's proprietary JDK, and not on the reference JDK (OpenJDK), which kinda sucks, doubly so since the former is not re-distributable, making it even more alien in the linux world.

I don't think this is true anymore [1]. They're bundling IntelliJ with custom OpenJDK (with needed bug fixes) in recent releases.

In addition, I run on Azul Zulu [2][3] for Java / Scala / Kotlin development and haven't had any problems so far (switched about a year ago).

Notes:

[1] - https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/206...

[2] - https://www.azul.com/products/zulu/

[3] - macOS Sierra at work, and Ubuntu 14.04 at home

I'll completely pass on software that requires (and bundles!) it's own JDK. I already have the reference implementation installed, honestly programs should use that, not bundle their own.

Anyway, I still gave it a try to see how it works. Looks like they're resolved lots of the visual glitches (especially the most serious ones, like font rendering).

For some reason though, after running the app, I was left with two directories in my home with dumps of configs/cache all mixed up. :/

I run it on OpenJDK just fine.

1. VSCode runs on linux 2. On .Net Core 3. meh

VSCode is NOT VS, dude.

Precisely, you get it!

This is quite true.

Using clasic *nix tools (vim+plugins, zsh, etc) plus their CLI tools, I can download and build many C# projects.

Creating a new solution/project? I need an IDE for that. Or copy-paste the base project files from an existing one.

you can just run the dotnet new command.