They are just making a bet that tight coupling to a singular platform does not give them the agility they want for the future. This may also be a trial balloon. If this goes well you may see other things in the Microsoft stack make similar changes.

They may attract some Java developers, but I don't think it has much appeal outside their own ecosystem.

As for whether ASP.NET on Linux will ever attract many new developers; I must admit that I'm inclined to agree with you.

But that wasn't my point, I was commenting about how Microsoft support other platforms and standards to gain a foothold in that specific market; then introduce incompatibilities to lock people into their technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish). It's a well used strategy (and not just by MS). In fact, I almost sympathise with it's usage as it makes a lot of business sense - even if it does totally suck from a user perspective.

Also, why down vote me; then ask the question? Doesn't that seem a somewhat backwards approach to discussion and peer moderation?

* sell more sql server

* reach developers who wouldn't consider ms technology at all

* accelerate the nuget "marketplace" of open source 3rd psrty libraries, which could benefit other platforms almost for free (winphone, xbox, winrt, win8)

* finally, there's a good chance a lot of the stuff will "just work(tm)" well enough only on windows. Suddenly your planned linux deployment is thrown out and replaced with windows to make those small annoyances just go away

* Developers developers developers

Since it's more trouble porting code to a new language than it is porting web servers to a new host OS, it makes total sense to encourage more developers towards .NET via open source platforms.

I'm curious: what are these "other platforms" that Microsoft have briefly supported?

And even just talking about .NET, that was only created to compete with Java after Sun to Microsoft to court over MS's own Java implementation (though granted it's since evolved into something much more). .NET was originally sold as but MS quickly lost interest in pushing it on non-Windows platforms. And then came Silverlight to compete with Flash; and the cross platform hopes for that followed a similar fate once it became obvious that Flash was no longer a competition.

But as I said in another comment, it's a common enough strategy - hardly something unique to Microsoft. It even has it's own coined term: Embrace, extend and extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Internet Explorer for UNIX (Solaris, HPUX) during browser wars. When they ended, support was dropped.

Does leopard change its spots? If they are successful with ASP.NET as The Web Framework (not much realistic, I know), expect them to drop support for anything but Windows.

It seems that Linux vs Windows is often a fundamental question, so Microsoft is going to rule out all of their products if they can't say yes. Mono is plausible; I've been using it in production for years and processed billions of transactions with it. Microsoft adding more official help reassures the people that might otherwise dismiss Mono.

Microsoft still has some good product value. SQL Server is pretty fantastic as far as capabilities and getting them to work goes. Unfortunately their decision to go all Oracle on their licensing means a lot of people are going to be looking elsewhere. (Not adding "basic" things like JSON operators is also a bit embarrassing.) Office and Visual Studio are unrivaled.

Windows can sell itself on its own merits, and has been for ages. Meanwhile, dev tools is a billion dollar a year revenue division, and yet it could be even bigger. C# is one of the best languages around at present, but a lot of the "cool kids" don't use it because it's too tied to the Microsoft stack.

I typed a bunch of stuff here already but I just deleted it, instead I'm going to go with an analogy.

If devs are cats then doing things like porting the .net toolchain to linux/osx is like leaving cat food outside. And that's precisely how you turn feral cats into house cats. Cats will go where the food is. And they'll keep coming back to it night after night.

If you treat devs right, and give them the tools they want on the platforms they want they will become encouraged to turn to you for support. They will buy your IDE and other dev tools. They may even buy your OS and database tools. Additionally, by increasing the adoption rate of the .net toolchain it makes it that much easier for devs to write for winphone, windows, xbox one, etc. If you encourage devs to use C# for android/iOS development then the cost/benefit prospect for shipping a winphone version of an app changes dramatically vs. using raw java/obj-C.

It's win/win for devs and for MS.

ASP.NET and C# may be incredibly amazing, best-thing-since-sliced-bread, when compared to what exists for Windows developers, but, for most developers who live outside the Microsoft ecosystem, it deserves no more than a "meh". There are tons of languages in the C# space, and even more tons of modern web frameworks to choose from. Why would anyone pick ASP.NET when they have so many other toys?

With the rise of other tools, they have a foot in the Linux/MAC development, where else, they wouldn't have anything outside of Windows. Their coöperation with Mono is great, helping a partner further while letting the .Net thrive :)

BTW. Their strong argument is Visual Studio, which is still (personal opinion), 100% better then any other tool i ever tried - although i must admit, Sublime Text feels great, but it isn't integrated like Visual Studio

Notepad with plug-ins vs IDE. I mean ReSharper alone beats everything except for maybe IntelliJ IDEA.

Sure - make Windows the premiere platform for (ASP.)NET, which is rather a given (even if not intentionally, which it most certainly would be, unintentionally the practical implementation details mean that things will just naturally work better with Windows). Get teams that would have adopted alternatives to adopt .NET under the premise that it is cross-platform and goodness now. Make a really good case for them to switch to Windows down the line.

That isn't a new tactic, and is done across all industries by many businesses.

Despite the apparent influx of Microosft-platform devs on HN lately, this is not going to gain traction -- it is, in essence, a gimmick, and simply provides a talking point to avoid changing platforms.

What makes you think that? Microsoft makes things easy for developers.

They've already enabled multiple generations of so-called "Blub developers" to service major portions of the vast enterprise landscape. If you think blub devs are stupid, then you must believe that Microsoft offers a really easy development environment. So why would that be unwanted or un-useful?

Will you argue that nobody wants to get locked into Microsoft's ecosystem or that nobody likes them based on whatever politics? I don't think there is any lock-in here (since it's running on Linux) and I don't think people are that principled when it comes to tools (based on the observation that so many `nix devs have locked themselves into the comfy and easy to use Apple ecosystem).

It makes me suspicious of the source and purpose of them.

[1] Slowly, but inexorably. Anyway, this is server side. The only similar act on the client side I can rmember is making Office run on Android.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1970941-microsoft-earnings-h...

Microsoft's Windows Server division is the second largest business unit making up over 20% of its total value. It is also one of the fastest growing divisions of Microsoft. During Q2 FY14, revenue from the commercial segment, which includes servers, commercial office licensing and cloud platform, grew 10% to $12.66 billion driven by higher SQL server sales and adoption of the cloud based Azure platform. Many customers of Microsoft depend on SQL servers for mission critical and business intelligence needs, specifically in the big data analytics domain. As a result, Microsoft's SQL server revenue grew by 11%, outpacing the server market. Additionally, its Azure cloud offering clocked in triple digit growth in revenues. We're encouraged by the continual growth that this division posted, and it is becoming an important driver for Microsoft's value.

Up to now, Microsoft is using them to force people to buy Windows, at the expense of those products own market fit. Now, they are just removing IIS from that list.