Re:How far has Microsoft fallen?
by johnbellone on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @08:05AM
(#4937265)
> It's a shame how some people view .NET as a closed platform and not open source friendly
That is a shame. Because Mono has advanced so far since a few years ago, and software such as Unity prove that robust, fast code can be written for the CLR and be relatively easy to port cross-platform. Its really an amazing feat.
Diving further into the rabbit hole with WPF/WCF, which as far as I can tell hasn't been implemented in Mono, was an absolute awesome experience developing an application. I would take that over iOS/Android platforms any day of the week.
It's not popular on HN for a reason. Even if you run everything on Mono, for practical reasons you are tied to Windows as a development platform and that's a major issue for just about anyone who does their development on other platforms.
It's a shame how some people view .NET as a closed platform and not open source friendly, when Microsoft has been making a BIG effort to push .NET into the open, especially ASP.NET. Let not forget things like Nuget, which has completely changed the way most .NET programmers work. Then there's Mono, which is just getting better and better every month (Host ASP.NET MVC web sites on Linux... now you can, thanks to Microsoft open sourcing MVC and Mono supporting it)
All in all .NET has become a very embracing platform for open source. I use it for just about any job, with great success.